I flew out of San José, landed in Guatemala City in the early evening, and checked into a small hotel. In less than ten hours, I was back at GUA boarding a Transportes Aéreos Guatemaltecos Embraer ERJ 145 to Flores.
After landing at Mundo Maya International Airport, I met up with the outfitter that was to take me on a day trip to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. I was in the northern Guatemala lowlands, about 60 kilometers west of the Belize border. We set off on an easterly road that tracked the shore of Lake Petén Itzá and then turned north.
As can be seen from this map, Tikal is in the boonies. Flores looked to be a very nice lakeside vacation spot with an airport that calls itself “international” only because there’s Tropic Air puddle-jumper that flies out of it to neighboring Belize. (Do click that link to get the full flavor of aviation in rural Central America!) But once we were three kilometers out of the airport, there were scarcely any towns, just handfuls of buildings here and there clinging questionably to the side of the road.
I say “we” because this was a group tour. I’m innately leery of that kind of thing. Maybe this is my travel twist on Groucho Marx’s disinclination to join clubs that would have people like him as members. But this group was excellent, people I would be happy to travel with almost anywhere. We were collectively heavy on lawyers and teachers, but with a congressional staffer and a photojournalist on assignment for TripAdvisor thrown in for variety’s sake. We all synched politically, which isn’t that surprising. I don’t know whether liberal people travel more or travel makes people more liberal, but there’s definitely correlation, especially in unsung places like Guatemala where the cruise ships don’t dock.
Not long into our journey, we stopped by the side of the road to admire the lake. The landmass off to the right in this picture is called The Crocodile for obvious reasons. It’s said that sometimes, if you picnic by the side of the lake and drink enough beer, you can actually see it move.
Midway to Tikal, we stopped at a roadside café/souvenir stand. I’m not a fan of the genre. I groaned as we pulled up, but I had to pee so I climbed out of our Toyota van and went inside. There were craftsmen working on the souvenirs that would be sold. There was a large diorama of Tikal, which helped orient me to the place we were heading. And there was a cheesy plastic skeleton surrounded by equally cheesy plastic limes inside a plexiglass case. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen something like that?
The premises backed right up to the jungle and a riot of flowering plants.
Across the road was a much more homely refreshment stand. The proprietor looked like she needed the business more than the big café, so I bought a glass of powerfully sweet fruit juice from her.
After we got back on the road and drove north for a while, the scenery began to change. Soon we entered the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected tropical forest in North America. As if the lush vegetation on both sides of the two-lane road wasn’t enough to announce that we were in the forest, the road signs clearly conveyed that we were’t in Kansas anymore.
Finally, a little more than two hours after touching down in Flores, I entered the Parque Nacional Tikal, a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s powerfully deserving of the designation. More on this to come…
