| Tikal, Guatemala: Temples in the mist |
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Page 2 of 2 The plaza itself is about the size of a baseball diamond, large enough to give scope but small enough so the weight of the buildings presses in. This was the center of life in the city's heyday, from the third century AD through the ninth. "Our downtown," joked Manuel Lara, my guide of Mayan descent. "Our Times Square." In the 1996 accords that ended the Guatemalan civil war, the Mayan people were given the right to worship in their ancient sites as they wished. Fire pits were built in the Great Plaza and elsewhere at Tikal for their use in rituals. Pilgrims come for major festivals and at other times, too, more casually and often on Sundays, when the entry fee is waived for Guatemalans. "They are taking back their privilege," Lara explained. Outside the Great Plaza, Tikal, the largest of the ruined Mayan cities, is a winding series of jungle paths to various temple complexes. There are six stand-alone temples altogether, numbered in the order in which they were discovered. All are variations on the step pyramid theme, some thicker and broad-based, others soaring and majestic. Temple IV is the tallest at around 200 feet, about the size of the smallest of Egypt's three main pyramids. Temple I, median width for the six, has a base of 10,000 square feet. Each has a tiny room for rituals at the very top, the only indoor space on these massive structures, covered by a "roof comb" decorated with stone carvings. Some parts of the city date back to 800 BC, and at the city's apex it was a dominant city state, the home of about 70,000 people spread over 25 square miles, about 65 square kilometers. Only six of those square miles can be visited now, all on foot. Walking the old Mayan footpaths feels right, even though, between the humidity and the frequent jungle rain, you're pretty much guaranteed to be dripping at day's end. Tikal was opened to the public in 1955, when several of its major buildings were still under soil. Although excavation continues to this day, some buildings have been left partly or fully covered by jungle. The look is a product of a different philosophy toward ruins than the one that ruled when Chichén Itzá was fully cleared in the 1930s, Lara explained. The intention is to give visitors a sense of how the site looked when it was found: scores of unnaturally symmetrical mounds, blanketed by grass and dirt like small children hiding under the covers. Leaving the soil in place also protects against erosion from wind and rain, particularly dangerous for Tikal's limestone structures. The latest area to be unearthed is the Plaza of the Seven Temples, just southwest of the Great Plaza, with seven small but identical buildings on a right angle and three ball courts. Cement and chalky blocks shone white there the day I walked through. Over future years, the jungle will provide the same living grime it has given the rest of the city, but for the time being the most appealing temple was one not fully excavated, with a tree growing on its roof, the roots reaching down to obscure the facade. The half-buried, organic appearance of Tikal goes a long way to explaining its mysterious air of somehow still being alive. Paradoxically, the clean-everything-up, museum approach to archaeology can make a site feel deader and more sterile than one that sports a healthy coat of moss. Temple V is the most recently excavated major temple, a 150-foot behemoth that gives you no warning when you come upon it in the jungle. Kate Croucher, 28, of Aspen, Colorado, was sitting on a wooden platform at its top when I was there, catching her breath after climbing its daunting, ladder-like steps. Over the trees, we could see Temples I and II squaring off in the Grand Plaza and the acropolis beyond. A cool breeze floated off the treetops, a welcome relief from the soupy jungle below. "I saw the Pyramids," she said, comparing Tikal to Egypt. "I'd say this is on par with those." Then she reconsidered, thinking of the Mayans. "This is better, because you can go on top of them, and see what they saw," she said. The living quality that I felt from the ruins also seemed to be sensed by others I met. "The jungle and the ruins are some kind of symbiosis," said Ian Thomas Belanger, a tourist from Quebec. "It feels like the elements are trying to get over what man did." On the first day of my visit, I saw the Great Plaza fill with a different sort of life. I was there near Columbus Day, and without planning it in advance, I stumbled onto a modern Mayan festival, an anti-Columbus Day held annually to show the world that despite all the Europeans had wrought, the Mayan people are still there. "Father Sun, Mother Moon, Father Wind, Mother Earth," the head shaman cried in Quiche, starting the prayer, as Lara explained to me, translating the words. The shaman bowed to the ground, his necklace of jade and shells rattling, and the hundreds of gathered Mayans did likewise. His voice fell, the public prayer becoming a private one, and a chorus of chattering voices rose to join him. Guatemala has 22 dialects, and these people were speaking in all of them, asking their ancient gods for help, for health, for money and friendship. A small boy in front of me kissed the scrubby grass beneath his hands. The shamans — there were four or five altogether — piled candles, eggs, incense, sage, tobacco, leaves and rum in a large stone pit and lighted it. Flames leapt 20 feet in the air, and the people danced in the clove-scented smoke, circling to the plunky beat of the marimba. Before leaving Tikal, I sampled a much newer activity. Canopy Tours Tikal (www.canopytikal.com) opened a few years ago and offers zip-line and suspended-bridge tours of the jungle canopy. Advertised with breathless enthusiasm ("Tarzan-style. More jungle, longer, faster!"), the zip-line nonetheless lived up to its billing, with nine zips nearly the length of football fields ($15). The suspended bridges (also $15), though, were unexciting, save for a fusillade of nuts and twigs from a pair of spider monkeys, which didn't appreciate the intrusion into their treetops. After the canopy tour, it was time to make a decision. A second sunset and sunrise in the shadow of Tikal's majesty, and a second sweaty, mosquito-filled night? Or on to Flores, where my flight would leave the next day? Flores, a cobblestone colonial town on an island in Lake Petén Itzá, won out, and I dined that night in a restaurant full of tourists. It was sad to leave the living ruins, but all travelers must also face considerations that come under the modern definition of "living." And that night, for me, living meant a rare steak soaked in pepper cream sauce, a glass of Chilean merlot, and air-conditioning running full-blast, all night long. Copyright: International Herald Tribune |
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