Day 47 – Flores
After a good nights sleep at the gas station, we set off on the four hour drive to Flores. Flores Proper is located on a small island in the middle of a lake, connected by a bridge to the mainland and rest of the city. It’s very touristy with restaurants, bars and souvenir stalls along the waterfront and a pretty church high atop the hill in the centre.
We parked up by the waterfront as all the parking here is free. We walked around the island and up to the church on top and found that most of the souvenir stores here are quite overpriced. Heading over to the mainland across the bridge, we found a street food market that was almost like a fiesta. There were 4 or 5 marquee tents selling cakes, empanadas, tacos, burritos and more. As it was lunch time, we picked up 3 tostadas each with various salad toppings along with a horchata and a slice of delicious banana bread.
Continuing on, we went to the central market hoping to find some artisanal goods. After wandering through the cramped aisles for half an hour we found it was mostly western style clothing and dried beans for sale. We did not want these and so returned to the island.
We got our books from the van and plopped ourselves down into some comfy couches in a coffee shop for the afternoon. It was wonderful. After the sun set we had a quick dinner and then headed back to the food market to enjoy the atmosphere. We tried an empanada of loroco which is a flower from Central America that is also a common pupusa ingredient. It was interesting, very green tasting. While eating the empanada a man started shouting “dos por uno” (two for one) for the small boat tour around the island so we decided to hop on board to attempt to understand the Spanish tour. There was something about the Spanish arriving, creating a wooden horse, and it turning into a God. That was about as much as we understood but the island was very pretty by night.
Day 48 – Tikal
We woke up Tikal-ed with the idea of seeing more Mayan ruins and these really Tik(al)ed all the boxes…
After a very early start we arrived at Tikal National Park. Tikal was one of the great Mayan cities from around 200AD to 900AD. It’s a huge site with clusters of pyramids, temples, and other buildings. We were also pretty excited that we might see monkeys. Low and behold, over the four hours here, we saw many monkeys, a big group of coatis, bats and an ant colony that Andrew was very excited about (see photos).
We followed the walking guide in the Lonely Planet which was very useful. It took us through the jungle to Templo VI, to the Gran Plaza, North Acropolis, Templo V, Plaza de los Siete Templos, Mundo Perdito (the Lost World) and finally Templo IV (the second pre-Columbian building in the Western hemisphere after El Mirador, also in Guatemala).
By far the most iconic building is Templo I in the Gran Plaza. It’s very prominent against the flat land around it and the architecture has been preserved/restored very well. In contrast, many of the other temples are still overrun by jungle and it will take a lot of work to restore them. There is still a lot of excavation still going on at the site.
One of the highlights of the day was hiking up Templo VI and having panoramic views above the jungle canopy as far as the eye could see. On the way down we saw a tiny baby monkey with it’s mother high up in the tree tops.
It was really nice to see Tikal after visiting some of the other sites in Mesoamerica. Each one has very much it’s own character and for us Tikal was one of the best.
Leaving Tikal, we drove back to Flores in a slightly longer than necessary route to Palenque in order to have more of the street food that we so much enjoyed yesterday. We had burritos, tacos, tostadas, cheesecake, rellenitos and an atol-like dessert. We are now very content!
Looks fantastic