We went to the Belize jungle in search of Mayan ruins and toucans. Yes, I know, I started the last post on this blog with those exact same words. We found both in western Belize, but if I was going to traipse all the way to San Ignacio to find these two things, you better believe I was going to push just a little further into Guatemala. Not just to add a new country to my countries list (I'm NOT collecting countries) but to get to Tikal.
I am nothing close to a Mayan scholar. At best, I'm an enthusiast and that may be giving me more credit than I deserve. But in my uneducated mind, the three premier Mayan sites that are known and reasonably accessible to tourists like me are Chichén Itzá and Palenque in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala. And Tikal is a couple of hours ride and a quick border crossing from San Ignacio, Belize where we were camped out (not literally...) for four nights this January. I had to make it to Tikal. When else am I going to be this close?
We visited Tikal two days after our day at Caracol, one of the most famous (and potentially the best) Mayan ruin sites in Belize. We did this deliberately. I expected Tikal would blow Caracol away, and I didn't want to go to the best of our two Mayan sites (on this trip) first and then be disappointed by the second. It made perfect sense to me to do Caracol, then Tikal. Tikal would certainly be way better than Caracol.
I believe we were right to do Tikal after Caracol. But not for the reason I thought. Don't get me wrong, I thought Tikal blew away Caracol and it wasn't even close. But Tikal also wouldn't have been as amazing as it was without us first visiting Caracol.
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| Temple II (left) and Temple I (right) as viewed from the Central Acropolis. |
When you visit two Mayan sites in the space of three days, there is inevitably a compare and contrast exercise that goes on to try to make sense of the relationship between the two places. Let's do that now in this blog post, shall we?
Big-picture wise, Caracol and Tikal were founded, flourished and declined at about the same time in history. Based on our two tours, it appears Caracol may have gotten a head start on the initial settling between the two places by a couple of centuries but by the time both sites were being built up and out in a significant manner, they were doing it at the same time. History timing-wise, that's from a few hundred years BCE all the way to about 900 CE or so. Both cities were around in a meaningful way for around about 1,000 years or maybe a bit more. That's a significant length of time.
Both cities also supported a significant population over that time. We heard numbers of 120,000 to 180,000 when we were being guided around Caracol. At Tikal, it was about 150,000. Nobody really knows for sure, but those two figures are close enough for me to being identical for the purposes of history. This stuff is an approximate science at best. There was no census back in the Mayan world or if there was, it's been lost to history. Approximate is good enough.
So...we have two fairly large and spectacular cities of about the same size in relatively close proximity to each other in the jungle of what is now Central America. They had to be friends, right? Trading partners? Sister cities? Intermarried and grew together? In harmony?
Of course not! They are humans and humans inherently want to destroy each other so of course they fought. The word I heard when our guides were talking about these two cities was "war". Not disagreements, not skirmishes, not battles. War! These two places did not care for each other for a significant period of time.
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| Tikal is full of temples like this, uncovered enough to be partially overgrown again. |
Because the history of the two places is so similar, it would make sense that the tourist experience today would also be fairly alike. Go with me here a bit. Old city. Jungle. Same time in history. Same people. Same technology. Similar size. Were in contact with one another. Makes perfect sense that you might get the same sort of thing in both places today, right? After visiting both sites in the span of three days, I believe this was true. I also believe it wasn't true.
Both Caracol and Tikal are fairly good-sized sites with a significant amount of structures for the 21st century visitor to gaze at and climb on with enough variety to keep things interesting. Temples. Pyramids. Reservoirs. Palaces. Tombs. Observatories. Stele. They both have plenty of all of that sort of stuff and it's all good. On a volume basis, Tikal definitely has more. When we visited Caracol, we were told that about 8 to 10 percent of the entire place was uncovered, with the rest being still buried below mounds of soil. The same is true of Tikal, but the uncovered number at the Guatemalan site is about 20%. Were there two to two-and-a-half times more structures at Tikal? Probably. Tikal appears to be bigger, probably because of what's been uncovered.
On this point, Caracol may eventually catch up. Excavation is still going on at Caracol (admittedly slowly) while at Tikal, it has stopped. Apparently they found at Tikal that the uncovering of structures was causing irreparable damage to them. For now (at least), the Tikal site is frozen in time the way it is.
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| Mayan carvings. Original (but protected) at Tikal. Not like Caracol. |
The progress on the excavation of the two sites is really a product of the discovery and accessibility of the two sites and these concepts may actually be intertwined. And the discovery is as much about who as when. When I wrote about Caracol, I wrote about the road to the place and how recently it has allowed the accessibility to the site to be improved significantly. There's a road to Tikal also, but it's a short-ish modern paved road off another larger, much longer significant Guatemalan road. It takes way less time to get from where people live today to Tikal that it does to make the same sort of trip to Caracol. Access to the site from an excavation point of view I'm sure is important.
Why are things this way? Well, I don't know for sure the history of the development of paved infrastructure in Guatemala and Belize. I also believe that Caracol is actually further into the jungle than Tikal is, but there is something about the "discovery" of these two sites worth considering. Caracol was stumbled upon by a man named Rosa Mai looking for mahogany trees in 1937. Before then, Caracol was largely lost to time. Tikal was "discovered" by the Wrigley family looking for gum trees to use to make chiclets to fill their gum vending machines in the United States. When they found out about Tikal (it was already known to the locals via myths passed down through abuelas) they started funding the excavation of the site. Is it any surprise that Tikal is ahead of Caracol here?
Tikal became a national park in Guatemala in 1955, if you need any more convincing here. Inaccessible places in the middles of jungles don't generally become national parks.
One last difference / similarity before I talk about what it was actually like at Tikal. Neither site is known today by their Mayan names. Caracol is named after a Spanish word for a snail shell. Tikal is a modern Mayan word meaning city of voices (eek=place; al=voices).
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| Mayan ball court, with Temple I in the background. |
Earlier in this post, I stated two things. First, Tikal blew away Caracol; we'll get to that one. Second, our experience at Tikal from a learning standpoint was improved by the stories we heard at Caracol. That is because we either heard the same thing twice or we heard it told in a slightly different way. Let's hit that concept now. And it's about the ball courts and the sudden decline and subsequent death of Mayan cities. Let's do that last one first.
When we visited Chichén Itzá in 2017, I of course followed that visit up with a blog post. The narrative that I presented in that post about the history of that site was that the Mayan city was absorbed into the Toltec culture and continued to flourish until about the year 1200. I assume I found that story in a book or online somehow and vetted it against other sources before writing it all down as what appears to be fact. That history was different than what we heard at Caracol and Tikal and legitimately, there may be two histories, one for the northern Yucatan Mayan cities and one for those in the south of that same area of the planet. The geological and climactic conditions were different in those two areas for sure.
What we were told at Caracol and Tikal was that the Maya simply exhausted the ability of the land to support their population. The jungle in Central America is a rainforest. Rainforests produce life by housing animals and growing plants but they do that by capturing and retaining the rain water so that it lasts much longer than that moisture would stick around if the rainforest weren't there. Water is life is the principle here and it's absolutely true.
The Maya were farmers. Most societies that at some point stop hunting and gathering and decide to stay in one place become involved in agriculture. But you can't grow crops in a rainforest. The sunlight required to grow plants won't reach to the fields you have plowed and planted. So that rainforest had to go. They started clear cutting. They needed space for crops. They needed space to build. They needed space to create places in their rapidly growing cities.
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| Welcome to the jungle: there's something big and Mayan below every mound like this at Tikal. |
When the Mayans took away the rainforest, the rain started to disappear. Open land doesn't retain moisture the way a dense concentration of leafy plants does. Water is essential for life (I know I just wrote that above) so no water, no life. Even if you don't use it to grow crops, you still need to drink it. No rainforest, no water.
The Mayans clearing the forest did something else to affect their food supply: take away the habitat for animals whose meat used to sustain you in addition to your crops (during growing season) and in absence of your crops (if something went wrong with the harvesting season) and you take away the creatures themselves. Animals that the Mayans hunted for food needed the forest for shelter and protection and (in the case of carnivores) to prey on other animals for food. Take the rainforest away and the tapirs and agoutis and whatever else you might hunt aren't just going to stand around in open space. The animals are going with the forest. Hunting trips become longer or just too far. No rainforest, no wildlife.
There is also evidence that human waste got into the water supply because the Mayans over populated the land to the point where the soil could no longer absorb the waste coming out of their bodies. The sickness caused by this issue started to take its toll on the population. There are many accounts of diseases brought by Europeans to the new world wiping out indigenous peoples. The Spanish never found any people at Tikal to wipe out. The Mayans' own over-use of the land did it for them long before the Spanish arrived. We heard this at Caracol and we heard it at Tikal. I think it was the reservoirs and their close-ness to the city and potential human waste disposal sites at Tikal that made this issue hit home. It was definitely re-iterated more at Tikal than Caracol by our guide.
It's ironic that we as a planet are faced with the same issue that killed a lot of the Mayans off almost 1,200 years ago. We won't learn, will we?
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| Mayan stonework. Not the precise cut block we see in some Mayan temples reconstructed by archaeologists. There's a carving in the gap also. |
While Mayan society was flourishing, they had time to do more than just survive. Agriculture tends to start to create time in the day to do something other than search for food as the only activity you engage in. For the Mayans, this meant making art; watching the night skies; recording numbers; serving the ruling class (you think those guys ever searched for any food?); and recreation. Yes, there were spectator games in Mayan societies and we found ball courts at both Caracol and Tikal. Their game of choice? Pok ta' pok.
We walked through and around ball courts at both Caracol and Tikal. These features were in important spots in both cities, including in close proximity to caana at Caracol and right next to Temple I at Tikal. Now admittedly, Temple I is a 20th century moniker and I suppose there's a chance that specific temple might not have been the most important temple in the city but it is in an important spot and it was found with a particularly important altar signifying its importance. Ball courts located near these places seems to imply that the ball courts were important. We had also seen these things years ago when we visited Chichén Itzá (although we did that site without a guide).
A pok ta' pok court looks like a strip of grass flanked by what look like short, steep ramps and vertical walls on the long sides. At the midpoint or so of each long wall, there is a vertical stone hoop. The game is played by teams from two to five people with a single ball which weighs about eight pounds or so and is solid rubber. The aim (like most games) is to score more points than your opponent. The goal is to drive the ball to your opponent's end zone by keeping the ball aloft using only your hips, knees and elbows. How anyone figures all these rules out from whatever the Mayans left behind is anyone's guess but since the story we were told at both Caracol and Tikal was relatively similar, I'm accepting it as the truth.
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| Pok ta' pok court. This one is at Caracol. |
But there's more.
It is unclear whether these games were played for recreation (like was there a professional pok ta' pok league?) or something more important, like to commemorate religious events or playing a game of pok ta' pok as a substitute for actual war between two cities (this last point seems to have some merit). It is also unclear as to whether there was any sort of sacrifice component for either the losers or the winners of the contests. There are rumors (or should it be uncertainty based on the archaeological record?) of both scenarios. The explanation of the winners being sacrificed seemed to have some "guarantee" of eternal happiness in the afterlife. I mean, otherwise, why would you try to win?
It was also unclear to me while we were at Caracol as to how this game was actually played. I mean, an eight pound or so solid rubber ball is super heavy. How on Earth do you keep something that heavy from hitting the ground, especially with just two players on a team and the other team presumably trying to disrupt your efforts? Our guide at Caracol, Jason, showed us some still images (OK, so they were really artist's renderings) of people playing this sport. I still didn't get it. Maybe I wasn't paying attention properly. I was admittedly taking notes.
There is, by the way, a shortcut to winning the game and that's putting the ball through the vertical stone hoop. No clue how this would be done with knees, elbows and hips only. We didn't see hoops at either Tikal or Caracol, but they are still intact or are restored to intact at Chichén Itzá. There's a pic below. Tell me how you get a dense rubber ball through a vertical hoop using your hips.
Then Reggie stepped up. Reggie was our guide at Tikal. During the ball court part of the tour, Reggie didn't show us any pictures. He did, however, step on the sloped part of the call court and demonstrate how pok ta' pok players might (emphasis for me on might here) strike that eight pound ball. Watching Reggie show us how to elbow and knee that ball by stepping onto the sloped portion of the court made a lot of sense. It helped tremendously. Still no clue how you'd hit the hoop.
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| Ball court hoop. Chichén Itzá. 2017. |
None of all that explains why I thought Tikal blew away Caracol.
It was the height. Plain and simple.
The height of the temples at Tikal was just overwhelmingly impressive. And the "s" on the end of temples isn't a typo. Caracol had caana, the tallest manmade structure in all of Belize at 43 meters high. Tikal had at least four and maybe five or six taller than that. I hate to boil this down to "size matters" but it did. Tikal is temple after temple after temple and they are all impressively huge and tall and that's the magnificence of this site in a nutshell.
I won't stop there.
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| The back side of Temple I from the drop-off point. |
The first temple we laid eyes on at Tikal was Temple I. We saw it right after we got unloaded from the open bed truck with a cage on it that transfers people from the parking lot all the way up the hill to the site (and believe me, despite the sketchy nature of the transportation, it was much welcomed). Temple I is the only temple on the site that is fully restored which translates to "archaeologists have supplemented the condition they found it in by adding pieces of stone to make it look whole".
It's not just the height. Yes, Temple I is tall. But it's also the angle at which the temple was built. The slope of the steps at Caracol's caana is maybe 45 degrees (and probably less). Tikal's Temple I has to be a good 60 degrees. So in addition to actually being tall, it looks even taller because its footprint is appreciably smaller than less-tall temples we saw just two days before.
Walk around the front side of Temple I to the Gran Plaza and you'll find it facing Temple II, which is also tall and steep. Not quite as tall as Temple I but the difference is negligible. Plus you can climb a wooden staircase and platform assembly around and atop Temple II to get better looks at Temple I and the faces carved on top of Temple II. There's nothing like this at Caracol. Let alone two facing each other.
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| Temple II. Also known as the Temple of the Masks, erected as a mortuary monument to the ruler's wife. |
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| Temple I as seen from the top of Temple II. |
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| Temple II's "mask" at the top of the front face. |
Did it get better than the Gran Plaza bookended by Temples I and II? Yes, it did.
Temple III is immediately behind Temple II and it's taller than II. It's not fully excavated and unless they find a way to excavate without damaging what's still below the soil and plants that have found their way onto the remaining uncovered 1,000 structures, then it's always going to be that way. But its top is visible. Here's this green pyramid completely covered with vegetation except for the very tip above the tree canopy where its white limestone is completely visible. You know it's there because you can see it clearly from the ground level. And it's immensely tall.
Move on to Temple IV and it's even better. Meaning bigger. Temple IV is the tallest structure on the site. It's a full 70 meters high. That's 60% taller than Caracol's caana (I know, I'm obsessed with size here still...). And you can climb it by walking step by step up the wooden staircase and onto a platform at the front of the temple.
Tikal is impressive from the ground level. What the Mayans built all those centuries ago is just amazing at this site. But get above the tops of the trees and it gets even better. The view of Temples I, II and III from the top of Temple IV is so romantic. You are in the middle of the jungle on top of this ages-old Mayan temple and all you see is a tree canopy punctured by three additional temples that the same people built. What a testament in that view to what Mayan architects and builders have achieved. It's absolutely one of the best views I've had in all my travels in all my life.
There's a pyramid on the site (the South Acropolis, if I'm remembering correclty) where you can get a similar view of all four temples poking above the forest canopy which is comparable but maybe not quite as spectacular as the view from Temple IV. Sure there are more temples but the viewing platform is not quite as high. I'd rate the top of Temple IV view as better.
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| The views from Temple IV (top) and the South Acropolis (bottom) at Tikal. |
There is some irony here. These incredible views would never have been visible quite in the same way when Tikal was a thriving Mayan city. And I don't mean because regular folks never would have been able to climb to the tops of the temples.
When Tikal was an active city, all of the jungle that these temples are sitting in would have been clear cut. What I saw in my day at Tikal is all second growth forest. It is only in its ruined and unexcavated state that these views can be experienced. But all that is what made Tikal, for me, the most impressive Mayan site of this trip. The understanding of the decline of the Maya and the insight into how pok ta' pok was possibly played were invaluable. But the real take-your-breath-away-this-is-absolutely-incredible experience was these temples in the jungle. Just spectacular.
Oddly enough, both people I traveled with to Belize and Guatemala this January preferred Caracol to Tikal. They both thought the guide was better at Caracol (he was); they both thought Caracol was less touristy (it was for sure); and they loved the fact that you can climb on the main structure (caana) at Caracol (I actually think we should NOT climb on caana although it would admittedly kill the experience at Caracol). One size does not fit all in travel. Even when we travel with others, our experiences can still be so different at the same place on the same day. Tikal for me was absolutely spectacular.
Now I just need to get to Palenque.
Some final notes on Tikal. First, I'm dumping some random pics below. The last one is my favorite. It's Temple I with a "tourist tree" next to it. The tourist tree (not its real name) gets this name because the bark looks like a sunburned white person's skin.
Lastly, if you are a big Star Wars fan, the view from Temple IV is in the original Star Wars movie (Part IV, A New Hope). Tikal was used as the location of the rebel base on the fourth moon of Yavin. Part of me has wanted to see that view in person for a long, long time. And for most of my life, I didn't think there was any way I'd ever get there. The real thing was way better than I could have imagined.
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| Top to bottom: the truck that took us to the site; some Mayan stele; coatamundi on top of Temple IV; and Temple I / "tourist tree". |
