Category Archives: Travel

Tikal, Guatemala: After Dark in the Great Plaza

Over a thousand years ago, the temples and altars of Tikal’s Great Plaza were the site of gruesome rituals of human sacrifice.  At night, there are no lights, and the low, scream-like roar of howler monkeys fills the air.  It’s an eerie place to be when the grounds are deserted and the sky is dark.

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Tikal Temple II

It’s an amazing experience – at any hour – to be amid Mayan temples that have stood more than a millennia.  Friday night I had the chance to be essentially alone there after dark and after the park had officially closed, with the chance to make the whole place my private photo studio.  Though I lit up the temples for these pictures, in reality there were no lights except a half moon and our handheld flashlights.

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Tikal Temple I

Tikal National Park is Guatemala’s most popular; it enshrines some of the most famous and prominent remnants of the ancient Mayan World.  At Tikal’s center are the temples of the Grand Plaza.  Each day, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of visitors tour the park.  Each evening, a few dozen stay ‘til dusk to watch the sun set behind the Temples.  I stayed even later – until it was truly dark and everyone else had gone home.  Two park rangers waited patiently (sort of) and escorted me (and my local guide, “Henry”) out of the park long after they’d done their nightly sweep of the grounds to make sure no one else was left on the grounds.

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Temple I

 

Those night-time images aren’t Photoshop tricks.  Henry and I were giddily watching them show up on the back of the camera as we moved my big tripod around the Grand Plaza in the dark.  There is no electricity and no lighting at the Temples, so the light on the temples is from his flashlight, which I borrowed and used to “paint” light on the stones and trees during the long 30-second (or so) exposures).  The streaks in the sky are clouds; in that amount of time, they moved quite a bit (happily, the stars did not).  I haven’t picked a favorite image yet – I still can’t quite believe I was there.

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Sunset from Tikal’s Northern Acropolis

All this capped off a long day:  I’d been in the park at 4:30 a.m., too, in the pre-dawn darkness.   Each morning a few dozen folks climb to the top of Temple IV to watch the sun rise over the Grand Plaza.   I got there extra-early, and just in time to get a couple of shots before clouds and fog took over the entire view.  By the time the rest of the sunrise “crowd” arrived, there wasn’t much left to see (bottom).

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Tikal’s Temple IV, just before dawn.

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Foggy sunrise, Tikal Temple IV

Through the middle of the day, I’d driven through the jungle to see the ruins at the town of Uaxactun.  Mostly by accident, I’d wound giving rides to four locals, including a 100-year-old blind man who needed to get home to  Uaxactun.  Normally the guards at Tikal would never have let me stay at the temples at night (which is why  you never see nighttime pictures).  But they were the same guards who’d asked a favor of me earlier in the day and who’d seen me doing multiple favors that day for locals.   So they sat patiently for at least an hour, giving me a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity.

 

Laundry Day: Peten, Guatemala

Between the archaeological sites celebrating ancient Mayan grandeur is the real world of modern-day rural Guatemala.

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Peden, Guatemala

I took a short diversion off the highway between Tikal, Guatemala and the Belize border, heading down a randomly chosen side road just to see what I would see.  I quickly came upon a plain little lake, with a tiny community on its southwest shore.

In the edge of the lake, in waist-deep water, were fifteen or so little thatch-top huts, most of which had a table-like flat board right at water level.   About half of the little huts were in use:  with women (and children) doing their laundry by scrubbing their clothes on those boards in the lake water.  The village had no electricity and no running water.

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Peden, Guatemala

What would strike you most about this is the water.  You can see in some of the pictures that it’s murky, with lots of green slime near the shore, and with trash floating or piled up on the shore.  This is what they’re using to CLEAN their clothes.  It must work better than you’d think, because their clothes seem clean enough.  Meanwhile, the kids were happily swimming alongside the laundry zone.  There were almost no men around, so I’d guess they were mostly off at work somewhere.

As I first made my way through the trees to the lake, I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.  I just waved, smiled, tried out my pitiful Spanish (“Ola!  Su lago es muy bonito!  Puedo hacer algunes fotos?”), and tried to act like it was the most normal thing in the world for a gringo to wander through the trees with a state-of-the-art camera.  I decided to pet one of their dogs so I’d seem friendly, which resulted in my being bitten from behind by a dog not being petted.  (Happily it did not break the skin!).  The humans were much more receptive:  bashful at first, but only a couple said (or motioned) that they didn’t want their pictures taken.  As usual, most seemed eager or flattered.

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It’s sobering to see how these folks live.  And it’s pictures like this that will remind me, in the future, to make that turn off the main road, and to be brave enough to hop out of the car and walk toward whatever looks interesting.

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SCUBA School! San Pedro, Belize

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When I started planning this trip to Belize and mentioned that I’d try to get my SCUBA certification while I was here, pretty much every person I said this to responded, “What?  You don’t already have that?”  So I guess this was something I was supposed to do (or to have done already).

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If you’ve ever been tempted to learn to SCUBA, let me endorse a plan.  I did the “written” part online (at home), then did the pool sessions in two afternoons in Houston.  Then I did my open water qualification dives in some of this hemisphere’s best SCUBA country — the reef just off Ambergris Cay, near San Pedro, Belize.  We covered the required skills, but 80% of the time, we were just swimming around enjoying the sights.  I got paired up with a group of fun Canadians who made their living building fancy vacation homes in zero degree weather.  They were happy to be in sunny Belize.

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Yes, those are sharks.  We saw several — I’d been in the water about ten seconds when I saw my first one.  They’re harmless (to us) nurse sharks.  I liked the yellow turtle the most:  that thing was nearly three feet in diameter!  All in all some pretty amazing sights to be seen just 60 feet or so below the waves.  A big shout-out to my instructor, Gilbert, at Chuck & Robbie’s Dive Center in San Pedro.  (That’s me in the last picture in the grid — photo credit for that one goes to one or the other of my underwater Canadian buddies.)

Camera folks:  I used my “pocket” Canon S100, and bought Canon’s dedicated WP-DC43 underwater housing — which is not expensive at all relative to a DSLR housing.  It’s got at least a dozen buttons and knobs, so literally every menu and adjustment is available, down to 130 ft.  It worked great for my purposes.  As you can see, when you get deep, it gets very blue, so you MUST shoot in RAW and crank the white balance a ton (add lots of yellow and a ton of magenta!).  Get super-close.

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Tikal, Guatemala: A Glimpse of the Americas in 900 A.D.

Some big piles of rocks in a Guatemalan jungle may change your thinking about “American” history.

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Tikal, Guatemala — Temple II

In the year 800 or so, Tikal was a city of nearly 100,000 Mayan people, set in the northeast part of what is now Guatemala.  Huge temples and plazas were the centerpiece of the city; farmers tended the fields for miles in every direction.  The society collapsed around the year 900, for reasons no one fully knows for sure, and the huge structures were quickly swallowed up by the jungle until they were rediscovered and revealed by archaeologists 1,000 years later.

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Tikal – Northern Acropolis

 If your image of our continent’s early history is mostly teepees and arrowheads, you’ll be pretty impressed by places like Tikal.  Most of us (including, I think, many Native Americans themselves) picture the American continents’ indigenous peoples as mostly hunters and gatherers in sparsely populated environments, living lightly on the land with modest agriculture and minimal construction.  If that’s the image in your head, a trip to a place like Tikal, Guatemala will change your assumptions.  Before the end of the first millennium A.D., there were tens of millions of people in the Americas, including huge cities and huge structures in what are now Mexico, central and South America.*

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Exactly what happened to all those ancient “Americans” is a bit of a mystery, but at least a part of the answer is smallpox.  The first European explorers – themselves largely immune due to generations of exposure – inadvertently brought the smallpox virus when they landed in the New World.  The virus spread faster than the European explorers did, so by the time (decades or even centuries later) most of the region was seen by Europeans, most of the “natives” were already dead from disease.  By some estimates, 95% of the continents’ population – perhaps a fifth of the world’s population — died in a wave of smallpox.  What European explorers “discovered” as they probed the continents were the minimal remnants of civilizations that had been as big (and in many ways as advanced) as those in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.  Tikal was already six feet under (literally) the jungle floor.

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Though Tikal had apparently seen its decline before the smallpox era, the site will certainly give a glimpse of the degree of “civilization” that existed on our own continent long before Columbus stumbled upon it.  Besides the sheer number of walls and buildings and monuments, the most striking features are the big temples – meso-American pyramids.  A similar temple at one of the Mayan sites in nearby Belize is, to this day, the tallest manmade structure in that country.

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Tikal — Stone monument detail

Tikal – Grand Plaza (from Temple II)

This was my first trip to Guatemala, and I was surely impressed.  More to come from Central America…

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Update:  A few more daylight images from my return to Tikal a week later.  Night time images are here.

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New Zealand Roadtrip

Of course New Zealand has plenty of famously beautiful spots, but maybe the most striking thing about it is just how pretty the ‘ordinary’ roadsides and countrysides are.

I wound up with several images that hadn’t found a ‘home’ in the prior posts, so I had to add one more.  Most were just stops along the road as I logged 2,000 or so miles criss-crossing the South Island.  I’d also planned to see the North Island, but I somehow never made it that far and had to fly out of Christchurch instead of Auckland.  Plenty to see here.  In case it’s not already obvious, I like just driving around seeing the sights (and the sites).

I spent another night in Queenstown and made another trip through Wanaka after I did my first post.  Thus the nighttime shot from the gondola above Queenstown, and the shots of the sailboats and the somehow-famous semi-submerged tree at Lake Wanaka.  The glacier is Fox Glacier — on the West (Tasman) coast about halfway up the South Island.  My favorite image here is the one of the Waiau River, up near Hamner Springs.  Those wild yellow flower bushes were amazing.

Since a couple of the shots have sheep and deer in them, I’ll offer one last set of New Zealand factoids — about animals.  New Zealand has no indigenous land mammals (there are a few bats and several sea mammals).   Also no land snakes.  Whether you ascribe this to Noah or to Darwin, it’s a fascinating curiosity that New Zealand was (forgive me) mostly ‘for the birds!’  The absence of mammalian predators has lots of impact:  Many of the bird species (including the kiwi itself) are flightless, for example.  And when humans (starting with the Polynesian Maori) brought with them (purposefully or inadvertently) mammals like deer, rats, and possum, they multiplied like crazy to the point they all became major pests.

Today there are lots of mammals.  Plenty of cattle, and sheep that outnumber humans 10 to 1.  The deer ‘problem’ has been solved by domesticating them; there are huge high-fenced fields of hundreds of deer, grazing just like cattle and creating a significant venison industry.  Amusingly, I decided to be sure I got a nice New Zealand Merino Wool sweater while I was here.  When I tried on my favorite, they bragged that it was actually 40% possum.  I told them that wouldn’t seem very luxurious in the U.S., but they insisted that the south-seas Australian brushtail was a different animal altogether.  I was dubious on several levels.  But I bought the sweater.

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By the time you’re reading this, I’m already home in Houston — mostly likely planning another trip.