tikal

today we woke up at 430am...this early rising business has been a trend, but its ok because its way cooler in the mornings and we got a start on most of the tourists. we visited tikal, a huge mayan ruins with several temples and plaza areas. tikal means something like echoes, or sounds and between some of the pyramids you can clap and it makes this cool twang noise. one temple was estimated by our guide to take like 50 years to make. our guide showed us how during the summer and winter equinox, the sun shines right through the middle of the temples, and there are 356 steps in one of them, obviously the mayans had some major arcitectural planning skills. we climbed up most of the ruins and one was really steep almost like a ladder. i was kind of scared and went down real real slow. i could hear the locals above me comment, que lenta (how slow...) haha. oh well, i wasn´t about to fall. i can´t imagine carrying bricks up that high to build those.

we also saw. tarantula, ant eater, guatemalan jungle racoon thing, snakes, frog, parrot, toucan, quetzal (national bird), howler monkey, and spider monkies. pretty cool.