The Hidden Treasures of Tikal: A 5-hour Archaeology & Wildlife Tour with Luis Arturo Serrano

        This tour takes you to the more remote parts of Southern and Southeastern Tikal. You will see Temples V and VI and various other buildings that are off-the-beaten-track with our guide emeritus: Luis Arturro Serrano, who has a great knowledge of both Maya history, culture and folklore, as well as a great knowledge of the forest’s plants and animals and how they interact with each other.

        We started at the restaurant El Mesón near Complex Q and headed South, almost straight away, we were walking down a seldom used path in the direction of temple six, along the way, I was learning things about the forest. For instance, the Army ants know when there will be strong winds, they collect all their eggs in the tree tops and take them down to ground level to hide them under rocks for safekeeping. If you know how to spot this, you can know that there will be high winds soon. I must admit that I forgot to ask how the ants know, so there’s something for a future visit. He can tell you about medicinal plants in the forest that can be used to help with snake bites for instance. He is also the first person I have met who has been bitten by a Tarantula, he shrugged it off as nothing, despite describing how it hurt for about two weeks, right down to the bone.

Luis Arturo was able to point me to various carvings and heiroglyphs that I wouldn’t have spotted myself and he could also explain things about them. There is an entrance to a building that has a very eroded snake mouth carving around the door, you enter into a corridor that takes a right angle turn to the right before leading you out of the side of the building, you have just ceremonially walked the length of the snake. Temple six has some nice inscriptions for you to see and temple five has both a magnificent staircase and rounded corners which is most unusual. You carry on through the South Acropolis and the Plaza of the Seven Temples before arriving at the Lost World Complex. There are easier ways to find your way here but this route is exciting because you can feel that you are in a more remote part of Tikal.

By this time, the sunset is approaching, you can climb the Lost World pyramid and watch the sunset over the treetops. I have seen the sunset from this spot three times now and it still doesn’t feel enough, it’s a sublime experience, the bird song is beautiful, there is a cool breeze blowing and the light gives the green of the trees a hue that is different from the rest of the day. I can describe what it looks and sounds like but there are no words to describe how this experience feels, words like magical and transcendental come close but still feel inadequate. Sunset at Tikal is a really amazing experience.

You descend back to the forest floor as the light is failing and get to walk through the forest at night, another amazing experience that has a feeling all its own. This is when the spiders come out; in the day there is a wasp that preys on them so they stay hidden. You are quite safe on the paths though, the animals don’t come after you, just don’t step on a line of ants, I once saw someone do this and before she knew it, they had climbed inside her shoe.

I won’t try to tell you everything that I learned on this tour, or all of the things we talked about because there isn’t space in a short article like this. I would highly recommend it because you get to meet a very interesting guide with great knowledge, who will show you some very interesting and obscure places and tell you all about them, as well as telling you a lot of things about the ecosystem which you might be hard pressed to find in books. For a Northern European like me, this is an amazing experience as there is of course, nothing like this back home.