With a nod to the Mayan calendar’s 2012 predictions, I just returned from Central America, where I explored the history of the Mayan world in the steamy jungle ruins of Belize and Guatemala. And I have the bug bites to prove it.
I went to Central America to meet my daughter Brenna in Belize, and we headed north to Orange Walk district and our final destination, Lamanai Outpost Lodge. Lamanai is reachable only by driving out of Belize City for over an hour along rough narrow roads, and then another hour by boat up New River, with its exotic bird life, into New River Lagoon. From home base in our thatched hut at the lodge, with resident geckos and other reptilian wildlife living in the roof – with an occasional drop onto our beds in the middle of the night – we experienced everything from ingesting Mayan jungle medicine to catching a (small) crocodile on a night journey into the lagoon by air boat to cooking tamales over an open fire in the tiny isolated village of Indian Church. But our quest was to explore the Mayan ruins of Lamanai, deep in the thick Belizian jungle. We climbed and trekked through the jungle in haunting stillness: nobody throughout the kilometres of ruins but the two of us and our guide Reynaldo. From high atop the temples we shouted out lines of our favourite poems to hear them echo back from the strategically built structures which allowed Mayan rulers to have their voices amplified over the crowd below. Our shouts disturbed a troop of howler monkeys slumbering in the treetops, and they joined in, creating a reverberating cacophony unlike anything I’ve ever heard. The howler, reported to be the loudest animal on earth, has a roar that can be heard for five kilometres. John Lloyd Stephens, discovering Belize (as the former British Honduras) in the mid-nineteenth century, described the howler monkeys as “grave and solemn, as if officiating as the guardians of consecrated ground.” Such is the loudness and strength of this humble-looking monkey’s voice that it was digitally enhanced to create the dinosaur roars in the Jurassic Park films. And that’s precisely what our time in the Belize jungle felt like – as though we’d stepped back in time, perhaps not as far as prehistoric, but certainly eons away from what passes for our real-time life.
After Lamanai we weren’t ready to leave Belize, and so took a water voyage to the glorious northern island of Ambergris Caye with its sand roads and wonderful reef. After a brief respite, it was on to our next stop for more Mayan discoveries: Guatemala.
We travelled to tiny Flores, built on an island, and from there ventured through the Petén Basin in northern Guatemala into the Tikal ruins, which lie among tropical rainforests. The 10-12 km hike through these ruins was carried out amid the 40C, 85% humidity temperatures with its variety of biting ants and creepy-crawlies. We managed to climb all of the six Temples, apart from Temple I, closed due to deaths from tumbling down the treacherous steps! We of course obeyed the rules on that one…
At the top of Temple IV a movie buff taking in the view informed us that the very vista we looked out on – the eerie tops of ruined temples rising above the treetops – was filmed as the rebel base of the Massassi Outpost on the fourth Moon of Yavin in Star Wars. You never know what unexpected information you’ll learn on these expeditions…
And then it was out of the rainforest and down south of Guatemala City to other-worldly, crumbling, colonial Antigua, where Brenna is living and studying Spanish. The history of these places makes my writers’ soul come alive; in the stillness of dark nights, with only hushed footsteps on the ancient cobbled streets of that tiny town, surrounded by its three volcanoes, I felt the vibration of past lives, and the stories started…
While for now Central America will have to be placed in the queue – I’m working on a story set in another, distant country – I have little doubt that these amazing images will force their way into my thoughts again and again, and the voices that demand to be heard will only be quieted for so long.
