Mysteries of the Maya in Tikal, Guatemala

by Turk Pipkin

(This story on the the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala originally ran in Texas Monthly.)

On steep ladders and broken rock, I had already climbed over a hundred and fifty feet from the floor of the jungle when I came to a dizzying, twenty foot ladder leading almost to the pinnacle of the tallest temple in pre-Columbian America.

In the remote northern reaches of Guatemala, I was in the thousand year old Mayan city of Tikal, and if I could just conquer my nerves and get up that last vertical ladder, I’d have a magnificent view of the entire ruins covering six square miles below me. My hands were on the iron rungs when I noticed a small, faded sign, presumably offering an important safety warning. The words, unfortunately, were completely weathered away. With sweaty hands, I climbed on.

At the top I was rewarded not only by a spectacular view, but also by a truly marvelous spot from where to contemplate the lost mysteries of the Mayans. From deep inside the three chambers atop Tikal’s Temple IV, cooled by side and back walls forty feet thick, I had a bird’s eye view of the most visible remains of a culture that developed astounding systems of math, astronomy, architecture, and a complex written language that we have only recently begun to fully understand.

Yet somehow, some way, after a thousand years of building their civilization, the Mayans lost their way, and nearly all their culture was lost with them. The clues to their sudden decline and fall have for centuries been buried within this building and thousands more hidden beneath the Jungles of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Belize.

Recent years have shown amazing advances in our understanding of the Mayans. After decades of work, scientists have finally decoded the hieroglyphs engraved on the Mayan stone stelae and altars and we are learning that wars and sickness—possibly as a result of overpopulation—depletion of natural resources, and drought all contributed to their demise. Since these same problems face much of Central America and the rest of the world today, perhaps we have much to learn from the lost lessons of the Maya.

So, in search of knowledge, adventure and the natural and man-made beauties of Tikal, tourists come to these ruins from all over the world. I met visitors from Germany, France, Holland, Costa Rica, and Venezuela while I was there; but not a single person from the United States. I could not help but wonder, as I gazed from my lofty perch out onto the magnificent towering remains of the Temple of the Sun, have we lost our sense of history, our sense of adventure, or both? Do we no longer yearn to know tomorrow what we do not today?

They are both numerous and illuminating, the lessons and the pleasures of Tikal. First there is the jungle, teeming with three hundred species of birds including numerous parrots and toucans, howler and spider monkeys by the droves, and a vast array of other jungle life. Next there is the continuous discovery of magnificent ruins in every direction, each building somehow more impressive than the last. And finally there are the stories of the ancient Mayans who excelled not only in astronomy, agronomy and architecture, but also in the strangeness of their ceremonies, ritually beheaded the conquered rulers of other cities, and engaging in bizarre forms of worship and tribute including the use of engraved sea urchin spines for painful rites of genital bloodletting. Come to Tikal on vacation, and you can leave the Stephen King novels at home.

To get to Tikal, tourists fly into the island city of Flores, Guatemala from Guatemala City, Cancun, Mexico or on smaller planes from neighboring Belize. You’ll know when your plane passes the Guatemalan border because the otherwise beautiful view is obscured by the smoke from thousands of fires set to burn back the jungle in an age old tradition which goes back to Mayan times, and which—as an only marginally successful system of agriculture—could possibly have contributed to their demise. As the population of Guatemala is now soaring past ten million, the need for cleared land grows every year, especially since the fertility of the strip-burned soil is soon exhausted and new plots must be constantly cleared by yet more fires.

Flores is a town that completely occupies a small island in the middle of Lake Petén Itza, the second largest lake in Guatemala, an iridescent blue-green expanse stretching for miles between mountains and steep forested hills. If you visit the town for shopping, a meal or a boat ride, you’ll notice that the level of the lake—steadily rising for a number of years—is inundating an entire ring of lakeshore houses and businesses.

From the airport it’s a twenty miles to the Westin Camino Real Hotel, a beautiful drive in the hotel’s big yellow mini-bus, the last two miles on a narrow causeway that skirts the winding lakeshore, passing small houses with women and kids waist deep in the lake, washing clothes on huge stones worn smooth by centuries of this work.

The road also passes the intriguing but primitive Gringo Perdido Parador Ecologico—the Lost Gringo Ecology Hotel—with lakeside cabanas for rent at just $20 per night. Other moderately priced rooms can be had at the very friendly Hotel Villa Maya, also on the lakeshore, or at the Jungle Inn located on the grounds at the entrance to Tikal, but offering electricity only from dusk till 10:00 p.m. at which time the lights and ceiling fans shut down. The mosquitoes, however, are available all night long.

The new and gracious seventy-two room Camino Real, located within the Cerro Cahui Nature Preserve and flowing across a hillside overlooking the lake, was more to my liking. The hotel employs one hundred people from the local area, all specially trained for their jobs serving the tourists of Tikal.

After checking into the hotel, I checked out the grounds and quickly discovered a big hammock beside a small boat dock on the beautiful lakeshore. I laid back listening to the shore birds and watching giant lizards scramble about as gusty, cool breezes heralded one of the frequent afternoon thunderstorms rolling in from the Guatemalan Highlands, the rumbling of two separate storms sounding like jaguars calling back and forth to each other from distant mountains.

The temperature had dropped 20 degrees by the time the first cold drops rousted me from my perch and sent me scurrying for the bar overlooking the lake where, sheltered from sheets of rain, I drank a cold Gallo beer and began to read an excellent Tikal guidebook I’d purchased in the hotel’s giftshop.

The food in the restaurant, I soon discovered, is the best in the area; the most expensive item is an excellent carne asada with refritos, guacamole, fried plantains, rice and fresh salsa. A lot of food for 8 bucks.

On a beautiful cool clear morning with steam rising off the road, having negotiated an all day cab rental for $35, I rode out to Tikal National Park with my driver, Ramón. Paying 30 Quetzales or about $5 admission at a booth on the highway, Ramón and I then stopped for a decent breakfast at the very rustic Comedor Imperio Maya, one of three small restaurants at the entrance to the site.

I also spoke for quite a while with a local guide named Angél—one of several who speaks English—about the advantages of using a guide ($20 for five hours) over a book. Angél also told me about tours he equips and leads to the remote Mayan ruins of El Mirador: eight days out and back by mule, sleeping in hammocks and eating meals prepared by Angél’s cook.

“Our pleasure,” said Angél, “ is to serve the visitors as best we can.”

Many tourists opt to wander through Tikal one day on their own and one day with a guide; I chose to go it alone.

Showing my ticket stub at a small guard booth, I followed the entrance signs up a half mile long path beneath a thick canopy of trees and vines, the buzz of the cicadas vying with the songs of parrots and the loud squawking of a brown jay. Turning left on a narrow pathway, I began to climb the slow slope of the Maler Causeway—named for German archaeologist Teobert Maler who sketched and photographed much of Tikal in 1895 and 1904, but stubbornly refused to turn his site map over to his sponsors, the Peabody Museum. High overhead several howler monkeys tossed fruit and broken branches down at me as I tried in vain to take a good picture of them.

After a hot climb up the sloping road, I arrived at the backside of the Temple of the Sun, a nine-sided pyramid rising majestically one hundred and seventy feet above me. Currently undergoing a painstaking restoration, the temple is surrounded on three sides by tall scaffolding. At one corner four men with plumb bobs, tape measures, small brushes and other tools, were carefully calculating the exact size and location of a corner stone that would anchor another layer of fascia above. The meticulous detail of their discussion moved at a pace that can only hint at how long it must have taken to build these vast and complex structures.

Climbing to the other side of Temple One brought me to Tikal’s incomparable Great Plaza, balanced at the other end by the even taller Temple of the Giant Jaguar, and underlayed by four different masonry floors, the first one laid around 150 b.c. Numerous stone stelae are lined along one side of the plaza as are two enormous multi-leveled side buildings. Climbing the North Acropolis, the base of which covers two and one half acres, I found a shady spot in which to read my guide book and soon found an intriguing photo of a giant masonry mask that was described as being in a tunnel beneath the very building on which I was sitting. I scrambled to the top of two different peaks and circled the entire structure, but was unable to find any hidden entrances. Then I noticed a small thatched roof shading some narrow stairs. Scrambling down, I found a small tunnel off to one side and began to dig in my bag for my flashlight. Crouching low, I turned a corner and found myself face to face with the physical representation of a giant looming Mayan god. Once an ornamentation on the exterior of the temple, two of these six foot high masks were converted to the service of guarding burial chambers when an even larger building was built over the earlier one.

Back in the sunlight I found two enterprising young men doing a brisk business selling ice cold Pepsi, bottled water, and Gallo beer from their giant cooler. Sitting on roughsawn benches in the shade I listened to the excited buzz of other tourists, all it seemed, talking about the wonders of Tikal in German, French, and Spanish. Once again, there were no Americans to be heard.

In all, I must have walked ten miles at Tikal. One of my favorite places was the distant Temple of the Inscriptions, discovered only in 1954 by Señor Antonio Ortiz who with his son runs the Jaguar Inn at the entrance to the sight.

Also not to be missed is the dramatic Plaza of the Lost World—chosen by George Lucas as the location for the rebel hideout in the movie STAR WARS—and a good place to see how these temples and pyramids were built one on top of another over periods of centuries, each new structure more massive and impressive than the one beneath. Indeed many of the partially restored structures at Tikal are the penultimate form, as many of the final structures have been excessively deteriorated by weather, tree roots and from later generations dismantling the stone for other uses.

Still my favorite spot was at the pinnacle of my somewhat perilous climb to the soaring heights of Temple Four where I shared the view with cliff swallows who make their homes in the cool recesses of the inner chambers and zoom into the sunlight high above the ground like jets off a carrier. The beautiful carved hardwood lintels that once adorned the chambers atop this temple were long ago removed by archaeologists and shipped to Switzerland where they remain to this day, but although they may chip at the face of this beauty, the glory of the Mayans’ achievement survives.

Out of film and out of breath, I climbed down and joined a couple from Germany to begin the long walk back to the entrance where we each drank a luke warm beer at the museum restaurant. There are two museums actually, the large one (free admission) filled with twenty stone stelae and altars, and a smaller, older museum (admission 10 QZ or $2 for foreigners, 2 QZ for Guatemalans) filled with beautiful red ceramic pots, jade, shell, and bone jewelry, intricately inscribed bone and obsidian, and three wonderful little carved gods called “Dios de la Lluvia.” Some of these objects are 2500 years old.

Most incredible was the skeleton and artifacts of burial 116, the tomb of a ruler known as Moon Double Comb which was discovered beneath the Temple of the Giant Jaguar in 1962. The chamber contained 16 1/2 pounds of jade jewelry and 96 incised animal and human bones. Moon Double Comb, who was a towering 1 meter, 80 cm tall (just under six feet), ruled over Tikal from 682 - 734 a.d., lived to be between sixty and eighty years old, and was one of the last great Mayan kings.

What happened to Moon Double Comb and the Mayans who followed him? Why, after Tikal was ruled for 650 years by a single continuous dynasty of 39 successive kings, did the lineage suddenly come to an end in the ninth century a.d.? Such questions have fascinated scientists and tourists alike for decades, but only with the recent decoding of the Mayan glyphs have we begun to form a full picture of their rise and fall.

Tikal had first dominated the central Petén region in the 4th Century a.d. after victorious battles by successive Tikal’s ahaus—or kings—Great Jaguar Paw, Smoking-Frog, Curl-Snout and Stormy Sky. These kings built massive complexes in Tikal and erected many of the stone stelae which have carried their history into the modern world.

In the 6th century a.d., Tikal was conquered by the kingdom of Caracol and would not reclaim their wealth and power until the year 682 a.d. when Ah-cacaw ascended to the throne and began to restore its honor by constructing the largest buildings to date in the Mayan world, including the giant masks which I saw at the North Acropolis of the Great Plaza.

Ever mindful of their own history, and with the highest regard for their ancestors by which the common destiny of each person in the community was forever linked, both physically and spiritually, Ah-cacaw conducted carefully orchestrated rituals and prayers to reopen the lost portals of communication to their ancestors. Under his leadership, Tikal again became the most powerful kingdom of the Petén region.

In the book, “A Forest of Kings, the Untold Story of the Ancient Maya,” University of Texas archaeologist Linda Schele and co-author David Freidel detail much of Tikal’s history. “To be Maya,” they write, “was to be part of the patterns of history formed by the actions of kings within the framework of sacred space and time.”

There is no single answer as to what caused the great collapse of these kingdoms but according to Schele and Freidel, “the voiceless remains of the dead, both commoner and noble alike, bear witness to malnutrition, sickness, (and) infection...”

Due to social strife and environmental destruction, the great fields of the Mayans could no longer feed the vast populations of the Petén. As the society crumbled, literacy as a part of the King’s public performance of ritual was abandoned, and soon wandering tribesmen were living atop the great ancient ruins.

Still, a very few Mayan kingdoms survived. Seven hundred years later, in 1695, Spanish Padre Andrés de Avendaño visited the Mayan king Can-Ek at the fortress island kingdom of Tayasol (now the island city of Flores, Guatemala). Having already learned to speak Mayan, Avendaño used his knowledge of Mayan prophecies to convince Can-Ek to surrender the old ways and be baptized as a Christian. Thus the oral and written histories of the Mayans were turned against them, and one year later, Tayasol—the last Mayan kingdom—would fall in battle to the Spanish. In a shameful effort to eradicate forever the historical religious traditions which linked the native Americans to their past, thousands of Mayan books were destroyed by the Spanish.

And now, thanks to the deciphering of Linda Schele and others, the secrets of the Mayan stones been unlocked and the first great early history of the Americas is open for all to see. Yet I met not a single American on my journey to Tikal.

For our children, the definitive vacation has become a visit to the kingdoms of Disney, where safe fantasy and cheap thrills substitute for any genuine stimulation of mind and spirit. I returned from Tikal to the distressing news that—in an attempted “bull run” of their own—the folks at Disney would now like to turn the Civil War battlefield of Manassas into an historical theme park. Of course, what they don’t seem to realize is that such a place already exists; the Manassas battlefield itself.

Unless we cherish and profit from our age old connections to a common past, some day perhaps, future civilizations may struggle to decode our forgotten language and search for the secrets of our own lost civilization. From Manassas to Tikal to Disneyland, there is one thing that even Walt knew; it’s a small world.