Exhausted from our Pacaya hike, we had to get up at 5AM the next morning to catch our flight to Tikal. We flew with TAG, a national airline here in Guatemala. Their website is perhaps a little "sketchy" (certainly doesn't have the standard flight reservation/ online booking system that major airlines do) but wow, we were impressed with the company. Service was friendly and personal when I booked our flight, the airline itself has its own hangar (you don't go to the "normal" section of the airport to fly with TAG, you go directly to their counter), and the flights were on time.
There was a brief scuffle during check in between my mom and "Tammy the Tour Guide," who was shuffling a mass of elderly people ahead of my mother, her full brim straw hat complimenting her baggy khakis and short sleeve button up, given her the look of either a serious archaeologist or a serious tourist, your pick. Other than that, the morning was uneventful, the flight pleasant, fast, and compared to normal international style airports, extremely hassle free (no security, no stupid liquids rules, it was awesome.)
We landed at the Flores airport, but our luggage did not. My mom decided to freak out about this, and the very friendly man who showed us a digital picture of our bags and asked us to circle/ label which ones were ours so they could be delivered to our hotel did little to lighten her mood. Sure, this digital picture system of forgotten bags was a bit "unprofessional" by our standards, but the man explained that there was simply too much weight for those bags to fit on our plane and that they would be delivered immediately to our hotel once the next flight landed with them. So we hopped on a 45 minute bus ride to Tikal and decided to take our chances.
True to his word, our bags were waiting for us when we arrived at our hotel in the afternoon after our tour of Tikal. More points for TAG airlines.
Tikal itself was pretty awesome; we stayed at the Jungle Lodge, in the park, which was honestly a little underwhelming. I think the biggest problem was that we felt like we had no other options once at the Jungle Lodge; this was where we would be eating, where we would hire a tour guide, where we would have to arrange transportation back to Flores, so we felt a bit sucked into a tourist trap, so to speak.
The tour we took was… memorable - lots of great people in our group. The guide did a mediocre job in my opinion. He was very knowledgable, but had a tendency to stop walking in the middle of the woods on our way between temples to explain the Mayan migration tendencies or something. This would really aggravate me, we must've stopped to talk several times for a total of an hour before we saw any ruins! I guess I was looking for some information a little more specific to the temples in Tikal (whenever we reached the actual temples, little to no explanation was given on their specific purposes, just free time to climb/ look around. Bummer.) He gave a thorough if tedious lecture on the Mayan counting system with a base of 20, which was cool. But yeah, too much stopping in the middle of the woods, too much talk about the local Flora, not enough info about the temples themselves.
The temples themselves, though, are unbelievable. They're massive, slapped right in the middle of the jungle, and are often climbable. Some have modern, wood stairs built into the sides for assistance (like Temples IV and VI, the biggest ones,) but don't let that bum you out - climbing these stairs is as adventurous at times as climbing the actual stone (which can be done in many places.) The stairs in temple VI in particular were so steep that I would call it a titanic ladder of some 100+ steps, which had to be descended backwards.
We saw several spider monkeys, lots of ant trails carrying leaves/ food, and other cool Jungle stuff. After the tour we headed back to explore some of the other temples on our own, which was some nice fun, quiet exploration time. Our feet were exhausted by this point (volcano hike + all day up/ down/ around temples) so we basically crashed at this point, ready to finish up Tikal in the morning and head to Semuc Champey afterwards….
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