Tikal

During the day of driving, we had to get in line for a ferry river crossing. There was a boy helping out at the coconut stand chopping open the coconuts with a machete.

Here's the ferry we are waiting on. It was powered by what looked like a couple big boat outboard motors (if that's what they're called?).

The truck next to us had a dead cow :(.

Flores is a quiet little town and people are mostly there to head to Tikal or other nearby Mayan ruins sites. The town itself is touristy and on a little island in the middle of the lake, but connected to the mainland by a road. The lake has risen in recent years and some of the lakeside properties and walkways are flooded - like you could take a dip and do some swimming flooded.

I got myself onto a sunset tour to Tikal and we headed out mid afternoon. Not the best tour I've been on but not the worst. Here's a map of the Tikal ruins that you see before heading out and our guide explained which ones we would visit. You could probably spend a full day or two here visiting them all. But for me, ruins kinda look the same after you've seen them a few hours.

This was a huge tree in the park that the Mayans termed the tree of life. It was pretty interesting looking to me.

There were two of these towers across from each other. You could only climb one (they erected stairs and platforms of wood so you aren't on the ruins).

The ruins to the left however, you could climb all over. That was pretty fun to explore. I even turned a corner and ran into a monkey. I don't really care for monkeys so I was happy to turn back around.

Then we headed to a different tower for the sunset. There was scaffolding we were climbing around. Super safe I'm sure ;). There is not much money in Guatemala to spend on discovering and restoring these ruins. So you have discoveries still occurring today (often funded by international universities doing research, many from the U.S.). You also have ruins that are mid or pre restoration. It is crazy to see how they get buried over time even though they are fairly large structures.

My sunset pictures didn't turn out too awesome. This is one of the better ones. You could see some of the ruins sticking out above the treetops from our vantage point. One of the guides also does birding tours. He spotted some far, far away toucans for us. I saw a glint of yellow beak in the binoculars but really that was all. Too bad they weren't closer. We walked back in the semi-dark and headed back to Flores.