This post is more for the friends & family crowd than the Guatemala culture & Peace Corps crowd, but all should feel free to laugh along with us. 🙂

We just got back from Tikal, one of the largest archaeological sites in the new world. It’s filled with a thousand years of Mayan architecture. It was abandoned in during the European dark ages and swallowed up up by the deep central american jungle, then rediscovered in the 1800s. They’ve been working on uncovering it since then, and they have barely scratched the surface of what’s hidden there. It’s pretty cool, and a giant playground for my mom and aunties, who are archaeologists.

We took an early flight out there, then a private shuttle to our hotel within the park. Emily and I have a friend who runs a small travel agency in Antigua (Vera, from Dia Verde), and she set us up for the trip, and did a great job. She found us a good price on planes, busses, things like that… but also she found us a SWEET hotel at Tikal that was a collection of grass-roofed huts with a pool. Normally, i don’t care if a hotel has a pool or not. But in a jungle that has 100% relative humidity and is in the 90s by 9am, the pool is a lifesaver. We spent every afternoon in it.

So, what about this Tikal place? Well, you have to wait until the next post to hear about it! HAHAHAHA There’s too much to write, and I gotta run. I am just posting this to show these awesome pictures of my poor old aunties doing action-adventure travel, so my family members can home can get a chuckle.

Here they are, ziplining a few hundred feet above the jungle floor. Prettymuch hilarious. And here’s another (click to enlarge!), of them climbing over a hundred stairs to get to the top of an ancient Mayan pyramid. I want to point out RIGHT AWAY that I did NOT force them to do this. In fact, none of these things were even my idea. I think Aunt Donna came up with it all to make her brother (my dad) crazy.

OK, i gotta run, because we have to get ready to find with my buddy Ricardo, a microbus driver that we hired to drive us all the way back to our site (yet another adventure). He was a good sport about it, but I saw him last night and he looks like a fish out of water. He’s a quiet Mayan guy, and I think being in Antigua around all these white people and Ladinos and traffic and crazy restaurants and big buildings is freaking him out. But we put him and his co-driver in a nice hotel last night and I gave them 200q for food (that’s about a week’s wages, in the countryside), so they should be OK for one night. I hope.