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Well, i have been abit slack on the blog thing of late, almost two months behind on stories, i guess time flys when your having fun! Well on Day two of the el mirador trek, and we had 8-9hours walking ahead of us to get from the el tintal campsite to el mirador. Most of the day was a blur of jungle, jungle and more jungle with a few sightings of monkeys, snakes and a large section of the track covered in giant ants that looked like they could all cover you and devour you in a few seconds. We finally reached el mirador just before nightfall and after two days in the hot sweaty jungle i got to have the best shower of my life, just a bucket of cold water rigged to a shower head, it was wonderfully refreshing!
On day three we had the whole day to explore the El Mirador ruins, a massive sprawling site, the largest of the preclassic mayan sites including numerous pyramids and temples, and has the biggest pyramid in the mayan world. It felt really special to be able to view the site in its mostly unexcavated state, felt veery indiana jones style!
The top of la danta pyramid you could see for miles around, on clear days you can see the tops of the temples in tikal some 70kms away.
after exploring most of the site wehad a few hours to relax in the afternoon (well some of the boys took relax to mean go play soccer for a few hours, and buggered up all their feet), before heading up to the other tall pyramid El Tigre, to watch the sunset. Our wonderful guide eric, only young early 20s i think, is so incredibly knowledgeable about el Mirador, having grown up all around the ruins he is able to read the glyphs and is able to tell us about all of the structures that we see even the most obscure ones that on the surface look quite ordinary having not been excavated yet. As We reached the pyramid el tigre, it was a rickety staircase of sorts leading up to the top with a rope pulley thing to help you up the last section, being slightly terrified of heights it was pretty challenging getting up there and realising it would be dark when i had to get down again, after taking in the beautiful view for awhile, i decied to leave the rest of the group and find my way down and back to camp before it got dark. It turned out to be abit of a silly decision mainly as it was fairly dark at this stage and im HOPELESS with directions and got abit lost. After a bit of a panic in the jungle i managed to find my way back to the bottom of the pyramid, where luckily another girl was coming down early as well and we managed to find our way back to camp together.
We all settled down for the night for some much needed rest, only to be awoken at around 2 am by the loudest howler monkeys have heard so far, they were so close to the tents, and their roars kept me up for quite some time. We set off on day 4 without much exitement, saying goodbye to a few of the crew who were doing the 6 day trek. Day 4 was the long stretch back to el tintal campsite, which was largely unexciteing except that me and another guy were walking separetly from the rest of the group and were startled by a large black cat creature walking across the trail (black jaguar/puma/jaguarundi??).
After a good sleep in a crowded cosy tent we set off on day 5 for the last stretch to carmelita, we arrived about 5 hours later and joined the rest of the group for a well deserved cerveza at the little town tienda. Feet were sore, body was extremely tired but the trek was one of the greatest weeks of my life :)
