Into the Jungle

Our final group for walking to El Mirador consisted of me, Stephanie and Daniel, a Swedish couple- Christian and Mikaela, and Simon from England. We left at 6am from Flores to a little town in the jungle called Carmileta. There we had breakfast at the house of the family of our guide, while the family packed all our bags and supplies onto 5 or 6 mules. Then we set off into the jungle with our guide, cook, mules and another guy to manage the mules. All I had to carry was a water bottle, with custom string shoulder strap, and of course my camera. I brought along my D70 with the 18-55mm kit lens since I knew I'd mostly be shooting in the daylight and it's the lightest configuration I had.

All of our nights we tented at archeological camps near Mayan ruins sites. Disturbingly, the guy that booked our tour forgot to include tent poles, so our guide Eric went into the woods at each of the campsites and cut perfect tent poles for us out of a certain type of tree branch. We spent the second and third nights camped at El Mirador, which has the largest Mayan temple ever built- La Danta. Originally it's thought to have been around 80 meters tall, but with degradation it's now about 72 meters tall. La Danta as well as pretty much all of the other pyramids and temples we visited were still covered in jungle. After 2000 years of lying dormant, the jungle has reclaimed all of these great cities. Hopefully 2000 years from now Chicago, LA, and New York won't be covered in forest. Good thing we're smart and aren't overpopulating, stressing our food supply and destroying our environment like those foolish societies of the past...

The last two photos are from the last camp we stayed at, which was currently serving as a camp for men cutting chate, a type of plant found in the Guatemalan jungle, which is used to make the green dye for United States Dollars. These guys spend weeks and months at a time living in these camps looking for this plant. The bundle our guide Eric is holding in the second to last picture sells for 3 Quetzales, which is like a little under 50 cents. If I ever return to Guatemala I'm going to do a photo story about some of these guys and live with them for a week or so in a camp while they work and live... all so we can have green money.

Anyway, it was a great trip- sunsets from the tops of pyramids, sleeping in cold uncomfortable tents, talking with good people... what more is there.

And that's it from Guatemala.

Cheers,
Pat