Searching for adventure among the Maya
Civilization comes alive while exploring archeological sites and traditional cultural rites
GUATEMALA & HONDURAS— A stone peak pierced through the canopy of tropical rainforest as our helicopter made for the Mexican border. For decades, the Guatemalan army used El Mirador as a landmark to identify the northern limits of the country’s airspace, believing it was a small mountain adorning an otherwise featureless landscape.
Little did they know the summit was actually the crown jewel of an ancient Mayan city. Rising up from the jungle floor, El Mirador’s La Danta pyramid is one of the largest manmade structures in the ancient world, rivalling even the Great Pyramid of Giza.
As we trekked through the jungle toward the pyramid, accompanied by a soundtrack of chirping cicadas and bellowing howler monkeys, I started to appreciate why we were told the 12-day expedition we were embarking on with Bella Guatemala Travel was for travellers and not tourists. “It’s more than a tour. It’s an experience,” explains Jose Antonio Gonzalez, a 48-year-old archeologist whose wide-brimmed hat and Keith Richards swagger give him the air of a Guatemalan Indiana Jones.
Along with his fellow guide Emilio Faillace, the thrill-seeking Mayaphile has put together an actionpacked trip intended to immerse travellers in 2,300 years worth of Mayan history and culture.
The itinerary alone is enough to make an adventurer’s jaw drop. On top of visits to at least seven archeological sites — two of which are protected by UNESCO — the tour also boasts helicopter rides, jungle hikes, visits to world class private artifact collections and a boat trip across a crater lake surrounded by active volcanoes, all crammed into12 days split between Guatemala and Honduras.
Sweetening the pot even further is the fact that Gonzalez and Faillace have tapped some of the most respected archeologists in the region to help them bring the Mayan world to life.
The trip certainly got off on the right foot at El Mirador, where we were accompanied by Richard Hansen. The American archeologist has spent nearly four decades fending off jaguars and mosquitoes in an attempt to uncover the ancient city’s mysteries.
If that isn’t impressive enough, he has also explored and mapped 51 cities in the surrounding basin, some of which were connected politically and commercially to El Mirador via a network of raised causeways that Hansen considers to be the “first freeway system in the world.”
According to Hansen, at its height several hundred years before Christ, El Mirador would have supported 200,000 people in an area approximately the size of downtown Los Angeles.
Although Hansen has excavated 20 major areas of the city, El Mirador remains largely covered by the jungle that reclaimed it after the kingdom’s collapse around AD 150. As a result, when you’re standing on top of the hulking La Danta, it feels more as if you’re in the middle of Jurassic Park than the ruins of Pompeii.
But as soon as Hansen started showing off some of the groundbreaking discoveries he has unearthed over the years, I was able to picture the brightly painted buildings that would have once lined the glistening white boulevards of El Mirador’s sprawling urban centre.
“In the minds of many people — the general public — the Mayans are very mythic,” Gonzalez said over one of many cold Gallo beers on the trip. “We have an ambition to change that concept.”
Throughout the rest of our travels, Gonzalez and Faillace painted a colourful, but nuanced picture of a Mayan people who farmed, went to war, made clothes, designed mathematical systems, worshipped the cosmos and drank liquid chocolate from exquisite clay goblets.
The diversity and complexity of the ancient Maya over the millennia was most evident at the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Tikal in northern Guatemala and Copan in Honduras.
Like most kingdoms in the Mayan world, the two shared a common religious iconography, characterized by stylized animals such as jaguars, monkeys and snakes, and other anthropomorphic deities. Archaeological evidence even suggests that Copan was colonized by a delegation from Tikal around AD 426.
Despite their connection and the fact they both flourished in the Classic Period, the art and architecture of the two cities could not be any more different. In Tikal, statuesque pyramids evoke the vanity of modern architects who built skyscrapers as high as possible because they could, leading Gonzalez to refer to the city as the New York of the Mayan world.
In Copan, 400 kilometres south of Tikal, the buildings are no less impressive. But what really sets it apart from other Mayan kingdoms is the unique style of its finely detailed relief carvings.
“Copan is not monumental, but it’s glorious,” Gonzalez says, adding that if Tikal was the Mayan equivalent of New York, then Copan was its Paris.
The royal lineages of Copan and Tikal both came to an end by AD 900. But scores of other sites — including the lush grounds of Iximche, which we visited — continued to rise and fall until the end of the 17th century, when last Mayan kingdom of Itza was defeated by the Spanish in the same Peten jungle where El Mirador once prospered.
Although the great kingdoms are now monuments to the past, it was revealing to see how strong and alive Mayan culture remains.
On more than one occasion, we witnessed Guatemalans practising Mayan spiritual rituals at the archeological sites where their ancestors would have worshipped.
In Santiago Atitlan, we were even invited to take part in a ceremony at the shrine of Maximon — a Mayan deity with Spanish Catholic influences embodied by an effigy — who is believed to be the keeper of balance in the world.
“Some people say Guatemalans come from the ancient Maya, but it’s the same Mayan people who are still here. They never vanished. They prevailed, they breathe, they run, they jump, they create, they think,” Gonzalez says.
By the time I returned home, I felt like I had spent the last two weeks on a journey through time and space. But it wasn’t until a few weeks later that the experience truly started to sink in. Cody Punter was hosted by the Guatemalan Tourism Institute and Bella Guatemala Travel, which did not review or approve this story.