Saturday, September 24, 2005

 

PART NINE: Tikal, renovator's dream

Many of you will know of Tikal. Central America's largest and most visited Mayan ruins were populated between 900BC and around 900AD and getting a feel for the romance and mystery of this lost world was my main reason for visiting Guatemala. Set in forest in Tikal National Park, the ruins span a huge area (like, hectares and shit) and take at least a day and a packed lunch to get a good look around.

As I write this, I'm now living in China and feel a little like a negative nancy as I ponder retrospectively on the experience. The thing is, despite the towering pyramids, the three thousand years of grafitti and the blood-soaked soils from the hundreds, if not thousands of battles fought on its grounds, I found the whole thing, frankly, a little underwhelming.

It's worth mentioning that over the course of these travels, I was reading a deeply depressing book given to me by a dear friend, called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Survive or Fail, written by a dangerously knowledgable chap called Jared Diamond. The book discusses the follies of extinct civilisations and draws comparisons with the modern world's short-sighted and rapacious existence. Essentially, Diamond's thesis is that most societies who are no longer with us came to grief through their own mismanagement of resources. The inhabitants of the Easter Islands, the Mayans, the Norse of Greenland, and many others, didn't just vanish. They starved themselves to death through deforestation, pollution, overgrazing, and a stupefying unwillingness to adapt to environmental change. Any that managed to survive then knocked each other's brains out over the last packet of M and Ms. By coincidence, the book covered many of the areas my companion and I traveled through, including Australia (my home), California (Diamond's home), the Netherlands, China, and Tikal. The book concludes that unless modern human beings prepare to make drastic changes to the way we live (which we won't), that shit's gonna get real fucked up (which, I firmly believe, it will). I never much liked the humans anyway and this book galvanised a lot of my personal beliefs about what a bunch of fucking idiots we really are. And I'm one of them. So, what's more, we're a bunch of hypocritical fucking idiots.

So, by the time I got to Tikal, having developed a blanket, shamefully racist dislike for whatever Spanish half-breed remnants of the Mayans that exist today, much of what I expected the impact of Tikal to be was replaced by a sort of sadistic glee at their horrendous fate, which really tarnished the 'magic'. As I've said before, it doesn't feel good to side with the Spanish.

Also, Tikal is now a major global tourist attraction, with a ticket office at the front gate. A line from Douglas Copeland's Generation X that has always stuck with me is "Purchased experiences are not real". That motto comes to me every time I fork out to see a tree, some clean water, a bird or two or, in this case, an ancient ruin. I wanted impenatrable jungle thickets surrounding the ruins, not well-maintained lawns. I wanted a babbling mountain stream to fill my canteen from, not a grinning Guatemalan hustler selling Sprite every 200 metres. I wanted the possible danger of bits of 2000-year-old brick crushing my skull, not treated pine struts and banisters bolted to everything to ensure that didn't happen.

That said, despite the commercial aspect and the hordes of tourists and the odd guy walking around with a revolver on his side (no, he wasn't a cop), the Tikal park is a rather beautiful place. Much of the vegetation that was removed for the site's excavation has re-established and there is a good deal of wildlife cavorting around, including hummingbirds which are just about the most heart-melting thing you'll ever see. And man, they fo' sho' is mighty tasty!

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