A Birthday in Tikal

On June 22nd I celebrated my birthday.  Getting up at 3:00 in the morning to catch a shuttle to the airport is NOT my ideal way to start a birthday, but it was so worth it!  I got to spend my birthday doing this:

Tikal is an AMAZING bunch of Mayan ruins in the middle of a Guatemalan jungle.  The ruins are really well preserved, and they continue to find new ones each year.  They are surrounded by trees, and can be really hard to find, so we ended up doing a lot of this:

And then you finally get where you are going, and it is AMAZING! The biggest section of Tikal is the Main Plaza, an area that is covered in ruins, every direction that you turn.  It is estimated that nearly 90,000 Mayans inhabited Tikal, so even though there are many ruins to see now, there must be many that haven´t been uncovered yet. 

We call this our ¨Plyg-Pic´´.  Poor Ryan was the only guy in our group.  Funny that we are all from Utah.  No, we are not Sister Wives!

This next one is probably my favorite picture of the day!  It turned out so well, and only took us three tries:

Even though there is a lot to see at the Grand Plaza, the ruins go on and on in every direction.  We spent hours hiking from one ruin to the next, and climbing all the ones we could. 

I can now say that I have visited ancient ruins, and I even managed to fall down one.  I didn´t get hurt badly (just some scrapes and bruises) but if I had broked anything, I would have been able to tell anyone who asked what happened that I had fallen down an ancient Mayan temple :-D  Such a klutz!  

The ruins are literally in the middle of a jungle.  There are monkey´s swinging from the trees above you, parrots and other birds everywhere, crocidiles in the pond, frogs, and other little animals in the grass anytime you stop and look for them.  We found this tiny turtle and thought he was adorable!

This was the view from the tallest temple that we were allowed to climb.  It was AMAZING.  you can look out and see several of the other temples (you can see one at the left if you look closely in this picture) I could have sat there for hours and hours.  From what I understand Tikal was used in the 4th Star Wars movie (not super knowledgable when it comes to Star Wars) and I think this is the view they used.  I´ll have to check into that. 

Had to take our classic Chaco picture.  We are going to send them all to the Chaco people at the end of the trip and hope to become rich and famous ;-)

We found this great place for pictures, and when I saw this one of me I laughed.  I guess in my heart it is my deepest desire to be a model (Just kidding!  And it´s a good thing since no one really wants a 5´3 model!)

The day was HOT and HUMID.  We stopped taking pictures with us in them after the first hour or two because we were all soaking wet (no joke)! But even so, we kept wandering until about 3:30 when we met up with our van driver who took us back to Flores where we found a hotel.

We were very ready to crash at that point!  We went out for dinner, celebrated my birthday with ice cream (Thanks Shonnee and Jess for the delectable dark chocolate Magnum bar!) and enjoyed the view of the lake before falling into a blissful sleep.  It truly was a phenomenal birthday!