There are three ways to sleep at Tikal, a national park almost as well known for its wildlife as its grand Mayan ruins: in a hotel room, in a tent, or in a hammock. We felt a hammock would be the most ‘authentic’ and we were right. We saw many pictures at Tikal’s museums of former archeologists and workers strung up in hammocks for the night (we suspect they didn’t have mosquito coils though). We ignored that we had never hung a hammock or spent the night in one before.
Two things to note about your first night in a hammock:
1) If it cools down at night, no matter how warm you were in the day, you will be cold. Dress appropriately.
2) Every crunch of leaf, squeak of bat, and croak of frog feels unbearably close.
Dreams not withstanding, we tossed and turned and otherwise survived the night, awaking in the dim light of early morning to enter the park before all but the most fanatical. The great pyramids were devoid of people but harbored plenty of noise courtesy of the howler monkeys and the toucans, parrots, and others whose names are lost upon us. In Maya times, only priests and kings would have felt the joy at being atop the temples, but they would have been gazing at a bustling city of people and temples for miles around instead of jungle.
While lying in our hammocks the night before, we did not feel the need to climb a temple to see the amazing starscape above us. In fact, we didn’t even want to leave our hammocks.
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