Salt Touched

Temple of the Great Jaguar

There are times when the job throws an opportunity at you that you can’t resist- that you would be an utter fool to resist. Yesterday evening I walked up to Amras after the set with the biggest smile on my face

So, it would seem that I have some sudden uber-cool plans tomorrow

Oooh did you get something good?

More like something awesome.

And I had him the many-times folded flyer I had printed off from my email just a half hour before, detailing the tour to Tikal. The tour crew never ever gets because you have to fly and it takes all day and it’s just one of those ones that’s unacknowledged ‘guests only’ the only people who ever get to escort those tours are actual tour department staff. For some reason – which I still don’t know – they opened up four slots for crew, just four, and at a very reasonable rate.

You’re kidding me!

No! I snagged the last slot! They had four, and I got the last one!

I’m SO jealous! Wait, is that the one where you have to fly? The one I was talking about?

Yup.

So you’re getting on a plane tomorrow

Yup.

Awesome! Oh my god I am so jealous!

And, he had every right to be.

There are few tours where I can’t find the words, this is one of them.

For one thing, I wasn’t even supposed to have it. Crew simply does not get these kinds of tours, anything more than a bus trip and it automatically goes to shore excursions staff. And this morning I was up at 4:45am to board a plane.

Yes, a plane.

A plane that took me over the lush jungles of Guatmala and deep into their depths to the site of one of the most breathtaking Mayan ruins of all time.

Tikal, I actually got to see Tikal.

I had seen the Temple of the Great Jaguar only in slides, during a long ago Mesoamerican Art History class. I was fascinated by it, and always wished the university offered more courses on it, I even considered going back to audit the class one year but found it more complicated an option than I expect.

It was a small plane that took us there, so small that it couldn’t even fit two seats on either side of the aisle, instead there were two seats on one side and a single on the other. Oddly enough, I found myself less frightened in such a small plane than I am in the cabin of a 747. Strange how these things work. It was impossible to sleep over the roar of the propellers (although I’m sure a few of us dropped off a little it was, after all, very early!) – so most of the time was spent staring out at the Guatamala jungle spread out below us like a many folded quilt. It looked like a giant child had dropped a favourite green blanket on the ground, leaving it in folds and shadows under the bright early morning sky. After a landing that felt like were skidding across the hot tarmac, we found ourselves in a mini-bus trundling through the outskirts of the city. Most of us drowsing while trying to look at the jungle because we had started so early in the morning.

Our bus drove us right up to the back of the main temple, a privilege that few people get – most have to walk the long hike from the parking area to the site proper. One of the benefits of being on a tour instead of going on your own. As soon as we got out of the bus the humid jungle air pressed down on either side of us, most of us at that point reached for our water bottles. Then you just stared up, even from behind the Temple of the Great Jaguar is highly impressive. Also, we weren’t due to see it from the front just yet. Instead we hiked around the back and ended up in what had once been the royal residence, now reduced to nothing but towering foundations and remnants of rooms (rooms with no windows, which is very unusual indeed). As I was standing there looking at these remains of what was once a hugely powerful civilization, I realized what I was standing in.

This is one of the only sacred ball courts discovered on this site, it’s very small in scale so it may have been symbolic.

We were standing in the ball court. What little I studied about Mesoamerican history came tumbling back to me, ball courts were not just sacred, they were often used in ritualistic sacrifice. While not as prolific as Hollywood would have most of us believe, it did happen, and it would have been an important part of life. All I know is that that ball court felt very strange, not quite dizzying, but far from steady either. I wanted to put it down to the heat, but I couldn’t really.

It’s a surreal feeling, trodding on stones that have been worn smooth by literally centuries of footfalls. It’s only comparatively recently that these ruins have been opened up, for years they were swallowed whole by the jungle, choked with vines and greenery and animal dens, many of the temples still appear as nothing but hills.

Once we emerged from the ruins into the remains of the main plaza, the Temple of the Jaguar and the Queen’s Temple reared up in front of us, providing the kind of vista you only see once in a lifetime, and then only if you’re very very lucky. The feel of the place was incredible, and when you climbed the rickety stairs to the top of the Queen’s Temple the entire jungle stretched out at your feet like something out of a fairy tale. The ruins were the only piece of civilization you could see for miles, and this was not even the tallest temple on the site, that would come later.

For the next few hours we trekked through the jungle on the dirt roads the park vehicles use to get from site to site. Every so often the guide would pause and point to what at first looked like nothing but a hillock and ask us if we could see what it was, and lo it would transform itself into the jungle-choked remains of a building, what kind of building is impossible to tell, but a building none the less. Around us the jungle buzzed with life, at one point a horrifically loud roaring rattled our ears and we were convinced that we were about to be devoured by a jaguar (who are, after all, native to the area), but were reassured by the guide that it was nothing more than a howler monkey – whose abnormally loud call sounds distressingly like a predator. I’m pretty sure most of us still believed it was a jaguar.

Our ultimate destination was Temple 4 – the tallest temple on the site, in fact the tallest building on the site at all. It’s only been partially restored; the bottom of half of it is still covered in archeological tarps and the remains of jungle fauna. It is a long climb to the top, and I was awfully tired, but I kept hearing Amras’ voice in my head

You’re going to climb it right?

Duh! Try and stop me!

So I did. Thankfully it was switch back stairs, which made it a lot easier. Upon reaching the top, it was all worth it. This is the kind of view you only see in text books and postcards. Nothing but green as far as you can see with the tops of the other temples sticking out of the canopy like broken teeth or fragmented tips of a long lost crown. Who else must have stood here, what must they have thought, what are they thinking now. Because this place, and so many others like it, is still so very much alive – and not simply because there are living breathing people wending their way through and around it every day; there is something in the stones itself that lives. Something kept alive by the sun and the jungle; not in a malicious sense, but in a very real one.

There were only four slots on this tour that opened up for crew, and we – nicknaming ourselves ‘the lucky ones’ grouped together for photos and general ‘can you believe this? I mean really can you believe this?”

The answer being , no, no you really couldn’t.

You were supposed to have been immortal
That’s all they wanted
Not much to ask for
 But in the end you could not deliver

~*~*
The choice was mine and mine completely
I could have any prize that I desired
I could burn with the fury of the brightest star
Or else, or else I could choose time
But remember, I was very young then
And a year was forever and a day
So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
I saw the lights and I was on my way
And how I lived, and how they shone
But how soon the lights were gone…

She wasn’t a saint.

They call her one; Santa Evita. But she wasn’t, scratch the surface of the glamour and Eva Peron was a woman who clawed, scraped and slept her way to the top. She did a lot of good, but she was far from selfless.

Yet, standing in front of her grave in the endless Recolleta Cemetery , where she is buried in not the Peron but the Duarte family tomb, there are still fresh flowers laced into the grates of the doors. Argentina still mourns its Eva, even though she is so long gone now that she is little more than a legend.

We hadn’t intended to end up in Recolleta, but I wasn’t sorry that we had done so. One of the friends I was with had never been, and although Tolly and I had both been (her as recently as two days ago), it’s a place that you can find yourself lost in and not see what you did the first time. It’s very peaceful – this city of the dead – almost lullingly so. Eerily so. Tolly mentioned that it made her wonder if this was what Pompeii had been like before the disaster; only in these streets the residents do no roam, at least not in the conventional sense.

Evita is far from the only resident in this silent city; though her resting place is the most visited. Some, sadly, are no longer visited at all. Many of the tombs belong to families who descendants are long forgotten, looking through half-open locked grates one can see the entrancingly chilling sight of elegant decay. In one instance the stain glass roof had crashed to the ground, lying in pieces amongst the toppled masonry, the coffin itself sheltered and untouched in its niche as the ferns and flowers fought their way up through the cracks beneath it. There was something hypnotizing about it, Tolly almost had to pull me away.

Whose life was that? Whose child, whose parent?

It is not Evita’s grave that interests me here, it’s all the others that are swallowed up by her shadow. All the others time has forgotten.

The cats were gone, that was the one thing I noticed. There used to be cats roaming the cemetery everywhere, lazing in the shadow of long dead generals and patrolling the perimeter of Evita’s neighbours; but I didn’t see one today. Although Tolly said she spotted cat food near one of the benches.

Buenos Aires itself is a city I had not thought I would set foot in again. I was lucky enough to visit on one of the world cruises quite some time ago, one of my very first. Then, I went out alone, somehow more confident than I am now. So it was a different experience to explore Recolleta with someone else. We had started out with four people, but two of us turned a corner and vanished from the sight of the others before they even realized we’d gone; we eventually met up at a café and drank fresh juice and nibbled on warm croissants. There are worse ways to spend a day.

We’ve actually been in Buenos Aires three days, but the first day was Amras’ and my last day in port together, most of which was spent tracking down a desperately needed suitcase (but which also included breakfast at a lovely little corner café so I can’t complain), and he debarked the second day; which left me with today – and I wasn’t going to go out at all, but as it turned out I did need a little peace and quiet.

The puzzle that is the City of the Dead proved to be exceptionally good at providing that.

Even if it does give us a stark reminder that we are – none of us – immortal.