carks

January 15, 2012

We are in Tikal, which is a place with tombs and temples and palaces built by the Mayans more than a thousand years ago. The buildings are made of rocks, and ashes and rubber hold the rocks together. We came to Tikal to see where they filmed Star Wars, and to enjoy ourselves, and because our ancestors built this place.

Temples are made in a pyramid shape, with four sides square at the bottom, and they’re really tall and have rock stairs. The archaeologists don’t want you climbing on the rock stairs, so you get to the top by wood stairs. When you get to the top one of them has rooms at the top and you can go in but the rooms are empty. Some of the temples have rooms at the top that you can’t go in, they have a fence across and I don’t know why, maybe because the archaeologists are working. When we get to the top of a pyramid or the highest they let you go, me and my sister sit on the rock stairs while my dad takes pictures and looks at things in the binoculars.

We climbed up two or three or five temples, my sister says five. We climbed one of the temples three times up and down on the wooden stairs, because me and my sister were bored because my parents were taking too long taking pictures.

Today we had our lunch on the stone bleachers where you would watch a ballgame called pic-a-tosh that the royalties, the kings and princes, would play. You play it with a wood ball covered with rubber but you can’t use your hands, only your elbows and knees and feet. The ball court looked like a small garden, it had grass around it and in the middle, and on two sides there were stone walls that were slanted.

We saw coatis, one was in the plaza between the pyramids begging for food. The coatis look like raccoons, with tails like lemurs that curl at the end and are really long. Yesterday we saw a whole flock of coatis, and I was the first one to see them, there were seventeen and some were babies, and they crossed the road in front of us and we stopped for them and took pictures.

Yesterday we saw monkeys in the jungle, spider monkeys. They had long tails that they used to swing with, and they used their hands, and we saw one baby with all the adult monkeys. The baby was swinging on its mom’s back. We also saw spider monkeys over the swimming pool at our hotel, there were two that were swinging over to a tree to go to bed because it was getting dark.

We saw a flock of toucans eating fruit in a tree, when we were walking back home to our hotel. We saw some turkeys but they look different than Ohio turkeys, we didn’t see any big tail feathers and their feathers are baby-blue colored on their heads and necks and their other feathers are black and brown and green, green especially on their wings.

For our meals we have chicken crepes, or pasta, or an American Breakfast – which is scrambled eggs, bacon and a muffin. Tonight I think I’ll have chicken crepes. This is Carks, signing out.