After a beautiful August and September with friends and family in Connecticut, we returned to “work” on the ship in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and sailed south to Guatemala – our first visit there. 

 

 

 

 

We spent a day in Antigua, a quaint town in the mountains we thought we could go to live for a few weeks if we wanted to learn Spanish.  We also played Fuego Maya, a course between two active volcanoes – which I would rank as my #2 world course after The Hills Course in Queenstown, NZ.

 

After that, we went on a very special trip into the jungle with Dr. Richard Hansen, a famous archaeologist, to explore what Smithsonian magazine called the “Lost City of the Maya.”

Some of you may have visited Maya ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula, but only in the last 50 years have the pre-classic Maya ruins (1000 years before the Yucatan) been discovered in the rain forest of central Guatemala.  For 38 years, with a very limited budget, Dr. Hansen and his team have been excavating the El Mirador basin, where a 2,500 year old metropolis of 51 cities was the size of Los Angeles and had a population of 100-200,000.  In addition to thousands of buildings, and the world’s first “highways,” they built La Danta, the largest pyramid by volume in the world.  Hansen has just cleared the top 80 feet of the 230-foot structure.  We got to climb it.

It’s a fascinating story that is too long and complicated to repeat in this blog, but this short “Breaking News” spot on CNN (is there anything that ISN’T breaking news with Wolf??) is a quick summary of the story.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voY8jNcuGe8

So, before my pictures and video, here are your “little known facts of the day”:

1. Mayan is the language. Everything else is Maya.  Maya ruins, Maya culture, Maya people.  You can see even CNN got it wrong.  The Maya people spoke Mayan. 
2. An new insect species is only declared if the genitalia is different. A butterfly that looks different, such as by color, isn’t deemed a different species unless…I don’t really know – it’s what we learned on this trip.  Breaking news?

It was a long, hot, humid day of trekking and climbing, but the passion of Dr. Hansen made it very special.  At the end of the day, thunderstorms approached and we had to race to the helicopters to avoid spending the night in the jungle.  On the flight home, the lightening and storms were frightening, but then the sun broke through and we saw a rainbow that went in a complete circle, never touching the ground.  A first for me, but sadly, I couldn’t get a full picture of it.  The arduous day ended with a spectacular sunset.

Here’s a 7 minute video of our trip: