Sweat began to run down my face and into my eyes as I walked along the rocky dirt path towards the ruins. On both sides, thick jungle flanked the trail, we could hear the call of forest birds and monkeys as we made our way forward.

A couple of times we heard something rustling in the trees along the path and when we stopped for a closer look, large rodents unlike any I had ever seen before hopped out from behind a shrub and stared back at me. We later discovered that these were coatis and agoutis, two varieties of small mammals that were once domesticated by the Maya, but still roam freely in the jungles of Guatemala.

Coatis are closely related to raccoons. They were domesticated by the Maya for pets and food.

After a few minutes, the thick jungle opened into a clearing, and peering through the trees, we spotted our first glimpse of one of the great stone temples rising above the forest canopy that was built by the Maya centuries before the first Europeans set foot on this soil.

Templo VI was out first glimpse of a Mayan temple through the jungle at Tikal

Brief History of Tikal

The story of Tikal began nearly 1,000 years before Christ, when the Maya first began to settle the jungle surrounding the city of Tikal. With the cultivation of crops such corn, beans, and squash the Maya civilization quickly grew from small villages of hunter-gatherers, into one of the greatest empires of ancient times.