El Mirador, Guatemala — BEFORE the torrential rain and the ankle-deep mud, before the quarter-sized blister and the mouse-sized cockroach, before all that, I climbed a 2,000-year-old Maya pyramid, watched the red orb of the sun sink into the jungle canopy and felt the thrill of being an anachronism.
Modern society has no claim on this place. In every direction, unbroken jungle spread in green waves. Monkeys crashed through the trees below. Dragonflies patrolled the pyramid's summit in jerky circles. All around, the buzz of cicadas crested and receded as rhythmically as ocean waves.
For two days, my guide, our pack horse and I had been hiking through the hinterland of El Peten, Guatemala's northernmost state. Our destinations were some of the world's largest and earliest Maya cities, several of which are in Mirador-Rio Azul National Park. That they sat near the remote southern Mexico border, in one of Central America's biggest tracts of virgin jungle, was a sizable hardship as well as a bonus.
Spider monkeys had hurled branches at us from treetops. Clouds of mosquitoes dogged our every step with the mechanical persistence of zombies. Although the jungle had wowed me with its ecological diversity, it had mainly stung me, sucked my blood and dehydrated me.
Now, after hiking 15 hours over two days, I was at Nakbe, a city that flourished from 800 to 300 BC -- a millennium before the Maya civilization's classic period. I prowled the mostly overgrown, unexcavated site, visiting ancient rock quarries and gazing down the ragged trenches left by looters.
Then, as the sky turned red, I spotted an unusual lump about eight miles to the northwest. That enormous, jungle-covered hill was the ruins of El Mirador, a colossal city some experts call the "cradle of Maya civilization."
It was still a day's hike away.
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MEL Gibson, of course, had beaten me to it. His Maya epic, "Apocalypto," was filmed in Mexico, to the north. But it was inspired, in part, by his involvement with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to conserve this region's forests and archeological treasures. The ultra-violent R-rated movie probably will not give you warm, fuzzy feelings about the ancient Maya.
