 Good morning world! Welcome back to the channel! It's day number 370 on our circumnavigation around the globe. I'm a motorcycle! We're here in Tikal in Guatemala and the sun hasn't yet risen above the jungle around us. But for us it's time to wake up because we've got an ancient Maya city to explore. We camped here last night inside the Tikal National Park right next to the Mayan city ruins and about one hour ago we just had like this crazy howler monkey symphony. That you were snoring. Yeah I think he was snoring actually. I don't know but I thought at the beginning that you were snoring. I'm like what's going on here? Wow! There was like a few groups all around us and it was just absolutely crazy and super loud. It was amazing. It was actually amazing. Normally I'm sleeping with earplugs but I had to take them out and just listening to what was happening. It was wow! The park is opening at 6 o'clock. It's now 5.45 and it's just a short walk over there. So we will just have some breakfast and then we will get the move on. Hi Bumblebee! Well look it's super misty around this morning. That's the Mayan atmosphere. No drones! Unfortunately Pinky and the Brain have to stay back with Bumblebee. I would say they are pretty peligro to be honest and they're not wrong. Let me show you guys what we're going to try and do this morning. So we're starting here at the front. First we're going to be heading straight up to the Grand Plaza which has like a whole group of temples including the Grand Jaguar Temple. And then we'll be heading all the way to the very end where there is Temple 4 which is actually the tallest temple in the whole archaeological park. I think it's 70 meters high so from there you can have an amazing view of the whole ancient Maya city. Let's get there before anybody else does. Absolutely crazy tree and I think the mist makes it even more dramatic and unreal. That is a massive tree. The rainforest here is so crazy thick and tall and just full of beautiful palms and ferns. We can see groups of hallow monkeys rustling about in the trees all around us. You can't really see the monkeys themselves but you can sort of see all the trees and hear them and I can still hear the howl of monkeys calling over on that side as well. This crazy demonic sound. Amazing the howl of monkeys are all over this area just like foraging in the canopy. Absolutely amazing. This forest is so incredibly beautiful. The first views of the Temple of the Jaguar and this is from like the backside of it so we're about to go round into the main plaza where all the collection of most of the large temples are. Here it is. We are home darling. It's just so misty and the sun is just rising above the jungle behind us. There's parrots just here and literally we are the only ones down here in the main plaza. Look at this. What an incredible place. This one here is the Temple of the Jaguar. This is the North Acropolis. You've got Temple 2 that's what they call it and then the Central Acropolis on this side so it forms this amazing massive square called the Grand Plaza in the center. This is the heart of Tikal. This is the very very very center. So Tikal was discovered in 1848 by Coronel Modesto Mendes and Ambrosio Tut. It was opened to the public in 1955 and it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. The name comes from Mayan meaning in the lagoon but it's also known as the place of the spirit voices or the parrot voices or the howl of monkey voices. The Mayan civilization itself is pretty impressive running from 800 BC to 900 AD. That's like 1700 years and this city itself reached its zenith in 750 AD and at that time the nucleus of the city was 65 square kilometers and they estimate that there was more than 50 thousand people living here. Impressive. There's actually a documentary film crew here as well and they've got all their cameras set up and they're getting some shots as well. We might be ruining their shot I'm not sure. Apparently the buildings of this Grand Plaza were built over a period of a thousand years. Can you imagine that one building there might be a thousand years older than one building there as part of the same city? It's just absolutely incredible the the scale and the timeline of this. But by far the two most impressive structures in the Grand Plaza are the Great Jaguar Temple and Temple II and these two were both built in 700 by the governor Jasar Chancawheel also known as Mr. Coco apparently and his tomb was actually discovered inside the Grand Jaguar Temple. So it's crazy that in 700 these two massive temples were built and by 900 the Mayan civilization had all but disappeared. 1,500 years to build it up to this point and then gone. There's all these upright stones all around this plaza and on some of them we can see carvings and these carvings basically are telling the history and the stories and this is what is giving the Mayan archaeologists all their info about the Mayan civilization because by the time the Spanish arrived here there was no one around to say what this was all about. There's a cutie a goodie. No he's like pretending that he didn't see us. Hey guys exciting news we finally got our very first sponsor. So we just wanted to take a minute to show you guys this amazing app from our newest supporter on Vacation Doctor. Just imagine the following scenario you're traveling in the foreign country you're exploring the wonders of the world and all of a sudden you get sick panic sets in and you just want to talk to a real doctor but you don't speak the local language. This is where the On Vacation Doctor app comes in handy. 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You feel like you are on the top of the jungle you know you feel like that you are really in there. I'm just so impressed with the scale of these structures they're so massive like this is just huge and this is not even the tallest structure in this whole ancient city because now we're going to be heading to a temple called temple 4 which is right at the back of this archaeological park and that is 70 meters tall and apparently you can climb all the way to the top. So ahead of us through this thick jungle stands the largest temple in Tikal and we are just about to start climbing it. Let's count the steps eh. Don't worry it's not the fit bit's four. You can still see the cloud line actually. There we go at the top temple 4. So this temple was built in 740 AD and it is 70 meters tall making it the tallest structure pre-Columbian structure in the whole of Mesoamerica. So this is like skyscraper of the ancient world and it really is I mean look at this. So over there is the Grand Plaza that we came from originally with the great Jaguar temple there and temple 2 there and then temple 3 this one we passed along the way to here. Crazy from up here you can still hear the howler monkeys all of them echoing throughout this whole forest but it's so impressive as well because from up here you can literally just see forest the whole way around. Reminds you what it can look like when you just let nature do its thing it's incredible. So alive it's so beautiful and then with these peaks of these temples popping up in between that's why this site was the first UNESCO World Heritage Site to be designated and classified based on cultural heritage and natural beauty definitely one of the wonders of the ancient world. Alright I am incredibly hot now. I think this is not even like you can't even say incredibly hot I think it's one level above it. The bike is recording 35 at the moment and I can tell you that getting on this gear has a challenge getting on this gear at 35 degrees is a massive challenge. Yeah oh my god but absolutely worth it. We just had some sandwiches back at the camp packed up the camp and now we're ready to hit the road again. Oh yes what a beautiful site here oh my god I really I just can't believe how amazing it is here like the jungle combined with the ruins. Yeah it's like a double wonder of the world I mean we saw so many howler monkeys we saw coates we saw this beautiful turkey yesterday. Wow hello he is so incredibly beautiful oh listen he's saying hello hello sweet dear that's not very good impression and then of course the ancient city itself in between all that jungle is just super super impressive what a crazy feat of engineering and determination back then in the pre-columbian period I mean those are some super tall buildings for back then that building that we were standing at the top of was the tallest building in the whole of the Americas when it was built and for the next 1000 years it's insane definitely a wonder of the ancient world and that was well worth a visit. Yeah a really really special place so now it's nearly midday and we have a really exciting ride still to do because we will be heading to the Mexican border. We won't cross into Mexico today because they will be pushing it a little bit too much our navigation says it will take us four hours to the border and then we will probably check out if there's a place for us to stay. Yeah four hours ride is still quite a big ride to do so let's see how we get on and see how close we can get. So away from the national park where there's no big rainforest to cool us down the temperature is just shot way up it's now 37 degrees and it's bordering on unbearable. Yeah it's really really crazy here what a huge difference it is. Many unbearable hours later. It's unbelievably hot I think we have like 39 degrees at the moment and Olya went in the shop and bought me an ice cream but it looks like this. I have to figure out now how to eat that. It's time for us to get in a room with an AC. We're about halfway now and we've ridden two hours and we have two hours more to go but yeah it's not really an easy ride. We're desperately trying to eat some pineapple see if it will cool us down a little bit. I don't think we've had temperatures this high since like Africa since Senegal that was probably the last time that we hit 38 degrees. Not even 38 it was 39. I really didn't expect that it would be Guatemala that would be the hottest of all the countries we've been through. And it's humid as well like whoa that's hot. It's official we have reached 40 degrees what a milestone hey what a milestone. Yeah actually Olya's phone is not working anymore because it's overheated. Yeah I got a temperature warning. Yes and normally we're using it with Google Maps to route us to the border. They said I'll turn back on when you reach the air conditioning. I'm nearly at that point going to shut down until we get to the AC. Lavie's just checking out a room in the second hotel which is called Hotel Alain and the owner just told us that the electricity for the whole town is out at the moment so basically there's no AC here or in the other hotel until she reckons the electricity will come back on in about an hour. We were like so hoping to go to a room straight away and just jump in front of the air conditioning unit but it looks like we might have to wait a little bit longer. Hello. We made it. Happy and alive and really exhausted and happy that we have an AC room. Yeah finally it got to six o'clock and the air conditioning did come on so the woman wasn't lying about that. So the room is cooling down and that's making us really happy and we've got the kettle on the go for some noodles but yeah it's been an incredibly long day with five hours walking and then four hours riding. There's almost the limit of what you can do in a day. Yeah it's just about time to get a good rest because tomorrow we have a crazy day ahead. We will cross into Mexico and that's it from us today. 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