Guatemala 6: Yaxha

After a long, intense day at Tikal, we decided to sleep a half hour longer than we had originally planned, and then have a breakfast all together at the Jungle Lodge. Reyes had slept in a hammock in the inexpensive camping area at Tikal (and had to move his hammock a time or two when the pouring rain started leaking through the thatched roof of his camping spot). We invited Reyes and also our driver Byron to join us for breakfast, which they appreciated.

As with all the other food there, the breakfast was great.

 

After breakfast on the morning of August 18, 2022, we piled into the van and drove towards the Mayan ruins of Yaxha.

Along the way, we passed the edge of the huge Lake Petén Itzá, which extends all the way to Flores, so we pulled over to have a look.

They say these hills look like a crocodile.

We had fun hanging out on the dock for a few minutes.

Mike took a picture of the kids.

Sienna made a little 15-second video about how pretty it was there.

She also mentioned how it was a death drap.

Nearby were some tourist areas that looked fun.

Yaxha

The ancient Mayan city of Yaxha is about 19 miles (30km) southeast of Tikal, as the toucan flies, though the drive is quite a bit longer than that. It was inhabited from about 600 B.C. to around 900 A.D. It is the 3rd largest set of ruins in Guatemala, after Tikal and El Mirador (way up north by the Mexican border). Yaxha and Tikal were allies, at least for a time, due to the marriage of the ruler of Tikal to a wife from Yaxha, for whom Tikal's Temple II was built.

The name "Yaxhá" (pronounced "yosh-HAH") means "blue-green water", probably because of the adjacent lake, and comes from the Maya "Yax", meaning "blue-green", and "ha", meaning "water". I like to think of it as "Aqua-Agua". It is one of the few place names of ruins that is the same as the original Mayan name. (The Mayan name for Tikal, by contrast, is "Yax Mutal").

The site consists of several plazas and architectural groups linked by causeways, as well as a causeway down to the lake. The population has been estimated at about 40,000 people (about half the size of Tikal).

There are over 500 structures, including at least 40 stelae. This stele shows a leader in a fancy headdress. You can see his two feet at the bottom left; and I recognize a "9" halfway down on the left side (four dots and a bar).

These three stelae celebrate important rulers.

Reyes grew up in Belize, so while Spanish is his first language, English is also an official language there, so he grew up learning and speaking English. So there was never a language barrier there.

Minor Astronomical Complex (Plaza C)

The first area we came to after the entrance was the "Minor Astronomical Complex" (Plaza C). (In this setting, "minor" and "major" mean "smaller" and "larger"). It was built very early, between 800 and 700 B.C., and there may be even older buildings underneath. It was used to celebrate the movement of the sun and stars, and to indicate the solstices and equinoxes.

Several of the main paths we walked down were actually ancient causeways, made with white stone. They were important for helping to move the large stone blocks needed for the structures.

This first causeway was called the "Causeway of the Quarries", also known as the "Lincoln Causeway".

As we walked along, we found a tree with a couple dozen "cicada husks", the shell left by these insects during their final molting process. They looked really gross.

 

As in Tikal, we saw many structures that were not excavated.

Toucans love the dark berries on these bright red plants.

South Acropolis

The South Acropolis had two ball courts. Here you can see steps leading up to an observation area of one of them.

One of the ball courts lined up with Structures 389 and 391, which have four rooms.

Here we have a couple of people in each of the doorways. The rooms have "corbel vaulted" roofs, made from having long, flat stones be longer and longer until they finally meet in the middle. They apparently had not figured out the stronger curved arches.

The South Acropolis was built in the "Late Pre-classic" period (100 BC-400 AD), and ran through the Terminal Classic period (after 900 A.D.). Yaxha apparently waited a bit longer than Tikal and much of the rest of the Mayan world before it, too, was abandoned around 950 A.D.

This is apparently a jaguar face (looking to the right). But I think it also looks like a toad (looking to the left).

This structure was a little further away in the "southwestern group".

This causeway goes all the way down to the lake.

Linette loved this cool tree.

Major Astronomical Complex

Our next stop was the Major (i.e., larger) Astronomical Complex, which is one of the oldest complexes in Yaxha. During the earliest times, this was the main plaza of the city.

The two smaller sanctuaries to the north and south of the main pyramid are at close to a 23 degree angle from the center of the Great Pyramid, and are associated with the location of the sun during the summer and winter solstices.

We hiked up all those stairs to get to the top. Some of the gals knocked on the hand rails on the way up, which sounded a bit like jungle drums with the different pitches that it made.

When we arrived (huffing and puffing) at the top, we were treated to a nice view of the surrounding area, including Lake Yaxha.

Jared zoomed in on Temple 216, "The Temple of the Red Hands", where we would be finishing our trip.

He also zoomed in on the north pyramid in the North Acropolis, which we would visit later.

He also zoomed in on Mikayla's face.

This tree is a "chakáh" (chah-KAH"). The locals also sometimes call it a "tourist tree", because the bark turns red and peels, like a sunburned tourist.

This caterpillar wandered along the railing.

And Mike took a picture of this frightening creature, which looks like a cross between a spider and a crab.

Then the two crossed paths. In this video, you can watch the interaction.

Whew. I expected much worse.

We also discovered an inch worm. I guess I had never seen a real one before, because it looked very odd to me. Here's a 30-second video of it (the first 5 seconds give you the main idea).

We also saw some howler monkeys eating in the trees from up there.

We passed by the West Residential Group (Grupo Residencial Oeste), where many people used to live.

(Seems a bit drafty now...)

Sharon saw this orange centipede, similar to one we saw at Tikal.

Here you can see an inner tree that has been consumed by an outer one.

We walked by the west side of the North Acropolis, where we saw the "back" side of one of the pyramids.

We came back to explore this area later.

As we continued on our way, we saw a beautiful Toucan.

We walked to the north end of the park along the "Waterway Road" (Calzada da las Aguadas), also called "Calzada Blom". It was a wide causeway that leads to a cluster of structures called "Maler's Group" (named after Teobet Maler, who first rediscovered Yaxha in 1904). The causeway has raised walls on each side, and some notches like you see in the picture below. This allowed the causeway to gather rainwater and direct it through those notches into some ponds and water holes for later use.

Here is a diagram of how the causeway worked.

The causeway was really wide, which supported all the people and their wares who used it, and also, I assume, provided more surface area for water collection.

Here is Jason on the left side.

This 10-second video shows the walls on the two sides. I don't mention it, but you can see the gap on the right side where the water went through into a collection pond.

We saw some spider monkeys swinging through the trees.

In that area, I saw some leafcutter ants bringing pieces of leaves down from a tree (to use in nurturing fungus to feed their larvae). As in Tikal, these ants made a "road" through the jungle, but in this case, their path cuts through some grass, so it is much more obvious. Here's a 45-second video showing the ants and the road they carved.

Roger also saw these red ants zooming along. When I looked closer and stepped through the frames, I saw that a little black ant came out of a hole, and one of the red ants sort of bumped into it, scanned it with its antennae, and then went around it, as the black ant ducked back into its hole. After that, all of the red ants went around the hole, so I suspect one or the other of the ants laid down a "conflict zone" or "dibs" chemical that caused the others to start dodging that area. Here's the 8 second video where all of that went down.

Plaza de los Sombras (Maler's Group)

At the north end of the Water Causeway (Calzada Blom), we arrived at a cluster of structures at the Plaza de los Sombras (Plaza of the Shadows), also called "Maler's Group".

There we found a great pyramid ("Structure 1"), which we climbed.

Here we all are on Structure 1 in the Plaza of Shadows.

A couple times, Reyes asked if we wanted to climb something, or if we wanted to skip it to pace ourselves, because of other things we would be climbing later. We answered, "We want to do it ALL!" :)

People didn't always have the same energy level, of course. This picture from Tikal illustrates the Three Degrees of Energy.

Shaylee, Mikayla and Sharon with varying levels of energy.
(In front of Temple I of Tikal).

But everyone seemed to be game for climbing on All of The Things, since that was one of the funnest parts.

I'm still thinking Sharon had more than her share of energy, though. :)

Across the plaza were another couple of structures.

From there, we saw some more spider monkeys feeding in the trees.

This monkey was hanging from a wall!

After hanging out on the pyramid for a bit, we carefully worked our way back down.

There were a few smaller structures in that plaza as well.

One stele was preserved under a cover.

It was interesting seeing these walls and stairs that seem to lead nowhere, but once were part of a structure used by real people.

It started raining, so everyone put on their rain gear. All the kids had dark rain jackets. And for some reason they all decided to stick their ears out of them.

Sharon thought that was funny, so she joined in as well.

Roger quietly went along with it, too.

North Acropolis

Next we went back to the North Acropolis. Here is the "back" side of the west pyramid (away from its plaza).

Going around that into the plaza, we saw a palace on one end.

Here you can see some evidence of later stairs built over earlier structures.

In fact, if you look at this cut-out, you can see several layers of construction, where earlier stairs were covered with rubble and then more stairs, at least three times.

Under one of the layers was this carving (which has been carefully re-plastered to make it look more like it did originally).

There was a residential structure to one side of the North Acropolis as we walked in, so we we all went up to check it out.

The walls around that structure had a cool notch in them.

Reyes told us that the three pyramids in the North Acropolis corresponded to the three Mayan "hearthstones" of creation, similar to the triangular three-stone hearth that is at the center of all traditional Maya homes. The lower part of the constellation Orion (the belt and feet) represent the same thing, and the Orion Nebula in the middle of those was interpreted by the Maya as the cosmic fire of creation, surrounded by smoke.

This smaller pyramid was on the left.

We climbed the North Temple, which was the largest one in that plaza. Reyes had us zig-zag up to keep to the steps that were in the best condition.

These pyramids were built early in the history of Yaxha, during the Mayan "Pre-classic" period (400 BC to 100 AD).

From on top, we could look down on the other two pyramids.

(This one is currently being repaired).

At the top of the North Pyramid was yet another additional pyramid. Here's Jason at the top.

We all eventually joined him.

From way up on top, we could look down on the jungle canopy as far as the eye could see.

I thought it was fun that Linette had her little backpack she got in Antigua and her Mayan water bottle holder that she got in Tikal. (I call it her "Guaterbottle")

It was an excellent place to chill for a while.

Roger's camera does something where it makes a video out of a bunch of poses or something, so we all did some goofy poses at the very top.

I thought this picture made Reyes look pretty cool.

Hey, Linette looks pretty cool, too!

There were many pictures from on top.

From up there, we could see the top of the Temple of the Red Hands, which we would reach at the end of our visit.

Finally, we came down the upper pyramid...

...and then the rest of the way down.

We told the workers that we appreciated their hard work in restoring these beautiful structures. This guy waved as I took their picture.

Plaza of the Birds

Just south of the North Acropolis is Plaza E, "Plaza de los Pájaros", or the "Plaza of the Birds". It was one of the largest urban spaces built in the Late Classic period (600-900 A.D.).

I thought Stele 31 was beautiful. It was laid flat, under a protective roof.

A replica of the stele stands out in front of a structure that hasn't been excavated yet.

On the stele, you can see the face of a ruler (looking to the left) with a fancy headdress. The headdress includes various birds and nature themes.

My parents gave me and Linette a book about the Maya almost 30 years ago. On the back is a picture of the author and his wife, with their son, David Stuart. David learned to read Mayan glyphs as a kid, published his first paper about it at age 12, and is now one of the foremost authorities on it.

According to an article he wrote in 2019, the stele shows a "richly dressed warrior-king...standing above a diminutive captive." The six glyphs shown below contain a long calendar date of 13 Ix 2 Zac (which, along with a date on the side of the stele puts the date at August 11, 795 A.D.); a playfully "spelled" verb saying "(he) was captured", the captured guy's name, Xu-bu Chahk-ki (aka Xub Caak); and the place where he was captured from: K'an-na-witz-nal-ajaw, which is Ucanal, Guatemala, located 22 kilometers to the south of Yaxha.

The Mayan writing system is fascinating. Like I mentioned before, the Spanish burned all of the thousands of Mayan paper books ("codices") that existed, in order to prevent the worship of other gods, and then banned the use of the glyphs, and eventually nobody remained who could read them.

People started trying to decipher them in the 1800s, and figured out the numbers and eventually the long count calendar system. But the rest remained a mystery. The top expert in the field at the time viciously slammed anyone who contradicted him, including people whose insights and ideas turned out eventually to be correct. He ripped on one guy who was on the right track, and that guy gave up. It was over 50 years later that someone finally rediscovered what that guy had started to figure out. So it was sad that one arrogant guy could slow progress by decades, in spite of some of the other good work he did.

Someone finally counted the symbols and realized that there were about 800 of them. That was far too few to be "logographic" (with one picture per word, like Chinese, which has over 10,000 characters). And it was far too many to be "phonetic" (with letters that correspond to sounds, like English or Spanish). But it was in the ballpark of the number to be "syllabic" (with one character per syllable, like Japanese kana, which has symbols for "ka", "ke", "ki", "ko", "ku", "ma", "me", "mi", "mo", "mu", etc.).

It turned out to be a very artistic combination of syllable symbols and logographic pictures, woven in and through each other enough to make it kind of tricky, but very interesting.

When you've got an hour to spend, I would highly recommend the fascinating PBS documentary on "Cracking the Mayan Code", which appears to be available for free online at https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/cracking-maya-code/. (I also enjoyed the 2-hour version of this same material that appeared as a NOVA special, but I couldn't find that online.)

So it was cool to see stelae with glyphs on them, and to know that most of them could now be deciphered.

We walked along the East Causeway, passing by a major residential zone along the way.

A couple of us ran up to see this broken stele.

This replica of it has blank areas where the missing parts are. But you can tell that there's a guy with a big headdress.

And there are more glyphs down the side. David Stuart could tell you what they say.

East Acropolis: Temple of the Red Hands

Finally, we reached the wooden stairway that led to our final stop, which was Temple 216. It is called the "Temple of the Red Hands," because archeologists found red handprints within the temple.

This is the tallest temple in Yaxha. It is 38 meters (124 feet) tall. 

It was a bit of a hike up the stairs to get to the top, but the view kept getting better as we went up.

From the main platform of the temple, you could see Lake Yaxha in the distance.

We could also see down to other temples we had been to earlier, like the north temple of the North Acropolis, shown here.

The temple overlooks Plaza A, which has a palace on the far side.

A wooden platform surrounds the temple at the top.

Sharon spotted a King Vulture in a tree, which you might just be able to see in this picture taken with the Nikon with its 270mm zoom.

Here's what it would look like if it were closer. And flying. And being attacked by a giant human thumb.

(Reyes identified the King Vulture using his chart that he had with him).

The temple at the top of the pyramid has two main chambers in it, which I think are to the left and right in this picture. That was apparently where the red handprints were found that give the temple its name (I don't suspect they're still visible now). Such red handprints have been found in other Mayan sites such as Cobá in Mexico.

From the platform, we saw some more spider monkeys, and got our best look at them yet.

Like I said, Linette and I had always wanted to go to Tikal. But we hadn't even heard of Yaxha until we started planning the details of the trip and Sharon brought it up. We were glad we decided to add one more day and see it.

Here you can see Jared taking pictures of the monkeys while I try to get some video footage.

Yaxha was awesome.

The Dr. Seuss stairs split off so we could exit into Plaza A when we got to the bottom.

I went down first and took a picture of everyone up on the temple.

Then Jared took a picture of me down in the plaza.

While I waited for everyone else to come down, I spotted a toucan eating berries in the palace. This 40-second video shows it pop its head up and eventually fly up into a tree, by which time Sharon catches a little extra footage at the end.

Here is a silhouette of the toucan in the tree.

I was amazed at how the monkeys used their tails to support much of their weight so that they could safely reach way out and grab food to eat from the tree branches.

So cool!

Here is a 3-and-a-half minute video of the monkeys we saw throughout the day in Yaxha. We saw howler monkeys eating, and then monkeys swinging and leaping through the trees. One funny moment is when you hear Mikayla realize that the nearby pyramid is not that far away, and is not nearly as large as she thought.

Apparently we forgot to feed the Sienna. Fortunately, we were about done and started making our way back to the entrance.

Across Plaza A from the temple was a palace.

In this chamber we saw a bat hanging out.

Plaza of the Columns

On our way to the entrance, we walked through Plaza B, or "Plaza of the Columns" (Plaza de las Columnas) because of the open building there with seven columns in it.

Only the top part has been excavated, so the hill above is actually part of a tall structure, as shown in the illustration below.

This plaza had Stele 11 in it, which shows a warrior dressed as Tlaloc, a Mexican rain god.

Stele 11, Plaza B, Yaxha.

Here is a replica that is easier to see.

Replica of Stele 11

As we neared the parking lot, we saw a deer run by. It appears to be a brocket deer rather than the white-tailed deer we are used to in Utah.

The model of the site made a little more sense now that we had seen much of it.

Still, it took me a few hours when writing up this report for me to figure out what we had seen and where it was. I had to use GPS locations on some of our photos, in conjunction with the signs and some other maps I found. I ended up creating the map below in order to finally get it all straight.

We drove to a restaurant that Reyes recommended, and they served a variety of beverages, including a warm drink in a cute earthen mug, a red sweet drink called jamaica (hah-MY-kuh), and Coca-Cola with real sugar.

We all ordered the same chicken dish to make it easy on them.

Finally, the van took us back to Flores, and across the bridge to the little touristy island in the lake there.

We said good-bye to Reyes and thanked him profusely for taking such good care of us, and helping us to have such a great experience at Tikal and Yaxha.

We also had fun getting to know our driver, Byron (which happened to be the name of our boat driver at Lake Atitlán, too). Apparently he does beautiful wood carvings in addition to driving.

Reyes had told us about his girlfriend from England, and we were excited to get to meet her.

We were pretty sure that the elevator at the hotel could handle this many people at once.

The view from the hotel balcony was lovely.

Due to some faulty information from our AirBnB at Lake Atitlán, and our tight schedule afterwards, we had not really been able to do laundry yet on our trip. With hot, humid days and lots of hiking around, that was becoming worrisome. Linette and I walked around town with a bag of laundry to see if any of the laundry places would do it, but they were all about to close and didn't want to do a load for us, so we gave up and went to go join everyone else.

They were all hanging out by the lake. Here Jason is pretending to fall in.

The little island had a party atmosphere, with colorful things in the air and music playing.

Everybody went to get ice cream cones, which you could get dipped in chocolate, which I always appreciate.

Linette and I finally joined them, and I went down and ordered a cone, too, doing my best in Spanish to make sure I ended up with ice cream. I was kind of grumpy from the laundry fiasco, and a little grumpier still when half the chocolate fell off my cone, got my shorts all dirty (did I mention we couldn't do laundry?) and fell in the water, at which point dozens of little fish showed up immediately to eat it. But you can only be so grumpy while sitting in a beautiful place at the end of a wonderful day with great people while eating ice cream, so I chose to get over it.

We stayed out until it got dark, and then went and played a couple games in our hotel room before finally passing out.

In the final episode, we split up and visit mission friends of Jared and Mikayla, respectively, which was the original excuse for taking the trip.