On The Road

While I’m waiting for that passport to arrive, I’ve been traveling on the web instead of on an airplane or train. Which, if you are like me, gets a little old after awhile. Sure, I want people to come to my virtual web space and read my stories to research their next adventure, but as a writer, it is sometimes painful to read about other people’s trips. I’m always critiquing the grammar, the sentence structure, the cropping of the photographs, and sometimes even the experiences.

Last night I did something different. I traveled, through a lecture, to the Mirador Basin in Guatamala given by the archaeologist who has been directing the work and excavation in the area for over twenty years, Richard Hansen, PhD. I’ve sat through many art history slide shows and lectures in my life, but it is really a wonderful experience to sit through those given by someone who is actually working on site and excited about the work they doing. I brought my notebook so that I could take notes for this posting, but he talked so fast I just wanted to listen.

For those of you familiar with this web site, you already know that I got hooked on Maya antiquities while chasing myself around The Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico a few years ago. So it’s no wonder that I want to do some more exploring and expand my quest for lost culture that area.

So, where is it, you may ask? The Mirador Basin sits in the Petén region of Guatamala in an area that now holds the last existing virgin rainforest in Central America. Tikal is to the south and Mirador extends north, over the border and into Mexico. Currently, the only way into the area is by hiking for two or more days through mud, jungle, snakes, and mosquitoes, or to take a very expensive helicopter ride.

Besides rainforest and wildlife, there is one other spectacular find in the Mirador Basin. More than one ancient Maya city and by far the largest collection of them in one single area. While the ancient sites on The Yucatan Peninsula range from the beginning of the Classic period, around 300AD to about 900AD, to the end of the Post-Classic period, around 900AD to 1500AD, the sites being uncovered in Mirador are much older, and in an archaeological way of speaking, they are from a period of time, centuries in fact, before Christ.

It takes a minute or two to get used to Dr. Hansen’s pace of speaking. But after getting in the flow, I get caught up in his unflinching excitement about the place. He showed us slides and talked of the wildlife that live in the area and in the rainforest, including jaguars, reptiles, and birds. Then his talk moved toward the archaeology, the buildings and the artwork within them. I can picture the place, unkempt jungle, rugged in comparison to the sites already developed for tourism in The Yucatan - like the smaller and newer sites of Chichen or Uxmal, which as massive as those sites are, only give a hint at what lies underneath a layer of dirt in the Mirador Basin.

I picture in my over imaginative head a kind of Indiana Jones appeal to visiting the area. The last place of archaeological jungle adventure. Me and my camera, photographing every inch of every new find. Or just hand me a trowel and a dusting brush and I’ll sit for hours in the jungle heat and humidity, dusting off the past … For Dr. Hansen, it’s more about politics and economics than it is about adventure. It’s about gaining people’s interest in the area, to save the cultural heritage and ecosystem. Because of the location of The Mirador Basin, this area, the ancient sites, and the wildlife in it are, as he points out, threatened by advancing development (to put it nicely), artifact looters and poachers that do not have Mirador’s best interests at heart.

After the lecture I went up to ask him a question, leading in with a description of my interest … about how even though I studied art and photography, and art history, I had never been held captive by the Maya, or had never really known anything about them until that trip to The Yucatan a few years back and that I now found them fascinating. He laughed. A genuine laugh, the kind of laugh that meant he knew exactly what it is like to get hooked.