The following morning we intended to see the sunrise from Temple IV, but when the alarm went off it was raining. I woke again a few hours later to see DC standing rapt at the window, watching hummingbirds. Not one, not two, but a half dozen hummingbirds drinking nectar from the deep golden clustered blossoms of the bushes next to our bungalow. They were larger than the ruby-throated hummingbirds I know from the Mountain West, not quite as brightly colored, with relatively long black and white tails that seemed to anchor their bodies in the air as their heads bobbed in and out of adjacent blooms in each cluster. They were within a meter or two of our open louvered window, and the very noticeable buzz of their wings as they zipped from place to place reminded me of the sound of Star Wars light sabers.

I had Star Wars on the brain because that was the “carrot” for getting the kids out of bed at 4:00 a.m.: getting to see the view used in the Stars Wars Episode IV: New Hope, where the Millenium Falcon flies low over Temples I, II, and III as it approaches Temple IV and the hidden rebel base on the fourth moon of the planet Yavin. I remember the look on their faces the first time we told them, as we watched the movie, that that was Guatemala: disbelief, pride, joy, excitement. Can we go there, right there?!? You bet.

That first morning’s rain was exactly the reason we had booked two nights in Tikal, no matter that it was expensive, just so we’d have two shots at sunrise on the fourth moon of the planet Yavin. If you don’t stay in one of the park lodges, you can’t get in early enough to get to Temple IV by sunrise, because the park gates don’t open until 6:00 a.m. The archaeological site is another 20 minutes past the gates, there’s an hour’s hike to the base of Temple IV, and then the climb.

The hummingbirds were our bellwether; we decided the rest of the day held great promise, so after a leisurely breakfast at the lodge we packed ourselves lunch and planned to head out to the Grand Plaza. At the lodge desk we were approached by a distinguished-looking Guatemalan gentleman with good English and offered an archaeological tour, to include discussion of the history, politics, and agricultural methods of the Classic Maya, not just their architecture. We’ve taken more paid tours on this trip than is our norm, feeling that the Guatemalan economy is failing many of the people who are working hard to make a living. We’ve let our shoes be shined and overpaid for it, tipped generously, haggled less than we might have. (Though haggling is a respected art form and most vendors appear deflated if you pay the first price they quote you – possibly because they think they could have gotten more if they’d only started higher, but for the most part because the haggling gives some personal engagement to the transaction.) So we hired the gentleman and headed to the ruins.

One of the most fascinating things I learned from our guide is that the Classic Maya quarried local stone for their buildings and then sealed the bottoms of the quarries to form reservoirs, connected by an intricate system of covered sluices. (In karst terrain, there is very little surface water, which would have been a major problem for households, royal and otherwise.) They used the reservoirs not just as a household water source, but also to grow water lilies, acidic plants that were harvested to be used as soil amendments in the poor alkaline soils of the karst flats they farmed. Many of the buildings are bordered by sluices, which then serve as gutters to direct runoff to the reservoirs, and many of the enclosures have drainholes to direct runoff as well. Their water and agricultural systems were very finely tuned.

We walked, talked, and listened through the east half of the site. The paths are wide, raked where the footfalls of tourists do not keep the dirt packed down, and the immediately adjacent jungle has been thinned, I presume to discourage snakes. The paths cut through short sections of jungle and then open out into clearings, where different kinds and groupings of buildings have been excavated and partly restored. Tall, steep mounds of tumbled stones mark structures not yet excavated, visible at every turn. There are no fences, few restraints to keep visitors from wandering into the jungle or up onto most of the structures; some of the stone stairs have been roped off, but for most of these, steep wooden staircases have been built for access to the tops of temples and other buildings.

Within the 500 acres of the officially designated archaeological site lie the core buildings of the Classic Maya city’s ceremonial center, including at least six large temples, several palaces, six royal ball courts, hundreds of burials of important personages, hundreds of altars, and hundreds of stela (six- to ten-foot-tall carved stones erected as monuments commemorating events as diverse as the decapitation of a prisoner and the beginning of a new year). There are an estimated 3,000 buildings identified in the central city, only a few hundred of which have had even an exploratory tunnel excavated, most of which have not been mapped; by some estimates there are 10,000 more buildings yet to be discovered in the outer edges of the city. Tikal city is estimated to have had about 100,000 residents at its height, with several hundred thousand more in the adjacent settlements. For over 600 years Tikal was the most powerful city in the entire Mayan world, which then had hundreds of cities and some speculate as many as eight million people spread across what now comprises all or large parts of five nations (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador).

Our guided tour culminated at the north end of the designated archaeological site, at Temple IV, where our guide expected us to join him in meeting the lodge utility truck for the afternoon shuttle back. He might have spent enough time with us by then to have guessed that we were far too interested in the ruins themselves to go back that early (only 1:30), or to go back any way other than on foot; but he did look surprised that we thought 20 minutes on top of Temple IV was too short and when we said he should catch the shuttle without us.

We climbed the wooden stairs to Temple IV, at 230 feet the highest of the buildings at Tikal, because the stone staircase was roped off. Possibly they consider the steps too mossy and slick, now that the reconstructed stones have had sixty years of exposure to the jungle, too likely for visitors to slip and fall. Possibly the erosion potentially caused by the footfalls of a million and a half visitors annually is considered unacceptable by those in charge of preserving the site. I do clearly remember climbing the stone stairs of Temple II in 2000 (no longer allowed): it was steep, each tall step requiring a leg lift (not simply a 20x version of the stairs at your local library); going down was difficult and scary because of the unevenness of the stairs and the balance required to lower myself down each long, narrow step. The wooden stairs have double handrails and are MUCH easier to climb, though some of them are more like inclined ladders than stairs.

We so loved the view from Temple IV that we stayed at the top for over an hour, even the kids. The “top” is defined as the narrow shoulders of the pyramid, on which there is perched a room (fenced off) capped by a tall stone “comb” with carvings and that during the Classic Maya period was also kept plastered and painted as a sort of an announcement billboard. On the top of the comb there is a pair of falcons nesting. We thought at first they were peregrine falcons, but we now know them to be Orange-breasted Falcons. The smaller male flew to a naked branch in a tree not far from us and near our eye level, then spent a half-hour there preening and calling back and forth with his mate, who we could just see thirty feet above us on the top of the comb.

From Temple IV that second day, we hiked home to our lodge taking a swing through the northern ruins and back a different way than we came, arriving to our bungalow happy campers. So happy, in fact, that when we were greeted by thick fog at the 3:45 a.m. ring of our alarm the next morning, not one of us suggested we give up trying to see that Star Wars sunrise view, or that we needed a guide to find our way. We hiked the full hour to Temple IV (with flashlights, wary of snakes) and climbed the stairs to find three people there ahead of us, but within minutes of our arrival they started talking among themselves about being cold, and they left. In darkness, we waited.

The fog never cleared, and though it certainly did get light we did not see a sunrise. But it was magical to be there, to hear the howler monkeys waking up and announcing their plans for the day, to talk quietly among ourselves, our little family alone in the world on the top of a thousand-years-old jungle temple. Birds in adjacent treetops started muttering and chattering as the sky brightened, and the orange-breasted falcon called out and then flew circles above us, eventually alighting on the same bare branch as the day before. He preened, and called, and the female joined him, and they mated there in front of us. We didn’t matter to the falcons or the howler monkeys, and neither anymore did the god-kings matter who commissioned such a temple and ruled such a city as lay in ruins around us.

We stayed on top of Temple IV for nearly three hours, joined near the end by a British birding couple who were quietly excited about the falcons still on their branch. It started to rain as we reached the bottom of the stairs, and instead of taking DC’s suggestion to wait out the rain under the shelter house there, the children voted to hike in the rain. An hour later, as we walked squishily past the gatehouse, the guards gaped at our dripping children singing and skipping ahead of us. DC and I smiled and waved; there are few times that I have felt certain that we’ve done something really right in raising our children, but that morning was certainly one of them.