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La Ruta Maya (cont.)

EL REMATE, LAGO PETÉN ITZÁ, GUATEMALA
After an uneventful border crossing into Guatemala we found El Gringo Perdido, a cluster of classy, yet primitive, palapa huts a few miles outside the town of El Remate on Lago Petén Itzá, a vast body of water surrounded by hills and palm trees. Lacking electricity and other guests, El Gringo Perdido felt bewitched—especially at night when the caretaker lit the oil lamps and tiki torches. After a day's stay, we decided that El Gringo Perdido is the ultimate base camp from which to laze in the sun, swim, rent bikes and kayaks, and explore nearby Tikal, so we settled in.

The next day we drove to Tikal, 30 minutes north of the lodge and the Manhattan of the ancient Maya world. The 222-square-mile park was once home to nearly 100,000 people, boasting the highest population of artists, architects, jewelers, astronomers, and warriors, along with the infrastructure to keep them all happy: ball courts, sweat baths, and brilliantly painted royal palaces. No one knows why the 2,700-year-old site was abandoned in a.d. 900, which adds to its mist-shrouded allure.

Le Gringo Perdido felt bewitched—especially at night when the caretaker lit the oil lamps and tiki torches.

On our first trip up the dozens of precipitous steps of Tikal's Temple of the Masks in the Great Plaza, we were clipped by a birder hauling a telescope large and powerful enough to see life on Mars. He huffed past us stammering, "I...I...I...just saw an orange-breasted falcon!"

We were witnessing a moment of birding nirvana. The orange-breasted falcon is one of the world's most rare and reclusive birds of prey—reportedly there are only 19 in all of Guatemala and Belize. At the top of the temple, the man offered us a gaze through his telescope. Sure enough, sitting in the crux of a ceiba tree was a smallish, orange-breasted bird with a menacing beak that looked like it could fillet small feathered creatures. Impressive, to be sure, but I failed to muster the passion radiating from our new friend and was far more impressed with the eerie hollow sounds that radiated from the bowels of the temple as we stomped back down the stairs.

Back in El Remate, we ate dinner at Casa de Don Juan, a two-story restaurant on the shores of Petén Itzá. Our host, Juan Chamorro, prepared us a special delicacy.

"They call it 'The Royal Rat,'" he told us, producing a platter of tepesquintle, an oversize rodent with a massive butt. Surprisingly, the varmint tasted quite similar to my grandma's pot roast. I savored every bite until Juan let it slip that the beast is nearly endangered. Poachers, he added, get fined hundreds of dollars if caught trafficking in tepesquintle. I choked down my last few bites, which suddenly began to taste like rat.

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