El Mirador

The northern part of Guatemala, Petén, is a big, low jungle basin with not very much in it - a handful of towns and villages, a lake (Petén Itzà) and Tikal, an ancient Mayan city which has been uncovered from the jungle and reconstructed to form a majestic destination for adventurous tourists.

If you go to the town of Flores, on the western shore of lake Petén Itzà, and then drive a hour further north, you reach Carmelita, a village of wooden houses scattered around a large flat area of cleared forest. From Carmelita you can walk north-east for two days through the forest, until you reach El Mirador, a Mayan city which like Tikal was mysteriously abandoned by the Mayans around 150AD. Unlike Tikal, though, El Mirador is still hidden by the forest, yet to be fully uncovered, and not visited by more than a handful of archaeologists.

It's a 40 mile hike from Carmelita to El Mirador. There were five of us: Mads, Casey, Maynor (our guide from Carmelita), and his brother, and two horses to carry everything - food, water, hammocks and mosquito nets. The first day we walked 15 miles, sometimes on paths through the forest, sometimes along dry river and lake beds with the coarse volcanic soil crunching under our feet. We spent the night at Nasciamento, a camp on a bend in a river. Our beds were hammocks under mosquito nets hung between trees and as the sun went down we lay listening to the birds calling to each other across the treetops, the almost unearthly noises of the howler monkeys, and the whirring, clicking, buzzing insects that filled the forest.

The next day we woke when the sun came up around 5.30am and by 6.30am we had started the second day's hiking, 25 miles through deeper jungle, where the path was often little more than a 20cm gap through the undergrowth. We saw toucans and spider monkeys in the trees; the spider monkeys defended their territory by leaping through the upper branches of the trees, 20m above our heads, screaming and shouting with unmistakably human body language.

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