Indiana Jones, Tikal, and Me

By Alli Sinclair

At school, history was a bore. I mean, really, what's so interesting about studying dead people? But then a man with a battered hat, bullwhip, and a lopsided smile swaggered into my life. OK, it was onscreen, but still, Indiana Jones impacted the way I viewed the ancient world and literally, changed my life.

History became exciting. The people who lived in ancient civilizations had invented cool stuff. They made me realize we owe a lot to our ancestors for what we have today. And from the first moment I saw Indy swinging with his bullwhip across a chasm, I decided to go on my own crusade and discover ancient cultures.

One of the first that fascinated me was Tikal, one of the largest archaeological sites of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization. Located in the lush Petén Basin in Guatemala, this UNESCO World Heritage Site is one of the most impressive, mysterious places on earth. Thick jungle surrounds the ruins and howler monkeys chatter overhead, accompanied by the lyrical songs of 410 species of birds.

Bound by rivers, the park containing Tikal provides protection for ocelots, peccaries, toucans, and jaguars, just to name some of the exotic wildlife that live in the shadows of the jungle. So far, only 3,000 sites have been uncovered, and there’s a further 10,000 waiting for archaeologists to unearth. It’s been 50 years since the first dig at Tikal, and given the expanse of the area, it could take many lifetimes to fully discover the history and secrets beneath the soil. The Mayans believed in reincarnation, and I wonder if archaeologists wish it were true, so they could continue with their discoveries.

In its heyday, Tikal was home to 90,000 people and covered close to 75 square miles (120 square kilometers).  Because of its geographical location, the Mayans needed to conserve water, and management of this precious resource was vital for the survival of their city. Surrounded by wetlands, the Mayans devised reservoir systems for water diversion and storage, taking advantage of the seasonal rainfall. Roads were paved with lime-based cement, and flint was readily available, providing the Mayans with a valuable stone to make spear points, arrowheads, and knives.

In 700 B.C., Tikal was a commercial, cultural and religious centre but by the mid-4th century, Tikal had morphed into a city of people who’d adopted brutal methods in warfare under the rule of King Jaguar Paw. It is still not known exactly what killed off the Mayans but the latest report in National Geographic suspects climate may have had a lot to do with their demise. Yet another reason why learning about history is so important – we have the opportunity to change our ways based on what our ancestors did, or didn’t, do.

The most striking features at Tikal are the steep-sided temples rising above the jungle. The plazas have been cleared of trees and vines, and the temples are partially restored. At times, great distances exist between sites, and one can stroll under the dense canopy, take refuge from the sun, and enjoy the rich, earthy scents of the low-lying vegetation. Even at peak tourist season, it’s possible to escape the throngs, step back in time, and imagine what life may have been like.

Translated from Itzá Maya, Tikal means “place of voices”, and it’s easy to understand why. Whispers from the past echo through the deserted corridors and around corners. The skin prickles, and hair stands on end with the feeling of not being entirely alone.

It’s a long, hot climb to the top of the temples but the view is worth every rasping breath. Temples tower above the dense forest, dotting the vista, and the great height of the monuments can cause giddiness. Star Wars buffs will note Temple IV was used for a scene of the Massassi Outpost on the fourth moon of Yavin. Even 1970s Hollywood saw the allure of such a magical place.

Tikal is shrouded in mystery and magic. It begs to be explored and the mind wanders, trying to create theories of how people lived and died. Maybe all the questions will never be answered. But what I do know is Tikal will always be a place I treasure, thanks to an intrepid fictional adventurer named Indiana Jones.

Great Travelers in History: Mary Kingsley

1862-1900

By Jenni Gate

The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

Albert Einstein

Mary Henrietta Kingsley traveled paths few in history had ever explored in a time when women never traveled alone. Her journeys within West Africa expanded Europe’s knowledge of the region. Despite the inherent racism of colonialist England during the Victorian era, she became an advocate for the people of West Africa, often suffering ridicule as a result. Ignoring popular opinion and the expectations of society, Mary Kingsley paddled up little-known estuaries, walked through jungles, endured insects and reptiles, climbed mountains, and stoked fires on steamships. She met and befriended cannibals and missionaries alike, though it would be fair to say she preferred the former to the latter. She collected specimens of fish wherever she went, and took copious notes of her experiences. Her life was extraordinary but short.

Although she had no formal education, Mary Kingsley grew up in a house full of books about science and memoirs of explorers. Her father, a doctor and writer, traveled extensively throughout his own life. He contracted rheumatic fever on his last journey and returned home where his daughter cared for him until his death. She had nursed her mother for years. Coincidentally, both parents died within a few weeks of one another. Mary Kingsley, then age 30, decided to travel. She had a few academic connections through her brother, who was in law school at that time. Mary read what was known about Africa, asked her acquaintances for advice about traveling there and was roundly told not to go. She was repeatedly warned that it was too dangerous to go to West Africa.

Ignoring all advice, in 1893 she headed to Liverpool and boarded a ship for the Canary Islands, then pushed on to Sierra Leone. She arrived in West Africa with few possessions other than her high-necked shirts and floor-length skirts. Traveling the coastline by steamboat, she made her way past the oil rivers of Nigeria and on to Angola. 

Region traveled by Kingsley

It was the Victorian era, and women did not travel alone. Her shipmates assumed she was a missionary, and they were scandalized to find her still on board the ship after all the other missionaries disembarked at the Canary Islands. Even in Africa, local women continually asked where her husband was. She frequently went into dangerous areas alone, but most often journeyed with African men who helped her by cooking, translating, making camp, and finding pathways.

On her second journey to West Africa a year after the first, Kingsley traversed the rivers of the French Congo and climbed Mount Cameroon (the first English person to climb it). She met and befriended the Fan (or Fang as some sources name them) people, who were known to be cannibals. Exploring by steamboat and dugout canoe, paddling the swamps and streams of the Ogooué River in Gabon, she collected fish from the rivers and lakes to take back to the British Museum as specimens for study. She was thrilled to have this work taken seriously by the zoologist who helped sponsor the trip, Dr. Albert Gunther. At least three previously unknown species of fish were named after her.

Mary Kingsley documented travels on the rivers throughout West Africa. Her writing is evidence of a humorous and curious mind. In Travels in West Africa, she described the dangers of paddling through the tidewaters of African rivers in dugout canoes:

Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dugout canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake – a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along – and when he has got his foot upon his native heath – that is to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud – he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him – and you get frightened on your own behalf.

About encounters with insects in West African Studies, she wrote:

But it’s against the insects ashore that you have to be specially warned. During my first few weeks of Africa, I took a general natural historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history, it soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first. Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say, looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent of West African insects sting, 5 per cent bite, and the rest are either permanently or temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away – for that’s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. …

Of course you cannot ignore driver ants, they won’t go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them, namely, your going away yourself. 

And later in the same work:

While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; …it may be just as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up your legs. … The females and workers of these ants are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the hilt; they remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot pinchers.

After her second trip to West Africa, Kingsley toured England and spoke widely of her travels. She lectured on diverse topics from opening trade to Europeans in the region to the harm caused by missionaries converting native people and destroying whole ways of life in the process. Her opinions, formed from personal experience and observation, were controversial, sometimes creating a backlash in the press. Yet her work was influential in establishing perceptions of West Africa in Europe, and many of her observations are still relevant.

Volunteering as a nurse for the Second Boer War, Mary Kingsley returned to Capetown, South Africa in the late 1890s where she died of typhoid on June 3, 1900. In England between journeys, she had met Rudyard Kipling, striking up a friendship of mutual respect and admiration. In her work, Kingsley often quoted Kipling. At her death, Kipling gave her eulogy before her burial at sea with full military honors.

About her own writing, Mary Kingsley was humble and humorously self-deprecating, as the following story illustrates:

Alas! I am hampered with bad method of expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself up to tell you the truth. … It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the steamer thereon said “that people who said things like those about a poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and lost souls entirely.” We realised that our observations had been imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless, things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind, that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the “poor inanimate steam launch”; but it was when it came to his going ashore, gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say; and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the superior snow-whiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, “Sir, we cannot say things like that.” “Right you are, Miss Kingsley,” he said sadly; “you and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments.”

Mary Kingsley wrote two books, Travels in West Africa, published in 1897, and West African Studies, published in 1899, and she published several articles. Her writing was descriptive and full of detail about the surroundings and observations of the people she encountered. The humor infusing her writing makes reading her work still a joy today.

Silk Road Ruminations

By Beth Green

While the sun made its way down behind the far hills, I crouched by a rock wall in a long-destroyed temple in the middle of the JiaoheRuins and imagined.

What had happened in this place?

I examined the crumbling wall. Were these striations and grooves in the rock from the wind alone? Could an army have destroyed this, or was the destroyer the oldest kind of enemy--time?

Half-left houses, their dark doors and windows eyes in melting giants' faces, leer at us but the city doesn't seem sad. It's a playground, a carnival of history. Here, Silk Road caravans rested on their way east or west. A dozen empires ruled and fell. Religions waxed and waned. How many people lived here, died here, sat just here and had the same thoughts that I did?

A map and historical description near the park's gate describe Jiaohe's high-sided rocky island as 'a willow leaf' pointing north. The residents, who were ousted by the Mongols in the 13th century, lived far above the flowing waters, protected by high cliffs on both sides of the river. The main gates led visitors up through the residential districts to the government buildings and then out to the temple district on the very tip of the willow leaf . The monasteries probably housed tens of thousands of Buddhist monks, centuries before Islam made its way along the Silk Road to XinJiang. Each morning they’d look out over the river that branched on either side of their city and catch sight of caravans of traders leaving the oasis for the Taklamakan Desert to the south.

A version of this post was first published as part of a travel blog about Beth's life in China.

To read more, follow this link to Travelpod.com. 

Time Travels in Persia

By Heidi Noroozy

Don’t you wish you had a time machine?

I do. But until someone invents one, I have to travel back in time vicariously through books. One of my favorite time-travel novels is Blackout (and its sequel, All Clear) by Connie Willis. These stories, and the others in the series, feature time-traveling historians from the year 2060 who visit England during World War II to observe history in the making. Because they must blend in while observing the “contemps” (short for “contemporaries”), they take jobs and new identities: a shop girl on Oxford Street during the London Blitz, an American journalist at Dunkirk, and a maid in a country manor that has become a shelter for children evacuated from the bomb-ridden cities.

Clearly I was born many decades too soon. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel back in time and see history in the raw—and experience the events than never made it into the history books? But if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t travel back to the Blitz. (How crazy is that?) I’d set the dial for Persia and seek out some of the happening places in the ancient and not-so-ancient world. Here are my top 3 picks for a historical adventure:

A valley in the Alborz Mountains

My first stop will be in 1930, the year that the British explorer, Freya Stark, embarked on her famous, and often hazardous, trek through the Iranian back country. She was searching for the elusive Alamut Castle in the Alborz Mountains, stronghold of the Nizari Ismaili mystics, also know as the Assassins. (A few years later, she also traveled to Lorestan, a region in the Zagros Mountains, near the Iraq border. In The Valleys of the Assassins, Stark’s account of her Iranian adventures, she describes the area as “that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered.”)

It sounds ominous, I know. But along with the bandits, shifty-eyed tribal chieftains, and policemen whose “protection” bribes were only a few cents less than that those of the outlaws, Stark encountered the last vestiges of traditions that even then were starting to die out. She describes breathtaking landscapes, and that exuberant Persian hospitality that Iranians are still famous for today. Equipped with letters of introduction from authorities in Tehran, she charmed her way past the suspicious natures of people unaccustomed to trusting strangers and ended up documenting the Alborz range’s remote valleys for the Royal Geographic Society. Apart from witnessing history as it unfolds, it would be thrilling to watch this fearless adventurer in action.

The problem with time travel is that you can never say goodbye to your new friends. So after we trek back to civilization from the Alamut Valley, I’ll have to slip away to my time machine and set the dial (or maybe it uses a switch—who knows) for another era. I’m heading far into the past, 2,500 years to be precise, to the time of Cyrus the Great.

To blend in, I’ll need a job, so I’m off to join the chapars, those swift relay couriers who carried the mail throughout the vast Persian Empire, crossing from one end to the other in a matter of days. They rode from one chapar-khaneh (courier house) to the next, which were situated as far apart as a man could ride in a day without stopping to feed and water the horse. And at each stop, they switched to a fresh horse and continued the journey.

I’ll need to brush up on my horseback riding skills. But I’m surely in good physical shape now after trekking through the Alborz Mountains in 1930. Wouldn’t the Persian Pony Express be a great way to see a vast and prosperous empire? True, I’d probably take in little of the landscape, galloping across the country at top speed. But surely I’ll get to rest at the end of the ride and, with a little ingenuity, even sneak a peak into the mailbag. Maybe I’ll discover a story or two that never made it into the history books. To get an idea of what my life as a chapar will be like, check out the blog I wrote about Cyrus the Great’s postal service.

Entrance to the Isfahan Bazaar

After these two heart-stopping adventures, 17^th century Isfahan, my final stop on the way back to my own time, will seem almost dull. Or maybe not. It’s not for nothing that Isfahan is called nesf-e jahan (half the world). In the 1600s, after Shah Abbas I built his glorious capital in the Iranian desert, Isfahan became a major stop on the Silk Road. Its squares and bazaars were thronged with people from all over the world. The arts flourished with everything from carpet weaving and miniature painting to bookbinding and calligraphy to tilework and the lovely architecture that still characterizes the city today. Maybe I’ll even get a glimpse of the silk, gold, and silver Polonaise carpets that Abbas commissioned to promote trade with Europe.

What I’d really like to find out, though, is whether there was a tunnel beneath Naghsh-e Jahan Square, connecting Shah Abbas’s Ali Qapu Palace to the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque. A guide at the mosque once told me it existed at one time, but I’ve never been able to confirm the truth of his words. It is said that the mystery passage was built to allow the shah’s wives to pass from the palace to their female-only house of worship without being seen. Since I’m unlikely to get into the palace (or the mosque) to find the tunnel, I’ll have to suss out the secret from the gossips at the bazaar.

So that’s my whirlwind tour of history. What about you? If you had a time machine, where would you go?