Nir and I made the short ride from Flores to the Mayan ruins at Tikal.
Tikal, in the middle of the jungle, is the most stunning set of ruins I have yet seen.
The day involved a *lot* of stairs:
It rained. It rained a lot. From the top of the temples we could hear the rain approaching from the distance, striking the foliage below, gradually growing louder until BAM we were suddenly under a deluge.
On the plus side, the rain scared off almost everyone so we pretty much had the park to ourselves. It wasn't too hard to imagine the first European explorers stumbling across the ruins.
During its heyday, Tikal would have been pretty much entirely deforested. Probably in a fairly large radius around the city, too. Because of this, I have a hard time imagining what it would have been like. The jungle quickly reclaims its own.