Things that make me nervous about our trip to Tikal

This Friday Amanda and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.  It took us a bit but we eventually decided we should go on a trip and to somewhere neither of us had been before.  I've always wanted to see ancient ruins and love Starwars.  Enter Tikal, one of the most famous Mayan sites and home to the rebel alliance's Yavin 4 base.

I don't travel much.  I don't like traveling much.  I don't even like thinking about travelling.  It’s not that I don't want to see exotic places and do interesting things around the world.  I just don't want to deal with any of the headache of getting there or any of the less than desireable things I might encounter along the way.

I'm pretty good at negative visualization, what some people probably call worrying.  I’ll call it being prepared, though it still feels an awful lot like worrying.  I guess it's how I deal with the unknown.  I can't predict the future but I can take what I know and think up the worst possible scenario.  Here's my list of things that are making me a bit nervous about our, I'm sure going to be really great, impending trip to Tikal.

Flying

I have a secret (I suppose now public) mild fear of flying.  I don't really have a problem once we are in the air.  I get that there is real actual physics holding us up.  I just don’t like the sensation of taking off or the several moments of negative visualization of all of the real actual physics that could take the plane down to the ground.  Its thoughts about these same physics that also make landing less than enjoyable for me.

We have four take offs and landing in the trip getting to Flores (the nearest airport to Tikal) alone.

People fly everyday, even in less industrialized countries, and most of the time nothing terrible happens.  The odds are good, at least.

Typhoid

Yeah sure I took some pills willfully giving myself this disease to prepare my body ahead of time.  But those pills are only 80% effective.  Either way I need to be careful to eat hot food and avoid the tap water.  Good news is if I get typhoid I should be in the states by the time I start feeling it.  Apparently it’s not that bad with treatment.  I still don’t want.  I might be quarantined on an island somewhere.

Being struck by lightning

The forecast in both Flores and Tikal call for thunderstorms literally our entire trip.  I’m not terribly excited about climbing to the top of temples towering over rainforest canopy when there are lightning strikes all around.

Violence

In the years after Guatemala’s civil war it was pretty common for armed men to attack busses and other and other seemingly random acts of violence.  While by all accounts today Guatemala is a much safer place, especially around Flores and Tikal, it is still not the safest place in the world.  Guatemala City is among the 50 most dangerous cities in the world (although Baltimore and St. Louis have higher homicide rates than Guatemala City).  Most of this violence revolves around the drug trade.  So, as long as you avoid the city and the Mexican border, which we are, you should be safe.

Despite all these unknowns I am very excited to visit a place so different from mine.  All recent information I can find about travelling to Guatemala suggests that it is a beautiful country and is not terribly dangerous.  Also, I spend the vast majority of my time within walking distance of the very spot I was born.

There is a big world out there.