On Friday, since none of the cave tours were running because of high water due to all of the rains, we decided to go for a stroll across the bridge to the sister town of Santa Elena. Not much there really but the bridges are neat.
They built the wooden bridge as a temporary structure while replacing the main bridge, but realized that the traffic flowed much better with 2 bridges so they kept both.
Then lunch at Mr. Greedy's Pizza and a walk up the hill to the San Ignacio Resort Hotel (how the other half lives) to see the Iguana Conservation Project, where they raise baby green iguanas to be released into the wild. Kind of neat to get "up close and personal" with them.
Then at night we had the best meal of the trip so far at Cenaida's, a little local place. We both had a wonderful cilantro grilled snapper. An excellent spot. And quite cheap. 
Then home to pack up a travel bag and an early night for our early morning (7:30) trip to Tikal in Guatemala. We had booked to just get a "ride along" with PACZ tours. Just one other couple was in the van, who were doing a tour with PACZ. We had booked to spend 2 nights inside the National Park at the Jaguar Inn and to take the Sunrise and Sunset tours the following day. The trip was uneventful but the border crossing is definitely interesting--everything you might expect from a land border crossing in Central America. And everything is structured so that as many people as possible get a slice of the tourist dollars. Got to our hotel, had an early lunch and wandered the site for a few hours, getting only mildly lost a few times due to the inaccuracies in our 10 quetzales ($1.50) map. Just an amazingly impressive site--the pictures don't really capture the scale of things-- and spread over an enormous site, with huge tracts of jungle in between many of the temples, pyramids and other structures. In the evening, when all the day trippers were gone, it was really quiet in the jungle. Since we were not really impressed with our lunch at our hotel--the "salad" that came with the panino was just iceberg lettuce with a vaguely ranch dressing on it-- we went over to find the slightly more upscale Jungle Lodge (it only took us about 4 tries to find it) and have dinner there. We both had a decent steak there, but it wasn't really worth the money (not for Guatemala, anyway) and it was a bit of a struggle, since none of the wait staff spoke any English (or so they said), trying to get them to understand that it was supposed to come with fries, not baked potato. Just when we had given up completely, a plate of fries magically appeared! Definitely not worth the effort. Then we had a really early night since our Sunrise Tour started at 4:00 AM.
The walk through the jungle in the dark was really wonderful, except for having to worry about the monkeys in the trees doing "target practice" in places. We walked to the far end of the complex, to Temple IV, and climbed the hundreds of steps (wooden staircase that has been built beside the temple) to the top. Then sat in complete darkness and waited for the jungle below to come to life. As is normal, there was no actual sunrise as there was a dense fog and mist covering the area, but listening to the howler monkeys roar and the birds call out as the light creeps over the canopy below is a truly magical experience. After sunrise, our guide, Jose took us on a tour through some of the back trails of the park (some of which we had managed to stumble on the day before, but others that we had missed) and explained a lot about the history of Tikal and told us about some of the plants and animals that we saw along the way. All in all, a neat way to start the day. Then back to the hotel for breakfast, a hot shower and a nap.   This afternoon, we head out for the Sunset Tour.