My wife and I splashed out for fully four nights in the Jungle Lodge, around the time of my birthday. We had been to Tikal 23 years before, and wanted to come back. The rooms are spacious and comfortable, as you'd expect, given the prices. The restaurant meals are OK, though the menu is rather boring. (The crepes are to be avoided--a gummy mess.)

The swimming pool is very nice, and hardly used at all by the guests. Indeed, there were very few guests at the Lodge when we were there, in late January. It's feast and famine for them, as I learned. They can accommodate about 80. The day we left, they were not only full with tour groups but had in fact overbooked and had to house these other people at their own expense in one of the other, local lodges. Then the day after that, the total number of guests in the Lodge was two (2!). The moral: if they tell you they have no room, try another day!

The Jungle Lodge is VERY expensive, no doubt about it. And knowing what I know now, I think I would have arranged things differently. The best way to get the most out of Tikal and the Jungle Lodge, I now think, would be to stay in Flores on night one, and come by mini-bus to Tikal early on the morning of day two. Stay night two (and if you can afford it, in terms of time and money, night three) in the Jungle Lodge. And on the next day, get yet more time in the ruins--check out at the Jungle Lodge is generously late--and take a mini-bus back to Flores in the late afternoon. If I had done things this way, I would have had just about as much time in the ruins and saved myself a few hundred bucks by staying in Flores at the beginning and end of the visit. (I hear that 'Los Amigos' is a very nice place to stay in Flores; a hostel, I believe.)

We loved having so much time in the ruins, not least because if you are staying nearby, you can get in early and leave late, or come and go at different times. The groups that troop by just troop by, and before long (at lunch time, let's say, when all the groups have arranged a lunch somewhere), you have the place virtually to yourselves alone, even on the Grand Plaza. We also loved having so much time because we liked getting out into the jungle on little-used trails, or short-cut trails that sometimes are not labelled. We left the area of Temple V, for example, and headed north on a circular path through the jungle that led us to a place they are only now excavating!,with some interesting carvings to be seen, and back up into the 'Lost World' Complex.

In short, there are trails and trails and trails, and so many things to see, especially if you like observing wildlife as well as the ruins and have a set of binoculars. We saw masses of spider monkeys, four great curasows, crested guams, oscellated turkeys, you name it. (Why do so few people carry binoculars? Beats me. They hardly weigh anything. I don't go anywhere without them, even to cathedrals--great for the stained glass.)

By the way: At least one of the guidebooks says that mini-vans go to the ruins 'all day.' Not true! The last one leaves Flores at about 13:00. And they come back to Flores at about 5:00pm.