Too Much Time at the Jungle Lodge
10 Apr 2021 by Amby
The Jungle Lodge was highly recommended to us by a friend and we booked three nights in their double room for $150. The selling point of the hotel is that it is the closest you can possibly be to Tikal National Park, just a five minute walk away. Indeed, while we did find the proximity to the park to be very convenient, we wouldn't recommend this hotel, especially not for three days. Maybe one day, max.
Sev and I had been living in hostels for over three months at this point so we were really looking forward to being in a real hotel with amenities. Well, that didn't happen. I guess we didn't read the website too closely. The hotel is in the jungle. Our room did not have a bathroom or air conditioning. Electricity and internet cut out at 10pm. Amenities included a restaurant, a billiards table, and a place to hang out in hammocks.
Maybe for the average tourist this would've been an exciting adventure, but I had already lived in a room with a bed in the jungle in Manuel Antonio for seven weeks and really wasn't in the mood for this more rustic experience.
The food was expensive for Guatemala (about $14 for a main course) and not particularly good. The servers tended to let you languish and the food often took an exceptionally long time to come out. When we were trying to get breakfast before heading to Flores for a day trip we waited nearly an hour for our food, and they got Sev's order wrong. Once we waited twenty minutes for iced coffee and began speculating that they didn't actually have iced coffee, but rather were waiting for regular hot coffee to cool down. Turns out, that was true.
The pool also wasn't very nice or clean and we didn't spend too much time there. We did end up playing a lot of billiards though because there was nothing else to do in the evenings.
Jungle Lodge offered shuttles from the airport and to their sister hotel in Flores for $25 each way, which we took advantage of and was convenient. The drive to Tikal from those locations is about an hour long.
If we were to advise someone on a trip to Tikal, I would recommend you spend your first night in Jungle Lodge, go to the park the next day, and then spend that night in Flores. Then spend part or all of the next day hanging out in Flores, which is a nice little city. Three nights in Jungle Lodge was way too much.
Also, we didn't actually take any pictures of Jungle Lodge because we found it so unremarkable and hadn't yet started this blog. The cars in the feature picture are from a nearby trail leading to Tikal.
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