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Guatemala's most popular Maya ruins lie at Tikal, but for real bragging rights you'll have to head deep into the Peten jungle, where you'll find the ancient city of El Mirador. Dating back to 300 B.C., it's about a century older and more than twice the size of Tikal. And while getting to Tikal is a simple matter of climbing into an air-conditioned vehicle, to get a glimpse of El Mirador's monumental temples you need to trek your way through the jungle - the nearest road is about 45 miles (75 km) away...
...trail proper starts at the village of Carmelita and the wise will arrive in dry season (November to May), when the rainforest is scorching but mosquito- and mud-free. The journey is utterly exhausting, of course, but your inner Indiana Jones will exult at your first glimpse of El Mirador - thought to be home to around 80,000 at one time. (See 50 authentic American travel experiences...
...breathtaking: thousands of ruins lie over an area of 23 square miles (38 sq km). Towering 236 ft. (72 m) over it all is the Danta pyramid, of greater volume than the Egyptian pyramid of Cheops and affording sweeping views of the lush green canopy. No trip to El Mirador is complete without a climb to this aerie of the gods - nor a wry contemplation from its summit of the long slog back...
...Salvador Rebels Take Power, Peacefully A political party largely composed of former leftist guerrillas swept into power in El Salvador's presidential election on March 15, ushering in a new era for a nation dominated for two decades by the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance. Mauricio Funes, a former television journalist and the first Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front candidate never to have served as a guerrilla commander, capitalized on voter disaffection with widespread poverty and soaring crime rates to win 51% of the vote. Funes, who styles himself as a political moderate in the mold of popular Brazilian President...
...right. In 1975 he and those teens and even preteens formed the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. It not only became a path out of the ranchos, it engendered a network of more than 100 similar youth orchestras around Venezuela that has come to be known simply as El Sistema (The System). It has served some half a million kids since the 1970s and is undoubtedly one of the most successful music-education projects of its kind in the world, emulated today as far away as Scotland. It has also produced its own international superstar: conductor Gustavo Dudamel...