Day 5 - Welcome to Jungle Part I

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Only got a couple of hours sleep last night – my fault, really. I said to Ian, “Do you want me to save you a sleeping pill mate? I’m gonna take as many as I can. I don’t even want to wake up.” Ian, being a pharmacist, gave me two and confiscated the packet. He didn’t get much sleep either so I couldn’t steal them in the night.

We stayed in the jungle area slightly outside Palenque, called El Panchan – “a travellers favourite”, which usually means it’s full of people juggling on unicycles, wearing loose fitting cotton slacks and matting their hair some more. With Ian’s hat and my rollies, we’d fit right in. Paid £15 for a hut with a paper roof and it even came with a pet frog in the bathroom.

Plan was to do Palenque in two days with an overnight bus to Tulum on the second day. With heinseit, it is doable in one day but we couldn’t have handled another bus journey that night. Instead, we spent most of our day ambling around Palenque’s Mayan ruins in the jungle. Lots of temples, a palace and some ancient residences. Everywhere you turned, there was another potential google-image shot but as Ian poetically noted, “No picture could do this place justice.” In other words, you had to be there. They discovered recently that Mayans actually fought each other. Palenque had almost been wiped out by one of these in-battles. Then in 625AD, Emperor Pakal, guided it back to power and stated the repair and expansion of city, whose ruins you can see today. There were stone murals of captured rival leaders who’d been sacrificed – also seen in Aztec culture, proving that Mayans and Aztecs did share knowledge, at least. It was all very interesting…but all I could think about was how red my big schnoz was going to be by the end of the day, as Ian, being new to the jungle, thought it was going to be cloudy all day and hadn’t brought the sun cream.
We had dinner and beers in Palenque town. You could tell we were in Mayan territory now – the Mayans are distinguishable by their characteristic hooked noses and round features. Even though Palenque’s economy is based on tourism, there weren’t many tourists and we were about to find out why…

Showered and ready to go out for más cervezas, the most rain we’ve ever seen started pelting our paper roof. Without a torch, suitable clothing or any idea where the bar was in the dark, we decided to wait for a bit before heading out.

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