From cold to HOT! - Palenque ruins

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Palenque

A belly-churning bus ride through the winding mountain roads (not recommended for travel sickness) brought us into hot & humid Palenque from the fairly temperate weather of the mountain regions. Palenque is functional town with none of the colonial splendor of the others places enroute, but cheap accomodation, an easy going atmosphere, and the fabulous comidas corridas (3 course set menu) at Economico Trotomundos kept us happy. The main purpose of the town is as a base for tourists visiting the impressive pyramids just down the road, which we did the very next day.

The deep jungle setting gives the ruins a great atmosphere added to by the booming of the howler monkeys (but we didn't see any on our visit). Determined to fully explore the ruins despite the heat we sweated our way up and down the steep pyramid steps before taking welcome refuge in the museum's air conditioning, hosting an impressive display of the best preserved artefacts from the excavations (some beautiful, some grotesque)!

Our tour van (yes we sucuumbed for once) then took us onto Misol Ha (huge waterfall & great swimming spot) and the very disappointing Agua Azul: a series of small waterfalls and muddy swimming holes lined with countless tourist stalls and tenacious local girls determined to sell you bananas or banana crisps (chips!) - no gracias, no gracias, no gracias!

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