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Published: August 4th 2009
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Palenque then.
Our last daytrip of the Chiapas, this was our last stop before we hopped on the nightbus to Merida. We'd already visited Agua Azul and Misol-Ha waterfalls over the day, accompanied by Sergio, the friendly Meridian, and Agnes, a Dutch tourism student having just done her exams in Cuba (why not?), who tagged along with us sharing stories. Palenque itself is just a town built to acommodate the growing amount of tourists who come to the area to see the Palenque ruins, and these were our goal of the day.
this is another maya site, special because of its situation in the jungle and its usage as a palace, rather than just as a temple site, and town. Its founder was a certain King Pakal, and his sons continued to do him honours by building the site up in his memory after he died , rather like the tradition of the great pyramids in Egypt. These are also different in that one has specifically been built around a tomb, like the Egyptian ones, although no other mexican pyramids do this. And again, just to be different from other Mesoamerican sites, this area seems to have history blended
with mythology, its kings becoming gods, and their timelines portrayed in carvings on the site stones. It's a little bit magic.
It's a shock to suddenly see it rising out of the green. The stone is so white, something I hadn't noticed so much at Teotihuacan and Monte Alban (white mountain - doh!) the first thing we see here is Temple 13, and I surprise everyone, including myself, by skipping up the 13 steps to the entrance of the inner tomb. Must be all the practise, and maybe the fact that all the greenery surrounding the place makes it look like a less threatening height. Inside it's clammy and dark, and we can see the stained red plain sarcophagus that housed a female body, nicknamed 'The Red Queen' because of this pigmenting. It's interesting to finally see a saecophagus in situ, as they're mostly in the museum on site (not covered in our trip, humph.)
We continue wandering arounf the site, marvelling at the detailed carvings and bizarre roof-combs. Annoyingly, there are vendors everywhere inside the site as well as outside, slightly taking away from the wonderful calm of the place. It would be wonderful to stay and
lie in the shade away from them, taking in the place properly. I spent a lovely ten minutes on my own sketching as Agnes and Jasmine climbed the Pyramid of the Sun in the Group of the Cross site - I smiled at a cheeky child trying to peek at my drawing, and listened to crickets (yum) singing in the longer grass. We could, walking further round, also hear howler monkeys in the jungle, roaring at eachother.
But, it was just too hot. Our heads were dizzy and we were practically panting for want of more water, so left the site a little early to get a drink.
Still, the place leaves its mark. Despite being more touristy that expected, palenque is still wonderfully quiet. Sergio, my Genesis-loving friend, had it right when he said that walking into palenque was like entering a cathedral; the place is filled with a respectful hush.
Palenque town, however, has no history, only shoe shops. We spent the hours before the bus at 10pm filling our faces with tacos, coconut icecream, drinking inevitable banana milkshakes, and looking at shoes. Jas has decided she does not like Mexican shoes as they're too
flat and 'Clarks'-like. We don't buy any. later we rock back up to the sticky and busy bus station, marvelling at the fact it's the smallest and least well-facilitated one we've been to, yet is in a town specifically for people to travel to and from on the way to other places. It deoes however have Mexican soaps on television. We've been watching these in awe. They are all filled with the whitest Mexicans possible, mostly with really bad hair, like the guy with the bizarre blonde mullet that doesn't even move, and all have something violent occurring in them at least one a minute. One we saw earlier in the milkshake cafe seemed to be about women whom all had awful things happening to them: one suddenly went blind, and bawled and dropped cups, and then another one's boyfriend had a crazy visitation from the Virgin Mary (very bad special effects, she seemed to have light coming out of her forehead). Another had some woman having her neck snapped, rather too realistically. Verty dramatic.
Also dramatic is our journey to Merida. Sergio had told us that it was a nice road, "straight as an arrow", to Merida. It
may have been, but we didn't notice as the bus seemed to stop every half hour, turn lights on, turn them off and keep going, then repeating it all. At one point we were inspected by armed guards, rather a shock to wake up to at 2am. by 6am we hadn't slept at all, and, even worse, had arrived.
Now, we knew that we couldn't actually check into our room until 12, but the Nomadas hostel had offered us some hammocks to sleep in until we could have the room. With the sun just coming up, this seemed like a great idea. I love the idea of hammocks - swaying in the breeze, completely relaxing. i also loved the idea of this hostel - it had RULES, like NO DRUGS and NO BONGOS AFTER 10PM (ok it didn't but almost as good and perfect after San Cristobal). We settled down to sleep off the awful journey, aching for the shower we planned to have after two days of travelling, that had to wait til midday...
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