Palenque ruins, Mizol Ha, and Agua Azul


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North America » Mexico » Chiapas » Palenque
October 29th 2010
Published: November 7th 2010
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The bus journey to Palenque went ok. We were a little apprehensive due to all the negative reports we had heard about night buses in Mexico, but it wasn't too bad. At one point we were stopped at a police check point in the dead of night, in the pitch black, in the complete middle of nowhere. A policeman got on the bus and flashed a spotlight over all the passengers. Upon spotting our white faces he came over and demanded 'passport' to each of us. He then inspected both of our passports for a long while before handing them back to us. We next saw him wake up some Asian people behind us to ask for their passports. After rummaging in the overhead compartments the policeman got off the bus and left us to continue our journey. We let out a sigh of relief as we had heard of some policemen being corrupt and demanding fines from passengers.

We arrived in Palenque around 6am. The bus terminal was small but fortunately not dead, so we decided to sit and wait there until the sun came up. We took the opportunity to freshen up in the dirty bathrooms, and then covered ourselves in 100% DEET as we would be going into the jungle today, and particularly Katie had suffered with bites up until now. As we were sitting in the station a man from a nearby tour agency approached us, offering us the tour that we had come to Palenque to take. We had not yet booked it, so we inquired about his prices. There are hundreds of tour agents in Palenque offering the same tour, so we knew we had a bit of flexibility. We had met some girls from Lyon in Playa who had taken the same trip for 350 pesos per person, which we thought was a fair price, so we inquired whether this was his price. The man agreed the price and wrote out our vouchers for travel. However, after completing the forms he said: 'you pay yourselves for ruins admission'. We were like, 'Urm, no'. The whole point of this trip was that it is one price all in. He then said that he would cover that cost, and we would just have to pay for national park entrance. We refused and walked out of his shop; eventually he called us back and agreed to 350 pesos all in. When we were on the trip we found that everyone had paid completely different prices for the trip, and had different admissions included. They really will charge whatever they think they can get out of tourits. There are no fixed prices anywhere, and there are different prices for Mexicans.

The first leg of our tour was a trip to the Palenque national park, where there are some Mayan ruins. We had around 3 hours to look around the ruins and walk through the forests. These were our favourite Mayan ruins so far on the trip. There was so much more to see than at Chichen Itza, around every corner there was another temple or pyramid. There was a lot of variety and the ruins were really big and impressive, and set amongst such beautiful scenery. Most importantly for us however, you were able to climb up and into the ruins. We had a really interesting morning, looking around the park, and climbing to the top of the ruins.

To exit the park we followed the signs which lead us through a forest. As we neared the trees we started to hear really loud roars, like there was a pack of lions or something. We were really apprehensive about continuing, and decided to ask a worker what the noise was. He said 'monkey'. We were like 'yeh, right'. We had no other option other than to follow the signs to the exit so we continued. We waited for some other tourists to catch us up, to increase our chances of survival if there really was something deadly in there! It turned out the noise actually was monkeys; an Israeli man on our trip dressed like Steve Irwin told us all about them, and found it very amusing to make animal noises to attract their attention. The jungle walk was actually really nice after we were assured there were no lions. There were more Mayan ruins within the forest, and some beautiful waterfalls.
On our original minibus there had only been five of us; us two, an Israeli couple, and a lawyer from Washington DC. We had assumed this would be our tour group for the day, but we were wrong. As we sat aboard our onwards bus, it continued to fill. The driver eventually mananged to cram 19 people into a bus made to seat 9. None of us were expecting this, and it was quite funny. The icing on the cake was when the driver produced an improvised seat from up front which was a makeshift bench that he forced into the aisle space. None of us really knew much about our destination so we spent the journey chatting. We were really high up at this point as Palenque is in the mountains. The roads were extremely windy, with no barracades separating us from the vast drops less than one metre from the side of the van. The driver took the hairpin bends at the speed of light, and when we reached our destination we were just in time for Luke to hop out and be sick. Nice. We had warned him that Jeffrey Archer wasn't worth it but he'd refused to listen.

When we reached our second destination we were impressed. Misol Ha is a beautiful waterfall which you are able to walk behind. We took the opportunity to do this; the cooling mist was a nice relief in the humidity. We only spent around 20 minutes here, and then were back on the bus to our final destination. Our final destination was Agua Azul, the place we had been most excited about visiting in Mexico, and the real reason we had come to Palenque. Agua Azul is a number of shallow waterfalls which are famous for having clear blue water that you are able to swim in.

Our experience was however nothing short of a complete disappointment. To start with, the journey was even more hair-raising than that to Misol Ha. Along the way we were stopped by what we were told were Zapatistas. This is a Liberation Army that operates within the Chiapas state in Mexico, and from what we understood they stand for independence in Chiapas, and are at war, protesting for their independence from the national government. We had heard from another traveller who had carried out some research that this group did not like tourists in their state; they like to remain as Mexican as possible. From our experience however, they were not against taking money from tourism, as at a number of points along the windy narrow roads men (some in balaclavas) would hold a rope across the road preventing traffic from passing. Our driver would have to pay them some money, or sometimes even get off the bus to speak with these people before we would be allowed to pass. It was at this point that two dutch girls on our minibus told us they had been held at knifepoint on a similar road on the way into Palenque from San Cristobal two days before, by an armed man in a balaclava. We were taking the same route later that evening, so we were a little disturbed by this news. It was no longer corrupt police we were fearing. On the plus side she told us no one had been harmed.

When we arrived at Agua Azul we were harassed by around 30 children trying to sell us bananas. They were really persistent and it became really annoying. There were also so many stray dogs here; so many more than we'd seen anywhere else in Mexico. Everywhere in Chiapas so far we had experienced being charged to use the bathroom, and this was no exception. To use a stinking hole it was 5 pesos each which was ridiculous when there wasn't even any water. When we finally made it to the falls the water was dark brown like dirty dish water. We would have been more inclined to swim in the lake at Elmdon park. We were told that this was because they had experienced heavy rains the night before. We were really tired as we had had barely any sleep on the night bus, so we opted out of walking round the dirty falls. We decided to try and get something to eat as we had not eaten all day apart from breakfast (with nowhere to buy food on the trip). The restaurants were all severely overpriced with the locals all catching onto the fact that they could charge triple at an attraction like Agua Azul. We sat down to eat in an open restaurant where we spent the whole meal surrounded by stray dogs that even Katie eventually got really annoyed with. The worst part about the meal was that the children would not leave us alone. They would not stop trying to sell oranges and bananas and crisps and pancakes and whatever else, and they could see we were already eating. We felt sorry for them that they were having to sell on the street, but we had a strong feeling that a number of them belonged to the men who owned the restaurant, and they didn't need to be doing it.

There was a big tour of French people who kept talking to the children and encouraging them into the restaurant. They learnt their lesson however, when one man who had accidentally forgotten his camera and claimed to have left it on his chair, came back to find it had vanished. Luke thought they may have found it on their bus but we were not too sure. When the table cleared children would run over and take all of the empty bottles and left overs. One parent came in to sell her wares too, but we were still eating. Katie had barely finished her meal and the lady made her child request the chicken carcass from her plate. They scooped it into a bowl and hid it under a blanket, meanwhile we talked about how they might use it, fearing the scrapings are probably used to fill the tacos that we so love.

Our trip was to end in San Cristobal de la Casas, so we had a connecting bus. We had been told in the tour agency in the morning that we would arrive there at 8.30pm. We had yet to book any accomodation but we had the name of a hostel we wanted to stay in. However, it seemed we would not be arriving anywhere near 8.30 as our bus didn't leave until 6pm. We tried to tell our bus driver we were unhappy but it was to no avial. We desperately need to know some Spanish for these types of altercations. The journey to San Cristobal took 5.5 hours in total, up some very windy roads in the pitch black. Katie spent the whole time with her nose pressed against the glass, with sweating palms, fearing for her life. However, we made it there safely, with no disasters.



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7th November 2010

AHHHH
A few near death experiences then!! It's all part of the fun =) Oh darling katie, where is your tan!!! haha, keep us updated ^_^ xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
26th November 2010

amazing sceneries
it looks beauuutiful there! xxx

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