The Wandering Chocoholic

Another brutally early morning wakeup today, for a daytrip into the remote parts of the Chiapas jungle to see more Mayan ruins.

Indy 500 Palenque

After some confusion where the non-English speaking guide tried to ascertain if we were indeed the group who booked, and us non-Spanish speaking tourists tried to figure out if this was indeed our tour, we set out in yet another sprinter van. We picked up two other couples in Palenque town, and then we were off to the races. Literally. We had about three hours on the bus to get to the first site, and the driver drove as though there was a prize for arriving first. A long line of buses and tourist vans made the same route, and our driver sped up around each turn, passing with abandon and swerving back into his lane just in time to brake for one of the speed bumps that are ubiquitous around these parts. Meanwhile, the other guy, who we’d falsely assumed was our guide, didn’t say a word about where we were going or, indeed, about anything at all.

We stopped at a crowded roadside breakfast buffet to eat, and continued on another hour or so to the national park entrance. The guy-who-wasn’t-a-guide took our lunch orders with a little translation help from the couple from Monterrey, and then we all got onto a small covered boat on the river.

Yaxchilan

The ruins at the Yaxchilan Archaeological Reserve are only accessible by riverboat, since no roads go there. We cruised about a half hour down the river, Mexico on one side of us, Guatemala on the other. (Some enterprising kids at the entrance were selling sharply marked up Guatemalan currency as a souvenir.)

We docked at the site entrance and disembarked, and our by-now-clearly-not-a-guide told us to return in two hours. So we set off to see some cool stuff. Luckily, for once there were English explanations on the plaques, so we could get some info about what we were seeing. Yaxchilan was a huge Mayan city, and much of it was remarkably well preserved. There were over seventy buildings at the site and of course we couldn’t see everything, but we focused on the main plaza.

The first ruin was a sort of dark labyrinth. We used phones and flashlights to navigate it, and we all jumped a bit at the enormous spiders and the flying bats.

We saw the ball courts where the Mayans played a sport that sounds a bit similar to soccer, except that the winners would have the dubious honour of being sacrificed to the gods. Um, I don’t think I would have tried all that hard to win, personally. We saw the housing ruins, the main plazas, and hiked up to the top of the temples. Mayans sure liked their stairs; the day was overcast and not overly hot, but it was the jungle and very humid so we got a good workout.

There was wildlife everywhere; we saw howler monkeys in the trees (well, we heard them first) and watched them swing from tree to tree for a while. You could get a real sense of what Yaxchilan must have been like in its heyday. The remoteness of the location meant the crowds were thinner and there were fewer people selling stuff. Overall I’d say the Palenque ruins are probably more spectacular, but the Yaxchilan ruins are in a better setting.

The return boat ride felt good after all that walking. We had a basic lunch at the onsite restaurant, and the piled back into the van to head to the day’s second site.

Bonampak

A van ride and a shuttle ride took us to Bonampak, the second of the two sites for today. Much smaller and more compact than Yaxchilan, Bonampak is famous for the remarkably well preserved rock art and paintings inside the ruins. It was quite crowded and each set of paintings had a long queue for one or two people to go inside at a time.

We saw two out of the three sets, and then decided to hike up to the temples and check out the rest of the site. The steps up were quite narrow and we had to climb them sideways, like negotiating a staircase in ski boots. The view from the top was great, though.

Having had our fill of ruins for the day, we took the return shuttle to the van for the drive back to Palenque. We picked up a couple of Italian guys on the way, who somehow invited themselves to dinner with our group. On the drive back, we spun some tunes off various people’s phones and sped back through the jungle.

Dinner and an almost-show

Back at the hotel, we met up with the others, who’d spent the day at Palenque ruins and at another waterfall. All I really wanted was a shower and an evening chilling out by the bar. But Milton had booked us a group dinner at a nearby restaurant that featured a fire show. So, world’s fastest cold shower and a mad dash later we jumped on yet another van to head back out.

Dinner was just okay; the menu was touristy and not particularly Mexican (I had pizza) and the food was mediocre, but the chocolate cake I treated myself to for dessert was delicious. There was a brief drumming and dancing show by some costumed performers, like the ones we’d seen in Mexico City. But by midnight the promised fire show had yet to materialize, and we were tired and facing another early morning departure, so we hopped a taxi back. Time for one more frozen strawberry margarita at the hotel bar before turning in for the night. I fell asleep to the sounds of the jungle.

Gao quote of the day: 
Gao: I saw god. He spoke to me. 
Us: What did he say?
Gao: I don’t know. I couldn’t understand him.