6: Palenque - Mexico

Days 22-25 (4th-7th Nov): Palenque Ruins, Date Changes, and Giant Waterfalls

(Written just around the 10th Nov, sorry for just publishing!)

So now its the start of the 4th week and time to do things again after having a couple of days not doing a lot!

 

 

The sunday (4th) we went to Palenque Ruins. We started off in the museum where a lot of the artifacts now are and saw the jade death masks and jewelery that they put over their dead royals, and some amazingly detailed carvings and hieroglyphs. Their hieroglyphs are really crazy and weird looking, to write anything must have taken ages! We then had to climb through the jungle up a path to get to the ruins as they are ontop of a mountain. The walk was beautiful through the trees and past waterfalls and we had our first encounter with howler monkeys! They are SO loud and sound more like dinosaurs then monkeys. There was a large group of them in the trees above us and some of the smaller babies climbed down to get a better look at us, they came so close and it was a great! Didn't want to leave them but we got to the ruins and they were quite grand with a large multi-layered palace, a well preserved huge pyramid (where they found the only Maya sarcophagus) and an unusual pagoda looking tower. We spent the afternoon clambering around them and looking in all the buildings at the carvings and finding secret passageways and it was lovely to be surrounded by mountain jungle. This one seemed to have a different/more ancient air about it and we really loved it, maybe its the setting. We also saw some Maya villagers dressed in traditional clothing and all the men grow their hair long. We rounded off the day with the biggest meal we have ever eaten and Liam could hardly walk so it was a brilliant day and made up for the previous week :)

 

The Monday started off badly as we called about changing our flights and found that without paying £450 each the only flights we could have from end Dec through January was the 9th Feb!! So we had to change all our plans and stay in Central America for another 3 months!! It really wasn't what we planned and were a bit miffed but after thinking about it we realised it was probably a good thing as there is too much to see here anyway and we love it! Though it does mean Christmas in Honduras...?

After that fiasco the day was really good as we went off to see our first big waterfalls of the trip. The first one was a huge 45ft single cascade named Miso-ha. It was really beautiful with serveral more small trickily ones and moss covered rocks and ferns, very fairy tale. We walked behind the waterfall and got misted all over, and into the caves there too which were dark and spooky. It really was very pretty place. We then went somewhere where there is a 5km stretch of river that is just waterfall after waterfall, all only a bit smaller than Miso-ha and the number of them is immense. We walked along the river bank for hours coming across new ones and wading into the pools at the bottom of each one (I actually slipped over in one of them fully clothed and got soaked haha!) One the way back we found a mirrador (veiwpoint) over the whole valley and it was gorgeous. This part of Mexico is lovely, being more mountainous and a lot less busy. After an hour and a half in a minivan along incredibily narrow windy roads and a sick Liam, we cooked vegi rice and had yummy sugary rolls from a bakery, as well as watching one of my favourite films (Muppets Treasure Island!) so what started as a bad day turned out pretty good!

The next 2 days we had picnics on the grass, lots of tacos, ice cream and fried bananas in the plazas, did a bit of shopping and sorted out our new plan for central America. Once we wrote down all we wanted to do it was actually too much even until Feb so it is a good thing we have that long! We also saw a crazy tattooed group of men doing stange dancing and drumming around a fire one evening.

And then it was time to leave Palenque and hopefully all the problems we've had lol. The next part of our trip gets more tricky though as we go to a really remote part of Mexico as we want to see more of the jungle and maya village life, and we cross the Guatamalan border.... fingers crossed it'll all go to plan!