Road Trip
Thursday, December 6th, 2007Day: 31
We had met 2 Canadians on our tour the previous day. Fraser and Phillip were from Montreal. They were in Cancun for a wedding but decided to rent a car for their second week and see a bit of Mexico. Today they were heading back to the Yucatan peninsula and had offered to drop us off in Palenque along the way. As comfortable as Mexican buses are this was to good a chance to pass up.
The guys were already seated in the courtyard of our hostel at 8am as I walked downstairs for breakfast. We had just left Fraser and Phil on the walk back to our hotels after a night at Bar Revolucion, not much more than 7 hours ago. After a quick filling breakfast we piled into their rented Nissan and started the 4 hour drive to Palenque. With the windy roads, cool fresh air blasting through the windows and the mostly pine forest of the Chiapas highlands, I felt like we were on a summer road trip back in Canada with friends. It felt good and it was an easy way to travel, it made car travel feel so luxurious to me. Specially since we don’t even own a car anymore. About 30km from Palenque we quickly descended into the low lying jungle. The fresh air was replaced with thick, heavy, humid air and the temperature rose sharply.
Palenque is two places, the dusty, ugly modern town and then 7km away deep in the jungle are the ruins of the great Mayan city of Palenque. The modern town has hotels and bus connections and not much else going for it. Fraser and Phil dropped us at El Panchan, just short of the ruins. El Panchan is an area in the jungle with 5 places to stay, its fairly rustic but a beautiful place. There is a bit of an annoying new age hippie aspect to El Panchan but other than that it sure beats a night in the town. After saying goodbye to our new friends we found a great room at Margarita and Ed’s Cabanas right in the thick jungle.
As dusk fell fireflies flashed and the jungle came alive with noise. We spent the rest of the night reading up on the site of Palenque and sipping cold cervezas in the humid jungle night. We also spent a fair bit of time being amused by the freaky hippies wandering around barefoot at the thatched roof bar. These hippies are puzzling to me. I mean do they dress like this at home? Some looked like they had been here much to long, which is also puzzling. El Panchan is beautiful but its just a place for foreign tourists to stay while visiting the ruins and spend a night in the jungle. No locals live here, its not a town. Why come to Mexico to hang with a bunch of other tourists every night?
Back at our hippie-free cabana, the temperature dropped but the humidity was incredible. Our bed sheets, money and clothing felt as though it had just gone through the wash. I thought about how this was going to be an uncomfortable, sleepless night. No matter I was excited to get to the ruins as early as possible in the morning and beat the tour groups.
Michael Coroneos