RECYCLE. REUSE. REFUSE!

The stone coffin of Pakal

Those would be the words of the great Yvonne Choiunard… founder of Patagonia, urging people to refuse to continue consuming. An interesting position for a maker of consumer goods to take. I dug a little deeper and found this really interesting interview with him (you’ll find it here). I couldn’t agree more with what he’s saying.

It seems to me that Patagonia is currently the center point of some really interesting thinking… I think it’s a company we’d love to work with. I’ve tried to reach out to them, but their nets are set for bigger fish. If you happen to know any Patagonia people would you please tell them that we’d like to be a part of it? Thank you!

Mayan Symbol

With four days to get out of Mexico before our visas expired and very nearly one thousand kilometers between us and the Belizean border… it was time to get going. Looking over our possible escape routes we saw that a little detour would make Palenque available. Palenque was originally on our short list of places to visit. But the unrest in Oaxaca some weeks ago had spread into Palenque and travelers there were reporting sporadic road blocks and gas shortages… so we decided to save it for another day. A quick check confirmed that the local situation had stabilized… it had just become that other day.

Coming from a few weeks in a non-tourist place to a heavily touristed place you’re quickly reminded of how the tranquility of life can be so easily usurped by the angst of making a buck. We’ve learned to expect a financial beating when the first few businesses that we see are a Best Western Hotel, a McDonalds, and a Burger King. Believe it or not a meal at a McDonalds or a Burger King costs exactly the same in Mexico as it does in America… which is really a fortune to pay for food here, especially food of that quality.

The city of Palenque itself is home to more than 100,000 inhabitants. Driving past the road that leads to the ruins and continuing into the downtown area you get every impression that it grew to it’s current size quickly and rather haphazardly. We briefly exposed ourselves to it’s frenetic pace and then beat a hasty retreat to the outskirts.

Rio en La Selva

Camping at the Mayabell

Being just a short walk away, the Mayabell eco resort is the closest that you can stay to the ruins. It has hotel rooms, palapas for tent camping, and a small RV type campground. There’s a large pool and a good… albeit pricey restaurant and bar. It’s really a pretty and quiet place. Here we paid 460 pesos a night for camping (about $25, the most we’ve paid in Mexico). 80 pesos per person (even kids) and thirty pesos per vehicle (the dreaded extra car fee… again). In other words, we got exactly the beating that we were expecting. But… we very much enjoyed our stay, and would recommend it to you.

Pool at the Mayabell

We were now in Howler Monkey territory. If you’ve ever heard one before then you know what an unforgettable sound they make. I warned every one before we went to sleep to expect to be awakened by the monkeys very early in the morning. It was around 3:00am when they started.
“What is that !!?”
That would be the monkeys I told you about”.
“Those are not a monkeys!”
I can’t really describe the noise other than to say that the first time you hear it you think you’d better go and get a priest. And then when you finally see the buggers… well, it maybe a matter of equal surprise that a noise that big comes from monkeys so small.

The beautifully ornate ruins of Palenque

The ruins of Palenque aren’t coveted because of the size of the site. The draw here is the quality of the architecture. These are easily the most detailed and ornate structures we’ve seen, and the quality of the stone work… considering it’s well over one thousand years old is spectacular!

The Stonework

Palenque is also the first of the Mayan sites where archeologists found a complete enough set of records to piece together a nearly complete history of the place. Which is why it’s the most studied of all the Mayan ruins.

Palenque Pyramid

It’s just an awe inspiring place. We climbed to the top of one of the temples and sat there quietly for some time… surrounded by the howls of the monkeys and sounds of the jungle. So incredibly remote… no signs of modern civilization to be seen as we scanned the horizon. And for just a moment… we were them. We may live out of the back of a pick-up truck… but, my god… the things we’ve seen.

The remoteness of Palenque

We broke from custom in Palenque and hired a guide for the day… Bladimir Cruz. Well… truth be told he isn’t actually a guide… yet. He’s a guide in training who offered his services to us at what we reckoned to be a reasonable price (450 pesos), complete with someone to watch the dog for us. It worked out quite well. Except for the fact that I was the translator… so, yeah… we might have a few gaps in our knowledge of Palenque.

Our guide Bladimir

Standing amongst the ruins we wondered how a place like this could go undiscovered for so long. And then Bladimir walked us just a couple of hundred yards or so off the trail… into what felt like the middle of the jungle, and proceeded to show us that we were standing on a pyramid that has yet to be excavated. You’d absolutely never guess it. And when we saw how cleverly the jungle disguises it’s possessions… well, then we began to wonder how it was ever discovered.

The temple of Pakal

It was, they say discovered by the Spanish through local folklore a few times, but for good in the late seventeen hundreds. It was then further popularized in the early eighteen hundreds… so the story goes, by an eccentric count who lived on top of one the pyramids for two years (in his sixties nonetheless) and published a book of fantastic drawings that apparently took some liberties with reality.

Monkeys in the Pyramides

Whenever you visit a historical site… like ruins, you do so with the benefit of the knowledge of how it all turned out, but rarely with a concrete answer as to why. Maybe it was climate change or deforestation or disease or warfare… some combination of all of the above, or perhaps a general alien recall. Whatever happened, one common thread is that every failed society that we’ve seen thought that they were too advanced to fail.

Sound familiar?