into the wild part 2: the return of apocalypto

monday 30 march
today we visited palenque, which we were excited about as the french flamingo couple had said it was excellent. it is the most well preserved mayan site in the mayan world apparently, and is right there in the jungle. we ate breakfast of yoghurt granola and fruit from the ice chest and set off, all excited. a little collectivo truck took us to the main entrance and we spent a few minutes fighting off the offers of guides in english, italian, german, spanish so as to stick on budget plan. we bought a little book with some explanations of the site instead. as it was monday the museum was closed today which was a shame as my guidebook said it was also excellent (though not with a french accent). i asked if we could use our tickets tomorrow for the museum then, and tried to express my sense of injustice when the answer was no, but words failed me as usual in espanol.

remember that by this point in our random mexican adventure holiday we had seen 2 big mayan ruins, tulum and chichen itza and we have seen a fair few in belize, so we were quite experienced ruin spotters and it’s not too unfair to say that once you’ve seen a few mayan ruins you’ve seen them all (though they are in fact all quite unique whilst being generically similar). (sorry just hedging my bets as usual). palenque however took my breath away, and bert’s. you enter the site (only 2% of which is uncovered, imagine the rest!), and on your right immediately is a huge amazing temple rising up into the jungle trees, amazingly well preserved, flanked by 2 other similar sized temples. if you stand looking at these temples, on your left is the main plaza which is surrounded by the palace and various other buildings. there are other sites within the site too, i won’t try to explain in words where they are and what exactly they contain, suffice to say that it was a really gobsmacking place and i could almost imagine decapitated heads rolling down temples right there in front of me. our little book didn’t do the place justice but bert filmed me reading out from it whilst standing in front of the relevant temple, in documentary style. there were some giant leaves by one temple, and we got a funny photo of me standing behind one, which looks like i have a human head and a giant leaf body.

after a while of really heartfelt oohs and aahs we stumbled across a tour group in english, and crept along behind it for a while trying not to get spotted as illegal tour group immigrants. we decided to ask them straight out if we could join, and after a group discussion in a strange language that turned out to be dutch, they agreed. we learnt so much from edgar the tour guide, here is a sample:
they didn’t use wheels or tools or animals in the construction of palenque. one theory as to why no wheels was that this would make the work easier and would give the workers time to maybe wonder why they were spending their lives building these huge temples for the upper classes, and therefore start a revolution perhaps.
there was a queen found only recently buried in a huge sarcophagus in the temple of the inscriptions, she was buried with red dye all around her and is known as the red queen.
nobody knows why the mayan empires died out so suddenly around ad850, but after they did, they went to the yucatan peninsula where there are lots of rivers.
for the first 3 years of their lives mayan babies had their heads squashed with planks to change the shape of their heads. chance of surviving to age of 12 was 50% and from then it was 80% to 40. there was a famous king called pakal who apparently lived to be 80, which comparatively is like somebody these days living to be 150 years old.

there was so much more but i can’t remember it now. there are little information plaques by each temple thing too, one of which had a funny typo which was an h instead of an n so it referred to the humerous mayan tribes, instead of the numerous mayan tribes.

we did a little jungle walk with edgar and the dutchies after this, at the end of which a cute little boy sold us some necklaces, each of which had a different mayan symbol on, like the mayan version of the zodiac signs. he tried really hard to tell us in english what they were but made some really cute mistakes, which were: one of them was the sign of the centre of the university (instead of universe), and one was the queen of the worriers (instead of the warriors).

we went back for another look at palenque as i couldn’t believe how stunning it was, and then walked back to el panchan where we were staying, via a really cool river walk with swimming pools and jungly type terrain. it was hot hot hot but we needed the exercise so walked all 3km without resorting to jumping in a taxi. we went into palenque that evening, which was way nicer than guidebook expectations (perhaps travelling without a guidebook would be preferable, as it would be much more a voyage of discovery and you may end up in places that you wouldn’t otherwise have bothered going to from what they say). there was extensive road mending going on which made driving taxing, but we found the square and watched a little band play pan pipe type music – my favourite, it always cheers me up so much (yes i am aware it is crap and cheesy) – and watched cute mexican children drive round the square in little battery powered cars and do little dances to the music while their parents and extended family leave them their own devices and we giggle in amusement. in mexico there doesn’t seem to be that sense of fear you get in more westernized countries of not letting your children wander around freely and have good old fashioned fun in case of strange people stealing them. there is definitely lots of danger in certain places here from drug related issues, but it’s so nice to see families and children all out in town having a great time from such simple things. brilliant for people watching and giggling. one little kid was trying to make his battery powered car go forward and couldn’t figure out that you have to stand on the pedal, he was kind of rocking back and forward instead, but suddenly he understood it and slammed the pedal down and nearly flew right off the back.

we had a cheap cheap road-side hot dog (when i say we i mean just me, bert has more control over his appetite and we had already eaten tacos), and went back to our nut bombarded cabin and agreed that yes we should carry on down to san cristobal instead of turning back and heading home via chetumal. i’ve never done such an unplanned random trip where you just keep checking your bank account and seeing how much further it will get you, usually i’m a bit of an over organizer, so this was a really cool experience. i had very fortunately got a big tax refund as i only worked a few months of last tax year before leaving, so thank you inland revenue for giving us the chance to be random for a while.

tuesday 31 march
we set off to the next destination, san cristobal, further south and west into chiapas. in 1994 san cristobal was taken over by the zapatista rebels, but the military ousted them quick sharp with a lot of zapatista deaths. the leader of the zapatistas was a guy called subcomandante marcos and basically their point is that the indigenous peoples of mexico should have more rights and more opportunities, and not be exploited etc. they founded schools and health centres in indigenous villages that had nothing, and after lying low for a while after the san cristobal scenario are back campaigning now, but i think in a more controlled and less violent way, though i think the violent association arises from the paramilitaries fighting back at their protests, which my book about mexico says was ‘a sledgehammer to the zapatista nut’. chiapas has the highest percentage of indigenous mexicans, and oaxaca state isn’t far behind, there are around 60 different indigenous groups. i’m not sure how successful the zapatistas have been in terms of changing anything for good, as i’m not sure how much actual politicial sway they have, but the point they are making is one i am very sympathetic to. basically mexico is made up of lots of different levels of peoples, as a result of the spanish conquest and european influence. at the time of the spanish invasion the top of the class system was the pure spanish, who after the conquest became the ruling and exploitative classes, then you have the next level which are those born in mexico of spanish descent, then the mestizos which are literally mixtures of spanish and indigenous blood, then the indigenous people, then the black slaves. today there still exists lots of racially inclined traits in mexico such as assumptions about your wealth, position in society etc based only on your skin colour, and it’s the whiter the better. if you are a blonde haired white european traveler here you will get stared at a lot therefore.

anyway. en route to s.cristobal we stopped at misol-ha, a beautiful waterfall that falls around 30 feet into a beautiful pool which we swam in. a group of school kids were eating sandwiches and potentially doing some sort of project about waterfalls, we said hola to them. perhaps the project was whether your sandwiches taste better when eaten in front of a waterfall, and i would hazard that they do. we saw our dutch tour group again, they must be doing the same route as us, but with a guide and all pre planned. we carried on to another waterfall called agua azul (blue water). bert said in his lifetime he has seen a lot of waterfalls and swam in a lot of rivers (he’s from montana remember, and also lived in florida, arizona, california, hawaii), but this one was far and away the best. i can’t describe how blue the water was without sounding like some over the top travel brochure so i won’t try other than to say it was my favourite turquoise colour, similar to one of my running tops back in its cleaner days. there were lots of medium sized waterfalls all white running over the rocks which if you looked up at them from a certain place looked like a big frothing meringue. lots of sparkly pools in between the falls, then at the bottom some big shallow turquoise pools complete with mexicans floating around the place. we were, in palenque style, gobsmacked, and so happy that we had decided to continue our trip down here.

before jumping in the big turquoise meringue, we spotted 2 boys with touring bikes all laden down with luggage, having their lunch on a picnic table. hmm i said, interesting, they look like long distance serious cyclists, let’s go see where they’re going on their ride. so we went over and this is an outline of the conversation:
me-hi, where are you going?
them-to patagonia
me-wow, etc
[general chat about their ride, which is alaska to patagonia, they set off from anchorage in august 08, and will finish january 2010. they are from australia].
me-i just did a bike ride coast to coast in mexico the other week actually, finished in puerto escondido
them-cool
me-it was with a group of about 50 people, for charity
them-oh - were you wearing green t-shirts
me-yeah actually
them-with writing on
me-yeah, macmillan cancer support tshirts
them-and you were in puerto escondido on a monday night in a club
me-err.. yes
them-we already met you in that club as we were there too that night
me-uh oh i can’t actually remember meeting you i was so completely drunk, sorry

general amusement all round, and isn’t it a small world and how completely weird to meet them again here having already met them there but unknowingly. we swapped emails and promised them a place to stay and an ultra light flight on their way through belize. they were headed to cancun then cuba then down to belize. they told me lots about their bikes etc as i said i am planning to do that same ride, maybe from alaska or maybe from just mexico, not sure yet. they are called max and mike, we gave them a lift up the hill after our lovely swim in agua azul, a pig walked across the road, and then they were off back the other way towards palenque.

before carrying on to s.cristobal we played back the video i’d recorded of bert diving in from one of the waterfalls, it was a good dive, i gave it 9.5 out of 10. he had had to shuffle out along the waterfalls to get to the place he could dive from, which worried me a bit but knowing bert i knew he wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe, he is a multi talented stuntman - remember he was the stunt flier on magnum p.i in hawaii and went to london with tom selleck to watch cats the musical and then had to go shopping with tom’s horrible girlfriend when she came to hawaii.

something amusing we encountered along our way towards s.cristobal was 2 little girls at either side of the road holding up a rope over the road. we immediately panicked and stopped at their little barrier, a little scared as to what was going on. they then ran to the car and shoved a bunch of bananas and biscuits in the car and demand we buy them. we did of course as the girls were so cute. they looked around the car a bit, enquired about the granola that was on view, for some reason the granola attracted a lot of attention, they all wanted it. we asked them their names etc and thanked them for the biscuits (which were utterly disgusting), then drove off. then realized that although that was a really cute thing to do, it could easily have been a front for an ambush from the hills above the road, something you definitely hear about. this wasn’t just us being paranoid, it does say in my guidebook that this area is a target for tourist robberies.
the scenery was beginning to change from jungly and humid and hot to pine forests, and gaining altitude. beautiful twisty roads, big tall pine trees, little villages with donkeys, crisp cool pine scented air, manicured farmland, every lowland field ploughed, and even some of the really steep hillsides were being used to grow corn – amazing how they can farm almost vertical land. people all in their traditional mayan dress, sitting doing traditional mayan things like weaving, carrying things with amazing balance on their heads. you can give them a wave as you go past and they always wave back and smile. a little vw beetle was in front of us for a while, its roof loaded up with brightly coloured brooms and brushes, obviously off to sell them at some market somewhere. we found it interesting the range of landscapes you can have in the space of 2 days driving, not even covering that much distance – we had gone from the hot arid flat burnt uninteresting brush of the yucatan, which just as you’re approaching palenque turns into hilly green hot humid low-lying jungle and you’re weaving up and down twisty mountainous roads, then a few hours south west of this and you’re in the beautiful pine forest farming highlands, and it’s cold and dry. these highlands carry on into guatemala and become their western highlands, which is for me without doubt the most beautiful part of the country and i wished we could have spent more time there – definitely a place to return to.

for lunch we had some tacos and beer as usual, these were tacos dorados though which are tacos rolled up and i guess cooked again or something as they are hard and crunchy. not as good as soft tacos we thought but still ok. we also got confused about why every other table had nachos and sauces on except ours but i didn’t want to ask as i think the waiter had asked us if we wanted them but i hadn’t understood him at all so just said no to whatever he was asking me. bert got upset as he saw all the nachos going past thinking they were coming to us then seeing them go off to other people. then i felt bad but i couldn’t bring myself to ask the waiter as i had found it so hard to understand his accent that i was worried of a total misunderstanding occurring. silly really, but it gets kind of tiring continually trying to understand and make yourself understood in another language. it’s like being a child again and not having the language to describe anything or speak in any kind of sophisticated way, whilst being super aware of everyone else so able to do it. often it’s amusing though and someone the other day told us how when she was in spain she’d got in a taxi and asked the cab driver to take her to her hotel which was just ‘cuatro cuadernos’ away, she meant to say ‘cuatro cuadras’, which means 4 blocks, but had said 4 notebooks away. the cabbie had turned round and said look lady i lived and worked in new york for a long time and i know for sure that you don’t want me to take you the distance of 4 notebooks to your hotel.

we got to s.cristobal and found a really sweet hostel and so cheap, a few notebooks away from the centre. s.cristobal is cobbly, on the smaller side of big, crispy (cold at night as it’s high up), and full of quaint and cool shops selling zapatista related artwork, dvds, books, good coffee etc. my kind of little city i thought as we wandered around, there are lots of spanish schools, and hence also lots of foreign travellers out here learning spanish, lots of churches, a square with a marimba band playing to celebrate the birthday of the town that night. not sure who s.cristobal refers to, it’s not cristopher columbus (that would hardly make sense in the most indigenous state of mexico). we watched some hippie traveller types playing guitar and flute and drums and singing and dancing around. it was cool and i’m pretty sure the guitarist was a boy me and sarahbullock had met in guanajuato who was french and called jeancristophe who was a friend of a boy we had met in san miguel de allende who was also from france but living in ireland and was called bousmaha which is the weirdest name i’ve heard. but i didn’t ask him as he was busy playing his guitar. plus it would be too weird to have the maxandmike on their bikes coincidence and another one all in one day. weird how this happens, i had in fact seen a lady from my oaxaca spanish school in zihuatanejo in january, and another i would see in antigua next week (both times too far away to say hi to), and the dutch tour group leader we would meet again tomorrow. obviously we didn’t know these last 2 things today, but i am writing this with the benefit of hindsight, which is a very useful thing, it’d be good if you could apply in advance for hindsight so you don’t make the mistakes that with hindsight you wouldn’t have made.

wednesday 1 april
lovely cold crispy morning. breakfast and a bookshop. i absolutely love bookshops, i go crazy in them and no matter what budget i’m on i have to buy at least one book. so we left with a second hand guatemala guidebook, such a useful purchase which if we hadn’t bought i would be cursing my lack of hindsight knowledge. we were planning to cross into guatemala tomorrow and be there a few days, so were thinking we could do it randomly with no info as the price of the book wouldn’t justify the short time there. but it being us and our non ability to stick to a plan for longer than it takes to turn the page of the map, we figured that we may end up being in guatemala longer than a few days and that hence we should be fore-armed so to speak. isn’t everyone forearmed, as long as they have arms? we also bought a book called the history of new spain, by a man called senor bernal diaz and written in the 1500s. diaz was one of hernan cortes’s crew members, hernan cortes was the main leader of the spanish conquest. this book is his description of the spanish invasion and conquest and occupation from a spaniards point of view, and is apparently a classic, and nearly didn’t get written as he was old and didn’t think he would be able to do it. he settled in guatemala and became one of the spanish ruling classes there. bert has started reading it as i have to restrict myself to just one book at a time – he says it is factual and descriptive, more a historical account than a story, but very interesting despite the writing style. i think it’s amazing that this book exists at all and can’t wait to read it.

today we also climbed a hill to look at a church and the view, and found some gym equipment in a kind of park there at the top, so did some exercises on it. which was strange. we alsonsaw an arch, went to the post office, bought a cheap chess set, had a falafel for lunch (the owner complimented bert on his cowboy hat and asked him if he was from texas), visited a coffee museum and bought coffee beans, saw a really big cumulus nimbulus cloud gathering over the museum, went to the market and bought some presents (some for me some for other people), bought some mangoes and apples from a food market, and some honey. whilst buying some coffee, we wanted to make sure we were buying beans and not ground coffee, but i didn’t know the vocabulary so i asked estan frijoles – are they beans, the lady said no, es café – no it’s coffee, i said si, pero frijoles o no? – yes, but beans or not? lady – no!- café. eventually she realized i meant granos, which means beans in this case, ie coffee beans. frijoles means eg kidney beans, or black beans, or refried beans, or baked beans. it was a coffee shop, so she must have though i was pretty mental asking if a bag of coffee was a bag of refried beans.

that evening we had the choice between mexico versus honduras world cup qualifier on tv in any of the various taco places or bars, or palenque rojo, a show with dancing and mayan costumes and fighting and mythology and history. we chose the latter. perhaps unwisely as the match was potentially exciting, though mexico took a beating in the football. the show was actually really cool, but took a while to get going, after 20 minutes bert whispered – it’s a bit slow isn’t it? – shhhh i said, that was a loud whisper. there were lots of cool mayan costumes and we’d read the story in advance so we vaguely understood what was being portrayed. there was a cool dream sequence in the underworld which involved a big skeleton and a giant centipede in glow in the dark costumes like you’d wear to halloween parties when you were little. there were jaguars, monkeys, crocodiles, sometimes they appeared from behind us and the girl on bert’s other side screamed and jumped out of her seat whenever this happened. like she never got used to it and the fact that they were just actors, it was funny. bert thought she just wanted to jump into his lap.

on the way home we saw a poster for a dwarf bullfighting show. then we stopped at a shoe mending shop to get bert’s shoe glued back together. the shop was a crazy grotto of shoes, mending equipment, pictures of the virgin mary with aged candles burning around her, old tins of paint, bits of leather, a calendar from 1995, every single bit of surface was covered with old faded things. crammed in the back behind the counter amongst the shoes and tins and shelves was the owner’s grandson and a few other mexicans watching some film on a fuzzily tuned in tv. there was a framed black and white photo on the wall of the owner taken by a friend of his, an american, we asked him about the photo and he was very proud of it. he looked at our dvd recorder and asked some questions. he invited us in to watch the film with them. it was like narnia in that shop and i’m sure it didn’t really exist and if we went back we wouldn’t be able to find it again.

thursday 2 april
left s.cristobal and headed to the guatemalan border, stopping at a small town called comitan for coffee etc en route where they had supposedly run out of small change until they got back from the bank so basically they didn’t give us our change which was fine as it was only a little bit but we thought they were lying because you don’t go to the bank to get small change. perhaps they weren’t lying and we were being paranoid but these things do happen. we got to the guatemalan border a few hours later. which was slightly troubling as we hadn’t had our passports stamped at the mexican border yet. so we turned round and went the other way to ciudad cauahtemoc which is the mexican border town. i presume the 4k in between is noman’sland. we got stamped out of mexico then went back to the guatemalan border, i think this is a place called la mesilla. it is the craziest border town ever, 2 little dusty ‘roads’ crammed with stalls selling clothes, food, cds, even a man singing karaoke in the midday sun. there is absolutely no signage so it is impossible to know what you are supposed to do to cross with your car and in what order. we asked a vaguely official looking man. they vague officials sit around on empty beer crates watching the backpackers trot across the border from their collectivos, and the karaoke man singing karaoke and the stupid white people in their car not knowing what to do. we figured it out little by little, the first step being that you drive up to some cones where they spray your car apparently to fumigate it, but really i’m sure it’s just water they spray it with and your fee lines the vague officials’ pockets. then you go to passport control then to the car customs place where you fill in more forms, pay a fee, get a sticker and put it on your windscreen. we realized that we had taken our car into mexico without doing anything official at all about it, and we should have had a sticker on the window for the whole time but didn’t. oops.

this process was stressful and we were hungry and hot and dusty. this was not a highlight of the trip. we stopped to cool down and distress in a river once on our way in guatemala. the river looked blue and sparkly and clean from the road, but was actually dirty and cloudy and too shallow to swim in, so we submerged ourselves into it and lay there for a few seconds while the murky river flowed over us, me with the usual river panic in case a sting ray got me. we carried on the journey, through beautiful pine forest highlands, just like in chiapas, but now complete with the totally crazy guatemalan chicken buses which overtake lorries on blind corners just for an added bit of excitement. we weren’t sure where we were going, but it became obvious we wouldn’t make it to antigua today, so decided to stop in quetzaltenango, also known as xela, as i had heard it was nice. and nice it was. after some initial annoyance at not being able to negotiate the tiny cobbly one way streets and nothing in the guidebook matching up with reality, we found a place to stay that was very clean and had free internet and a friendly lady who talked really fast and took advantage of the fact i couldn’t fully understand her to basically con us into paying more money than the room was worth. at this point after crazy dusty border and driving annoyance and not enough energy to investigate other options we didn’t bother making an issue out of it. after all guatemala is dirt cheap even if you’re overpaying. their currency is the quetzal, which is also a bird, their national bird i think, or belize’s. though if you ask a guatemalan they would claim belize is part of guatemala, they don’t really take belize seriously as it’s own country it seems, and are always coming over the border illegally to steal horses, and chop down trees there etc. given the level of poverty in guatemala i actually don’t blame them, and it would certainly make life easier if belize just merged into guatemala, belize is so small it could only do it good. mind you try telling the same thing to the welsh or scottish or irish…

we did the usual thing you do in a new place – wandered around, filmed the lovely square, and exclaimed at how pretty it all was. apparently after the spanish left xela the germans arrived (not sure why exactly but lots of the coffee plantations in guatemala are german owned, i guess something to do with the war), and there are bits of german-gothic architecture in the square. there is a cathedral whose original façade remains, but with a new interior, built in the 1900s. xela is a beautiful place, high up in the highlands, and i promised myself i would return one day and spend some proper time here. we had a beer and a burger, the beer went to our heads as we were at altitude (about 2300m). there is an elegant shopping arcade in the square, i think built by the germans, but over half the shops are empty as nobody is into elegant arcade shopping in guatemala.

friday 3 april
had the best latte i’ve had since leaving england in a beautiful coffee shop in town – accompanied by a croissant and jam – i really miss things like that, although it’s hardly good for the health and weight, both of which are now slightly worse off since not exercising after the mexico cycling shock to the system. we did some post breakfast wandering then set off for antigua. life becomes a cycle of driving, eating, and wandering when you do a trip like this, and i love the adventure of finding all these new places and being able to go wherever you like. the downsides of it are it’s annoying getting lost driving in new towns that have no signs and not knowing where to stay or eat etc. having said that it really is worth it, and i don’t think there’s any real risk involved. i wouldn’t consider doing it alone however, it’s always good to have a montana cowboy ultralight man as a co-pilot. i think all the things you hear about this part of the world being dangerous has to be given some consideration but ultimately taken with a pinch of salt when you weigh up the things you would miss out on if you didn’t take the small risk. the only time i was worried was when the 2 little girls put the rope over the road and sold us those awful biscuits, because in hindsight that could have been really dangerous. anyway, we soon arrived in antigua, which i will write about in the next edition of pickles does south america, which i think i should retitle as in fact only 6 weeks of my whole trip (which is now 9 months) were actually spent in south america.

until the next time comrades – adios.