Lonely Planet

The highlight of a visit to Palanque is a 15 minute trip out-of-town to the nearby Mayan ruins (Palenque National Park) which dates back to AD 600 or thereabouts. Our minibus unloaded us just past a sign saying: Carreteria a Palenque – Zona Archaeológica. This UNESCO heritage site is what put tiny Palenque on the international tourism map! We met our local guide for the day at the National Park’s entry turnstiles, stacks of people were already visiting the site when we got there around half-nine in the morning (Lonely Planet’s ‘Guessimation’ of over 1,000 visitors to the park on an average day seemed feasible).

The Palenque archeological site comprises an indeterminate number of temples within what was in its day a large Maya city with a plain on one side, a dense jungle on the other and the Rio Usumacinta running right through the middle of it. Before we hit the temple trail, Rafa our guide, who clearly knew his Mayan archaeology and antiquity, gave us a quick overview of the city using a cloth map affixed to a tent wall for illustration. Apparently Palenque’s original name was Lakamha (Meaning “Big Water”) – don’t think I quite got the significance of this name(?) unless it was a reference to the river which, not particularly noticeable today, may have been more significant in the time of the Maya. Like Teotihuacan on the outskirts of Mexico City, another indigenous civilisation occupied the site, predating the Mayans by maybe the best part of a millennium.

Once we started exploring the site Rafa explained that most of what survived of the pyramids, what we could see still, was the work of the 8th century Maya king, K’inich Janaab Pakal, AKA Pakal the Great. Pakal’s long reign oversaw a major building program for the city. Probably the pick of the temples we saw was the one known as the Temple of the Inscriptions…the intact panels of the structure, which Rafa explained the significance of to us, contained important Maya pictorial inscriptions – these are a kind of ideogram, a single picture which equates with a word or an idea or a number. These symbols (adopted from the Olmec people by the Maya) put together formed a text. On the temples some of these glyphs (hieroglyphic characters painted on the walls) survive, although the Spanish Catholics destroyed a lot of them! The unique Mayan numbering system is also in evidence❈.

We did the obligatory adrenalin-driven thing that tourists do: sprinted up the steps of the nearest pyramid. Once at the top, nothing much to see, we proceeded more cautiously and slowly back down the narrow and slightly crumbling steps (themselves a mosaic of unevenly cut stone squares). It wasn’t permitted however to climb up the Temple of Inscriptions) opposite which some 80 feet above the ground held Pakal’s mausoleum. Rafa showed us some of the practical functions of the temples, for example the plumbing, as well as explaining the religious ones. Palenque is not as high and imposing as Teotihuacan’s “Sun and Moon” pyramids, but loses nothing in the decorative stakes. This is especially evident in the four edifices enclosing the rectangular square of the smaller Temples of the Crosses which boast elaborate, bas-relief carvings and sinewy interior chambers. At certain points Mayan relics lay around the grounds☀.

A city of temples under cover of jungle
We had some free time to spend scaling one or two of the less formidable pyramids before tiring of this novelty. As we followed Rafa back to the entrance, we swiftly and adroitly swerved past lines of souvenir vendors loudly hawking their wares on the pathway. Outside, the group regathered and were shepherded by Rafa towards a nearby trail heading into a denser part of the jungle. I mentioned above that the temples of Palenque were of indeterminate number. The reason for this is that virtually the entire ancient city of Palenque was swallowed up by the jungle some time after the Mayan inhabitants left the area (circa AD 800). What what we could see and explore was the small portion that had been discovered and unearthed to this point!

An ecosystem of diverse biodiversity
Rafa took us deep into a high evergreen forest along a path called Sendero Moiépa, pointing out different aspects of the biodiversity bank. The Palenque National Park was made up of 996 tropical species of flora and fauna…around us were millennium-old trees, red cedar, mahogany, kapok and sapodilla, as well as camedor palms including the threatened fishtail palm xate.

As we trekked along the muddy, sloping trail through ancient streams with fossilised shells, passing vines and unfamiliar plants, Rafa educated us as to the kinds of fauna that the jungle was home to…in all there were 353 species of birds – we caught glimpses of only the relatively easy-to-spot red-crowned parrots, unfortunately the very hard-to-spot toucans with their facility for changing the colour of their beaks to regulate heat were keeping their distance as usual. Another group of residents – the howler monkeys – were audible in full voice though not visible to us (presumably they were dangling high up in the canopy at safe distance but aware of the strange human visitors on the ground). Also not seen were the even more elusive ocelots, nor did we manage to see any of the 71 species of reptiles and amphibians including the very venomous pit viper, the Bothrops asper, which happily in this instance was giving us a welcome wide birth!

After about 30 minutes of hiking we reached our main objective, a peak on top of which the skeletal ruins of a Maya temple was peering out of the jungle. This until recently hidden temple was discovered by local archaeologists. Rafa explained that tests had indicated there were undoubtedly many more temples buried under the jungle still to be unearthed.

Before heading back out of the Palenque jungle, Rafa invited us to explore an underground entrance point largely concealed by a rock ledge. Most of us took the challenge to climb down into the hole which led into a short, very tight and damp tunnel which came out at a shallow stream of water. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be looking for in the tunnel, a rare, fossilised Palaeolithic Age Mexican marsupial perhaps…it was too dark to see much of anything in the tunnel in any case!

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❈ Mayan maths were extremely accurate in calculating the calendar year at 365.2425 days, anticipating the much later European estimate of 365.2522
☀ when the archaeologists dug up Palenque they discovered small objects called censers lying round the Temples of the Crosses in particular. These are mainly brazing bowls made of ceramic used for making Mayan offerings to the gods

Towards dusk we reached the township of Palenque, our next stay-over on our journey to the easternmost tip of Mexico. The first thing we noticed in the area known as La Cañada was this giant native figure propped up against a tourism building (Carretera Catazaja Tramo Central Tuxtla). The massive sculpture took on a slightly menacing appearance to me, like someone you’d expect to find engaging in bloodthirsty, ritualistic Mayan human sacrifices.

Arriving at our lodgings (Hotel Xibalba) we found ourselves assigned to a separate section 100 metres down the road from the main reception area. The architecture of our dwelling was unusual, almost avant-garde, it certainly caught the eye…a small, sandy-coloured, two-level building with an A-frame shape, a design replicated in the shape of the large, outward-facing windows which gave the structure a very airy feel. The doors to each of the sixteen rooms conformed to this sloping pyramid pattern. The grounds surrounding the entrance to the sleeping quarters were tastefully decorated with authentic looking native sculptural pieces. The accommodation annex looked like it was a recent addition to Hotel Xibalba.

That night we acted on Hector’s dinner recommendation, leaving the Xibalba we ambled up Calle Merle Greene❉, past several cantinas and restaurants with picturesque displays of pot-planted flowers under their awnings. Around the bend we came to La Hector’s dining choice for the night. We partook of a nice seafood meal with a bit more Mexican cerveza sampling thrown in. At the end of the dinner while things were winding up, the guy who ran the restaurant, a German expat came over and engaged us in some small talk…he was quite a garrulous character, speaking in fluent English, he seemed very comfortable and relaxed, and exuded an almost a weary air of familiarity about all things Palenque (I surmised that he had been domiciled in Mexico for quite some time). After leaving the restaurant Eric and I slowly inched our way back to the hotel, taking in both the night air of this small town and of course the mandatory ice confectionary at the local “7/11” style store.

The next day my roommate Pétros and I decided to check out the old part of Palenque which wad down the road over a weathered, rusty bridge. This was definitely the poor part of town, as we walked I saw very few international tourists checking out this part of Palenque (too far away from the fancy tourist restaurants perhaps?). The faces we did see in the street were mostly indigenous ones – these are largely Ch’ol people (of Mayan descent)۞.

The shops were uniformly low-brow – no frills discount shops, cheap, grimy eateries and grocery stores. Lonely Planet gives Modern Palenque town very short shrift indeed – “sweaty, humdrum…without much appeal except as a jumping-off point for the ruins” [Mexico: Palenque, www.lonelyplanet.com]. No hyperbole here I’m afraid, compared to the “jawdropping jungle ruins” the town itself has precious little to recommend itself.

The wilderness of la jungla is palpably close however. On the return walk back to the hotel, crossing the river heavily camouflaged with overgrown vegetation (in reality a barely trickling stream), I half expected to catch, if not a sight, the sound of local howler monkeys emerging from the forest scrounging round for food in the town (it had been reported that deforestation in the area was driving them into the city). Unfortunately none of the Alouatta critters put in an appearance during our walk, couldn’t even hear a murmur of their famous vocalising from far off in the jungle. Nor did we get a glimpse of that other local jungle resident, the jaguar. But the following day we’d be in the Palenque jungle itself, I thought, who knows, maybe we’d be a shot at spotting one of these fabled jaguares – but not too close of course!

Footnote:
Some perhaps less photogenic people are known to have been uncharitably labelled with the disparaging sobriquet of ‘Dishhead’…in La Cañada near the “Big Maya” mega-figure as you head back onto Highway 189, I noticed this modernist style street sculpture in the middle of the roundabout, which (art being open to all manner of individual and idiosyncratic interpretation) I like to call “Head in dish-man”, literally. That’s what it looked like to me anyway!

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❉ our street, so named for famous American artist and archaeologist, Merle Greene Robertson, who developed a technique of “life-size rubbings” which preserved a visual record of much of the Pre-Columbian Maya art in Palenque and elsewhere in Mesoamerica
۞ I didn’t know this statistically at the time of visiting but Palenque is the poorest city in the state of Chiapas. When I came across this snippet later, it clearly tallied with the empirical evidence of what we had observed – the shops generally rundown and grimy, some of the local people were a bit on the scruffy side, the dirt and refuse on the streets

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Just blogging away … doing the hard blog

Continuing the search for signs of Intelligent Life in the University.

Palenque 2: A Temple City Overgrown by La Jungla

Palenque 1: Ambling about Town, Down Merle Green and Beyond