Palenque and the first bout of sickness

Continuing our adventures in the Chiapas region, we headed further east to Palenque via tikitour on another 8 hour bus ride. I say tikitour because the direct route would take just 4.5 hours, however there has been protesting and highway blockages on this route from San Cristobal on and off for the last couple of years. One guide told us this can be by people from the smaller villages on these roads who are protesting as people don't stop here and spend any money or stay there, instead heading for the bigger towns which leaves them with no income from tourists. Long story short, the bus takes a longer route to avoid this.

We stayed in a wee hut about 10km outside the actual Palenque city in an area called El Panchan which is sort of in the jungle which was quite fun. We could hear lots of different animals each night when we were sleeping although sometimes we weren't overly sure what they were. Other guests said they were jaguars but weren't sure how true that really was. Definitely ones that we did see were black howler monkeys so I'm sure they were making at least some of the noise! It has been our first stop out of the mountains as well which thankfully brings with it some warmer temperatures.

The first day here we visited an awesome set of waterfalls for the afternoon called Roberto Barrio. There was literally no one else there apart from our tour group of about 15 (again, when I say tour I mean the type where they just drive you there and back) which was insane because it was such an amazing spot. There was about three or four different levels of main waterfalls with huge pools at the bottom and then the main one we swam at you could climb all over and sit in little pools amongst it, awesome. Definitely recommend.

Then unfortunately in the middle of the night I managed to get sick with food poisoning or something of the like somehow so we spent the majority of the next day doing not an awful lot! Not overly sure what from considering Mike and I have been eating and sharing basically all the same foods but we will never know. Thankfully the worst of it was over within 24 hours and then it was just trying to face food again without the classic stomach churn and get the energy levels up again after the best part of two or three days without much substance. Because of where we were staying in almost the middle of nowhere, there was only really one restaurant called Don Muchos where we could eat at for breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days so it was lucky they had a large menu because we had well and truly exhausted the options after that many meals! They had live music each night though from a local band which kept things interesting.

We had intended to visit another two different waterfalls but given my sickness taking out a day of activities and the fact that we needed to keep moving we had to choose between these and seeing the ruins, which most people come to Palenque for. We had heard that these other waterfalls weren't as good as Roberto Barrio and far more touristy so we decided it was best to see the ruins instead.

So on our last day I managed to just muster enough energy to go and see said ruins. The ruins here date back to 226BC to 799AD but only about 5% of them are open to the public so it must be an absolutely massive area. Nowadays all these ruins are situated in a massive jungle which made for some good exploring for us and a welcome relief from the sunshine. So crazy to try and imagine these pyramids and palaces being bright colours like blue and red in their heyday when today they just look like regular stone. Unfortunately I have since managed to somehow wipe our SD card before I managed to back it up so we don't actually have any photos from the outing to share. Technology. :(Read more