MAYA-HO DOS!
_{To Central America, 2005}

DIA OCHO:
Thursday 24 Feb 2005, San Lucio
  and Flag Day (national holiday)
Chachalacas, Veracruz - morning.

Yesterday we escaped Papantla after a bit of thrashing about (different highways with the same number run in various directions) and found our way to the El Tajin ruins. This vast Totonac city is a wonderland of pyramids and temples and ballcourts. (Every 52 years, as the Totonac calendar changed cycles, an important ballgame was played. The winner was ceremonially decapitated -- sacrificed and deified. No word as to the fate of the losers.) Hey kids, this a MAJOR SITE and y'all should see it. Don't miss the carvings depicting the games and ceremonies.

El Tajin filled our morning, and Maureen bought a bright handmade dress, cheap -- our first souvenir. Too bad the voladores weren't flying. Noonish brought our first view of the Gulf coast, the stretch between Tecolutla and Nautla known as the Costa Esmeralda, a long line of hotels, cabanas, eateries, RV parks etc. We stopped to lunch on tortillas with cheese or peanut butter, and gazed at vistas of sun and waves and birds and an oil platform.

A beachcomber ambled by, stooping for shells. She's a teacher from Montana, in a 150-strong caravan at a nearby RV camp, doing Mexico for the first time and for as long as possible. This is indeed a good season not to be in Montana.

We continued southwaard, waited behind an overturned produce truck for some time, and cruised past cane- and corn-fields to Zempoala and Chachalacas, east of Xalapa and north of Veracruz. We went by the Totonac ruins at Zempoala (we just GOT see that Temple of Death!) but the hour was late -- we'll have to find local accommodations and come back. One or two other nearby archaeological sites to check out, too...

So we rolled out to the beach resort of Chachalacas (cha-cha-LOCK-ass) to try our luck. This is (to our eyes) a funky resort and it's the day after Carnaval ended and Lent started -- rather a sad place, many establishments just shutting down, the rest not quite desperate enough to cut good deals.

We eventually took a room in some newish concrete structure, upstairs from a typical eatery. These quarters have all the charm of a brightly decorated prison cell, but there's a nearly-private shaded terrace, and a view of the ocean past a thatched-roof eatery (one of many across the way), and no oil rigs in sight. Well, maybe just one. And the shower drains at a moderate rate.

SOUNDS: The ocean thrashes; the overhead fan whirls. Dogs bark during mosquito season, at twilight. Busses stop running early; there's hardly any boombox music, and the tortilla-delivery golf cart only honks by every hour or so. Little kids only ran around screaming during the evening.

I met two of the latter last night. After the car engine died and we'd unloaded and dined on something blackened and headed upstairs to our terrace, I descended to forage for sandals under the Ford's back seat. Two little girls ran by, ran back, stopped and chattered.

One asked, "?Como se llama?" Ah, what's my name?

"Yo soy Ricardo. Y tu?" And you?

She pulled her dress up over her mouth and mumbled.

"?Eh?" I asked. She said, "Lupita."

I turned to her friend and asked, "?Y tu?"

"Lolita!" she cried brightly.

I said, "Well howdy, little ladies! It sure is a pleasure to meet y'all!"

Lupita and Lolita yelled and ran off. They had more important matters at hand, apparently.

WHAT NOW? Maureen and I sat on the terrace in the almost-dark, watching the full moon's reflection on the Gulf water as we puffed a little vanilla cigar from Papantly and felt our sweat bubble in the sea breeze. We've taken the room for three nights. What now?

Showers and the fan and breezes almost made the night bearable. The morning is overcast, the rising sun toned blood-red; traffic starts up again fitfully. We're working out a plan: sit out the national holiday here, day-trip up to Xalapa tomorrow, then see the local ruins early Friday and bug-out through Veracruz to the Tuxtlas.

LATER MORNING: The wind has picked up, traffic dropped, birds are squawking. A German is surf-fishing just 50 meters away, next to the thatched eatery. The large woman has left the hammock on the terrace across the alley. Corners drip. Palm fronds wave. Kids skateboard slowly. The overcast is almost a fog. Dogs poke. Loudspeakers do. Is Florida anything like this? Where?

Midday: We stroll out in the midday sun. Away from the playa (sandy beach), discomfort. We flee to our terrace. The Germans have left.

CONCRETE: All about us is concrete construction, done like so: Steel rebar rods are twisted together at the corners and midpoints of intended buildings, and concrete is molded into and around. These are the pillars. Concrete cinder blocks are mortared between the posts; appropriate gaps are left for door, windows, etc. No rebar or cement goes inside the cinder blocks; this is unreinforced masonry.

Wood or concrete crossbeams may support higher floors, but I'm not sure what (if anything) supports the concrete ceiling (or it may be brick, in a classy place);. Rebar extends up from the roof, ready for the next layer of construction, if any. Door and window frames, and electrical and plumbing fixtures, are fitted into the walls. These walls are then painted bright primary colors, as are the molded concrete railing supports: floral columns or swans or mermaids or sea horses or palm trees or rockets. Wires are strung hither and thither.

One might not notice the immediate chips and cracks, the corners flaking away, the separating tiles. Another hotel or eatery or office is Ready To Go!

LATER AFTERNOON: It seems cooler, moister than yesterday. Pelicans are flying south. Mayan women in huipiles wander about, trying to sell handcrafts. The LP gas truck makes its rounds -- they're snaking the gas hose up to the tank on the roof above us at this very moment. And the tortilla guy is here again on his supercharged golf cart, flogging product.

Driving and strolling, we passed scores of still-open eateries within a kilometer or two, with the tortilliera in the middle. Here, shopkeepers and cooks needn't go to market for fresh supplies during the day -- the market comes to the customers. Fresh product constantly. The tortilla guy, the veggie van, the fish wagon, all go rolling by. And a guy with a guitar keeps strolling by, trolling for an audience.

Scores of eateries, all with nearly identical menus and prices; and like the hostelries, all seeming costlier and shabbier and less distinctive that those on Lake Atitlan at Panajashel, Guatemala, or even some of the more tawdry seaside strips stateside. Like cable TV: 500 channels but they're all the same. Or worse. How to choose?

WHY ARE WE HERE? Adam Gopnik writes in PARIS TO THE MOON, "There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it." The pictures in Maureen's head are of Mayan pyramids and tropical beaches, and she wants to be in those pictures, down in the lowlands. I visualize mountains and villages and colonial towns, festivals in thinner air. This marginal coast is almost out of the frame for both of us, so what do we see? Gray waves are crashing in. The gulls have shut up.

Evening: Thunderstorm; most shops and eateries have shut down. Something is burning nearby. More US tourists arrive. We have a fabulous cheap dinner of Mariscos Barbacoa (spicy-sauced seafood). The family that runs this place offered to sell me their cute but troublesome teenage daughter; too bad we're short on cash. The moon is high. The ocean is quieter. We can't find those little vanilla cigars now. G'night.

DIA NUEVE:
Friday 25 Feb 2005, B. Sebastian de Aparicio
Chachalacas, Veracruz - evening.

This morning we sped west up the mountain to Xalapa, 1/2 million people in the state capital of Veracruz. Elevation there is at least several thousand feet -- it's much cooler than the coast, and much busier.

Maureen says she saw a man walking the Veracruz-Xalapa road. His genitals were exposed ("his dong was hanging out!") and a very large snake was draped over his shoulder.

Otherwise on the roads, the usual vendors. But with traffic stopped (as usual) at a light in Xalapa, a young woman juggled bowling pins, running between the lines of cars and busses. G'z, I love university towns! (Yeah, we gave her ten pesos.)

Xalapa feels like a cross between Antigua Guatemala and San Francisco, California, but the weather and traffic place it in the heart of Seattle, Washington. Fog and rain and snarled roads. No vistas at the alleged vista points. Bother.

MAX: Our goal was the Anthropological Museum (MAX: Museo Anthro Xalapa), and what a treat it is! Tremendous displays of mostly carvings and much pottery -- giant Olmec heads, looming Aztec stelae, temple carvings and friezes, representations of people and gods and animals and spirits, tools and toys and musical instruments, all clearly exposed in expansive rooms like clean caves and in stunning garderns. Five hours there, 400 pictures snapped, and we don't nearly feel satisfied. We must return someday.

(Much of the domestic pottery looks suspiciously like pieces offered in the markets of Mexico and Guatemala. Methinks the replicators have chosen original sources.)

In fact, Xalapa is the most pleasant large city we've seen in quite a while. Like Antigua, it's tempting to return, to rent a place for a few weeks, to really dig in and explore the cityscape. And sample all the local foods, of course.

We lunched sinfully cheaply at Pollo Express, then circled forever in dense traffic til we found a parking place for our other rain-day goal, a gallery supposedly dedicated to many experimental works by Diego Rivera. But all those works were gone touring, replaced by installations of modern minimalist ceramics. Oh well, we only paid 5 pesos each to get in, and they were better ceramics than those produced by the crafters of Bisbee, Arizona.

We walked upstairs to the main hillside parque, next to the city and state capitals and the tatty cathedral. Alas, as I said, there were no great vistas of mountain and sky, but we looked down into a colonial city with modern extensions. Then we splashed around downtown, through the arcades and bazaars and those little callejons (alleys) each bearing a gory romantic legend. And then we fought our way through Friday rush-hour traffic to get the hell out of town.

ESCAPE: Skipping the cuata (toll road), the approach to and from Xalapa runs through hilly farmland and a few villages laden with the jungle's treasures: liqueurs and coffees and coconuts, fruits and woods and honey. But somehow on the descent we were spun off onta a side road in a different direction, through corn- and cane-fields and tropical orchards, almost to the outskirts of Veracruz.

Workers in one village labored on a green dragon float for some upcoming festival parade. In another town, kids and dogs ran playfully thru the clean streets -- which dead-ended in stubbly canefields. We painfully crossed several tiny hand-made one-lane bridges over swamps, half-expecting crocodiles to snap at us. Very old trucks driven by very young men, loaded sky-high with immense piles of sugar cane, wove and wobbled around bends and over bumps. Mounds of cane litter burned at streets' edges in the towns.

We eventually found our way back to Chachalacas, and the place is jumping now. Hey, it's Friday night! Families from Mexico city head to the nearest seaside resort for the weekend, and this is it. Good thing we're leaving tomorrow. It's time to amble towards Yucatan.

DIA DIEZ:
Saturday 26 Feb 2005, San Alejandro
San Andres Tuxtla, Veracruz - late afternoon.

Another leave-before-they-find-the-toilet-clogged run this morning, from.cheezy Chachalacas to zany Zempoala. Ok, so it's not exactly zany, but it's a lively enough place on a Saturday morning, and it has Totonac tuins -- chopped pyramids and temples and ball courts, not restored on the same scale as El Tejin but it's still rather impressive. The TEMPLE OF DEATH needs a bit of F/X work before it's included in the next Indiana Jones movie.

Naturally there's a knick-knack shop, and vendors in the shade outside. From one such, I bought my first souvenir, a clay reproduction of a stylized coyotl stamp, or so the fellow said. We didn't see one like it in the MAX (Museo Anthropologico Xalapa) yesterday, but it has a nice antique feel to it. Thirty pesos.

VERACRUZ: Our next stop was the big (half-million habitantes) port city of Veracruz. We strolled sweatily on the malecon (waterfront promenade) through the Artesan's Market, said artesans seemingly specializing in 1) local liqueurs and cigars, 2) rude T-shirts and funny clothes, and 3) mass-produced Chinese crap. Ah, it's so much like Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco...

(We are told that many Mexicans despise handcrafts, preferring mass-market stuff.)

We drove around the zocalos in the downtown commercial district, which was modern and boring. We skipped the local museums, which chronicle the city's numerous invasions over the centuries. We just drove south for miles along the waterfront, savoring the air.

Somewhere south of Veracruz, a subtle change in the environment as some of the more northern vegetation faded away, replaced by scrubby palms and brightly-flowering trees. It's difficult to discern the original vegetation, as much of this land was cleared for tobacco and cattle ranching many centuries ago.

ALVARADO: We drove the coast road, eventually across overgrown long sand spits (which encompass a large brackish lagoon) through the large town of Alvarado. Roadside vendors along here expand on the usual offerings with mangos, papayas, pineapples, coconuts, and vast arrays of shellfish and other seafood, cheap. We were *so* tempted by the prospect of a dozen oysters for 45 US cents.

(A note on Alvarado: it's a rare name on Mexican maps. Alvarado mutinied against Cortez and conquered-plundered Guatemala. THE PEOPLE'S GUIDE TO MEXICO says that you can tell who the "good guys" are because they have cities, highways, parks etc named after them -- and "bad guys" don't. Other rare names besides Alvarado are Porfirio Diaz and Cortez.)

LOS TUXTLAS: Before us looms today's goal, the southern Veracruz sierra area known as Los Tuxtlas. (The tourist sheet says VISIT VERACRUZ'S SWITZERLAND!) Elevated above the coastal lowland heat are the towns of Santiago Tuxtla (the old home), San Andres Tuxtla (the commercial center), and Catemaco (the ecotourism magnet), as well as surrounding volcanoes, eco-preserves, etc.

Catemaco features an eco-park and large upland freshwater lagoon (with an island populated by mandrill baboons) where the Sean Connery movie MEDICINE MAN was filmed. We'll get there tomorrow.

We walked around the zocalo in Santiago Tuxtla, ogled the largest known Olmec head, listened to musicians and birds, and rolled on. Now we're ensconsed in a slightly overpriced room at the Hotel Figueroa in San Andres Tuxtla, showered and ready to stomp around town this Saturday night.

LATE EVENING: Ok, so we walked around town, fed moderately in a tiny comedor next to a TV blaring the adventures of that little guy who wears a bee costume, then walked around some more -- the zocalo, the cathedral, the streets lined with more shoe shops than is moral, etc. I hate to say it, but these Mexican hill towns are starting to look alike. Maybe I'm just jaded...

DIA ONCE:
Sunday 27 Feb 2005, Gabriel de la Dolorosa
Comalcalco, Tobasco - evening.

In San Andres Tuxtla, the first rooms we were shown at the Hotel Figueroa had neither fan nor toilet seat. Perhaps this was a ploy to lure us into the 'best' (costliest) room in the house. Whatever. The noisy overhead fan strobed us with light, the door didn't lock securely, yet still we slept. with only a few bug bites as memementos.

When a small child, I had a big black loveable cat named Figueroa aka Figgy. This hotel was no Figgy. We escaped non-Figgy without clogging the toilet, escaped San Andres Tuxtla (becoming only slightly lost in the process), and drove a short twisty mountain way to the lakeside resort of Catemaco.

CATEMACO: Lago de Catemaco is somewhat like (but cleaner than) Guatemala's Lake Atitlan, which is somewhat like (but smaller and with volcanos instead of snow) Lake Tahoe, except that the malecon (promenade) is infested with hundreds of boatmen jumping into traffic yelling "Lancha! Lancha!" trying to rope in passengers for expensive rides around Monkey Island (Isla Mono - remember the mandrill baboons I mentioned?) and avoiding the droppings of spectacular birds.

The lake is lovely. It looks like a volcanic caldera, a Crater Lake in the tropics, with some good-sized islands. A thin mist swirled past the flowering trees and screaming birds. Saturated light muted the signs advertising lakeside establishments and the brujos and brujas (wizards and witches), The atmosphere sighs and soothes.

The lake is circled with small villages, cattle ranches, and tropical plant nurseries. Our morning goal was an "ecological preserve" which turned out to be a sort of commercial resort / theme park. Nanciyaga includes the world's most northerly tropical rain forest, developed as a newageland for crystal gazers.

NANCIYAGA: We paid our admission and were assigned a lovely young tour guide, who gave us a xeroxed English translation of her spiel. Ysabel led us through the jungle on paved trails, pointing out the holy sites, reproduced pre-conquest sculptures, guest facilities, mud pit, and captive crocodile.

Maureen's face was smeared with holy mud; my spirit was hoovered, er cleansed by a shamaness; these, and Ysabel herself, cost extra. As a souvenir of my cleansing, I was given a small clay Olmec happy-face. If we wanted to wait a couple days, we could experience the witchcraft festival. For an extra charge, of course.

(How does one say SUCKER in Spanish? Try BOBOSO, drooling fool.)

We skipped the (discounted) lancha ride around Isla Mono, having already blown half the day's budget, and drove down the mountain, out of the rain forest and onto the vast tropical flatlands of the Yucatan Peninsula. Finally!

SMOKING: On the way down we drove past great obsidian cliffs -- amazing! Harvested canefields were being burnt; the fire and smoke roiling over us were also amazing, in a rather more frightening way.

We reached bottom at the oil refinery town of Acayucan, near the northern edge of the Istmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico. We drove through dead-end cities and one-burro villages, past tens of thousands walking to and from church. We learned a painful lunchtime lesson: agree on price BEFORE eating. And we drove and drove across Tobasco.

TOBASCO: (Tobasco state has absolutely nothing to do with Tobasco sauce. But you already knew that, right?)

Our plan was to stay the night in the beach town of Paraiso, supposedly a windy resort near the sweltering state capital of Villahermosa. We instead found a booming oil center with immense bustle and prices, so we headed inland slightly. We're at a bus-stop hotel in Comalcalco, noisy but almost tolerable when the air conditioning (in which resides at least one iguana) is turned up full. Tomorrow: the unique Mayan ruins nearby. And then we head for Palenque!

LATER: The room and beds are quite comfortable, the location is incredibly noisy. When the traffic lulls, we hear strange piping music reverberating in the airwell outside the shower. We're parked across the street, under our window. The licence plates are still on the car. We're still healthy. Pepto does the trick!

We study the Central America guidebooks, trying to plan a month ahead. Maybe Belize is too expensive to lay over for Semana Santa (Easter Week) when the rest of Latin America goes nuts. Maybe Honduras is the low-cost option, but when? We MUST keep expenses down.

DIA DOCE:
Monday 28 February 2005, San Roman
Palenque, Chiapas - evening.

As the traffic noise in Comalcalco increased, I rose from the arms of slumber and peer from the nameless hotel. Our car was still in the street, complete with license plates and hubcaps. Buses the size of small Winnebagos chugged by. Vendors were setting-up pineapples on display in pickups across the street. Pedestrians poured from the centro a half-klick away. The highway at the corner was a blur of mechanical ingenuity. Another day had begun.

We whiled away half the sticky morning til opening time, then rushed through the gates of the Comalcalco archaeological site. A small, good museum -- we've learned that this site is extraordinarily unique, founded by a seafaring Mayan group with links all over ancient MesoAmerica. There are no stones nearby for pyramid building, as at other sites. Instead, they baked thin clay bricks. This is the ONLY KNOWN PLACE in the pre-Conquest Americas where such technology exists. And the bricks bear marks similar to those inscribed by Roman brickmakers. Some ascribe this to ancient trans-oceanic contacts, or even to Atlantis.

No large rocks nearby -- that just means more work. Huge volcanic basalt columns were hauled many miles from the Tuxtlas to northern Tabasco's Olmec and Mayan sites. Other big rocks were schlepped long distances to adorn these temples in the mud. Must have had help from ancient Egyptians or ET aliens, eh?

It's an inauspicious walk in a French-park-like setting to the site. Mosquitos drain our vital fluids. Asauna ambience pervades, and this is the cool season.

Then we clear the trees, and the pyrabids and temples and residenses rise, and rise, around and above a stadium's space. We marvel at this millennial construction, and climb and climb, up a couple hundred feet above the jungle floor. Flat inhabited lands stretch tol the horizon, and still these flat-brick structures rise. And only a small area has been excavated; most is teill overgrown and hidden by jungle and time.

This is a truly special place; even the mosquitos fall away from the windy top. But the air thickens as we descend and trudge quickly back to the air-conditioned car. A slug of Gatorade, and we're off!

It's Monday. School lets out at noon. The road, carved from the thick jungle, swarms with students walking home, dodging the anarchic traffic. Stateside driving laws are strictly enforced by state and local police; here, Newton and arbitrary deities have the final say.

After looking around the wrong parts of booming Villahermosa, we accidentally found our next goal, right next to the main highway. Parque-Museo La Venta features 33 Olmec sculptures rescued by a poet from petroleum exploration many decades ago. The setting is an outdoor museum, a 1-kilometer-long trail winding through jungle and a zoo, part enclosed, part open. Spider monkeys swing overhead; a coatimundi flock scurries past and swirls around, dozens of fuzzy critters foraging and nuzzling and playing and coming to listen to human voices. The effect is spectacular, with new wonders at every turn in this world-class space.

In the gift shop, I bought my second souvenir, an elegant carved gourd -- 32 pesos, just under three bucks. Maureen bought a straw hat and some local chocolate.

We stepped into the attached snack bar for tacos and soda. The snack bar is immediately adjacent to the jaguar pen, separated only by a window. The pregnant female is sleepy in the midday heat, two feet from the window. The restless male prowls out to the open, back into the shade, butts against his mate. She snaps at him; he prowls again, returns. She rolls over. He settle onto her head for some oral sex -- a jaguar blowjob. The tacos are nearly forgotten.

By now it's late afternoon; the day is shot, and it's still a long way to Maya Palenque. We dash eastward -- well, we would have dashed, if the road weren't being rebuilt, heavy traffic queued in a single lane, slowed by topes. The new unfinished lanes are well-used by cowboys, bicyclists and joggers.

The sky is darkening, obscured. Is that smoke? No; it's rain, lots and lots of rain. A real gully-washer or three. Our last hour into Palenque is driven in deluged darkness, dodging trucks and flooding and fate. Soaked horsement and pedestrians appear by the roadside. The country is invisible.

We drive through Palenque village and out to the ruins, looking for lodging. Our choices seem limited to luxury resorts or backpackers' specials ("Just hang your hammock over there, the mosquitos await you"). But we finally find a quiet, reasonable hacienda, the Hotel Posada Margarita. Maybe we'll stay a few days.

DIA TRECE:
Tuesday 1 March 2005, San Albino
  and Malaria Tuesday
Palenque, Chiapas - evening.

A down day, a lay-around-the-room morning, a wander-around-town afternoon, an early evening. Somewhere noonish we negotiated with the landlord a good rate for four nights, then went to town for orientation and lunch and internet and shopping. All was accomplished.

I look at Palenque town; and I remember other Mexican towns, and Panajaschel, Guatemala. And I ask myself: if I forget all that, and look at Palenque with fresh eyes, could I ever convince myself that this is an exciting or interesting or spirited place?

The answer is, no. Palenque town is charmless, exploited and oh so *instante* -- almost nothing seems more than 10-20 years old, and thoroughly worn in that time. Moldy concrete ages badly. We're glad that we're staying out of town.

We plan to spend the next few mornings exploring the ruins, the next few afternoons lying low from the heat and humidity. We'll be here long enough that we've bothered to unpack more goodies from the car, turn the room into a mini-home. Set out all the travel books and some other literature; plug the powered speakers into a computer, as well as the external hard disk; play some of those gigabytes of MP3s I napstered off the net a couple years ago. Old jazz, new age, hula, techno, opera, lounge, blues, tango. Now we need to get some local CDs.

DIA CATORCE:
Wednesday 2 March 2005, San Federico
Palenque, Chiapas
_{(transcribed from tape)}

MORNING: We arrive at the Parque National Palenque entrance just after opening time. The smallish parking lot is filled with tourist buses and passengers, vendors and would-be guides. We push through the crowds, through the trees, and immediately we're overwhelmed by the first great temples, and then the palace. The temples: so vertical. And the palace: such a maze, upper and lower levels. We descend down into the catacombs (which are actually steam baths). We eventually emerge.

Guides are guiding in many languages: French, German, Russian, English, Spanish, Italian. Mayans are set-up all about with craftwork, the usual piles of mostly blindingly exquisite stuff, but most of this is hand- or machine-batched reproductions of same-same temple art.

The sun's a cooker, even now at nine in the morning, and we'vebeen wandering around here for an hour already...

Now it's 10:00. I'm sitting in the shade on cool stone at the top of the Temple of the Cross. The Temple of the Foliated Cross is behind me. I look down on the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Inscriptions, the Palace, and beyond, over the great fuzzy pool table of the Yucatan. From this height, I feel I'm overseeing a vast domain.

The temples are mostly decayed gray limestone; some portions, like the crest of the Temple of the Inscriptions are burnished. The Palace's tower looks fresher also. The Temple of the Sun is topped with marvelous billboard-sized crestwork. Beside it are lesser, broken temples..

Looking at the Palace, I see tourists crawling around the upper structure, crawling out of the catacombs, just as we did recently. But now I have the deity's-eye-view, and they're all just ants. ANTS! This place is swarming with HUMAN ANTS! And likely some uncles too. HaHaHa.

Now I'm back down from the Temple of the Cross. I was boxed in on a narrow ledge, tourists from all lands on all sides of me, so I had to scramble down a sheer stone wall, a six-foot drop. No problem. I heard yelling sounds from the forest to the north; then a troop of kids came running out, I thought it was them. But Maureen says it's HOWLER MONKEYS!

Other sites that we warmed up on -- El Tajin and Comalcalco -- are large and impressive, but Palenque's a HEAD-THUMPER! Right at the edge of moderate mountains, clawed from the jungle -- a mighty metropolis, Rome in the rough. The LET'S GO! guide says the absolute best of the Mayan ruins are Copan in Honduras, Tikal in Guatemala, and this right here, Palenque. And who am I to argue?

The international tourists are amusing, dressed from scruffy to formal, from Rasta to LL Bean and beyond. I especially love the French girls in cocktail dresses and sandals, out for a stylish jaunt in the jungle.

AFTERNOON: The guidebook says finding a reasonable meal in Palenque is about as easy as explaining why the Mayan Empire collapsed; yet, we managed it. (Hint: stay away from the centro; and consider the downside of slash-and-burn agriculture.) (Stay tuned for notes on how to stay stuffed and healthy for a pittance. Maybe.)

Meanwhile, stuffed and tired, we returned to our modest posada for an afternoon of lethargy. What, there's NOTHING ELSE TO DO TODAY ?!?!?!? We can't let THAT happen again, at least not until tomorrow at this time.

EVENING: At the official Palenque giftshop today we bought some good-sized ceramics for unbelievably low prices: a Mayan boogeyman, a stylish dog piggybank, and a couple of large doves for the Bisbee garden. But since lunch it's just been a layabout for us. Climbing pyramids is hard, and there's more of that tomorrow.

DIA QUINCE:
Thursday 3 March 2005, San Emeterio
Palenque, Chiapas - late afternoon.

Back out to the ruinas this morning, earlier than yesterday, which must have been Tour Bus Day because there are hardly any today. Damn, we can't climb the Temple of the Inscriptions, it's closed during peak time. Come back at 3:30 this afternoon, senor, when the sun is at its deadliest. Yeah sure...

Clamber back up the Temple of the Cross, with Maureen this time. The Palace and Plaza aren't crawling with so many tourists, who actually managed to provide a sense of scale to this huge old place. And it's old and dead, it FEELS dead, you can sense that it's been vacant for a long time.

Besides the modern Mayas, this area is also inhabited by the Lacondon people, described as "stone-age folk wearing long white robes and black shoes." We've seen a few around. They're known for making arrows for tourists, among other things. Maureen couldn't resist a nice bow-and-arrow set for 50 pesos. When we get back to the states, watch out!

Climbing pyramids is REALLY hard work for us old farts, and afternoons are hotter here, so after lunch we just flaked out again. Tomorrow, we're off to Campeche.