Day 10-11, Palenque ( The Pakal Kingdom ruins )

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Photo Album: Plenque photo album

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To catch the bus from San Cristobal to Palenque, meant that we have to walk about 1 Km to the bus station with all of our bags.  The training at home with a 15 Kg load showed its benefit here.

With medication, I slept though the 6  hours daytime trip, which is only 220 Km, but an unrelenting winding trip.

However, upon arrival, a taco dinner with a Bauhinia drink, helped us to refresh and ready to get into the forest early the next morning.

Palenque is a smaller, and also dirtier town, then Puebla and/or Oaxaca, and it was hot and humid, being surrounded by rain forests.

We had an early start for a walk through the rain forests surrounding the Palenque ruin.  Based on remote sensing data from NASA, there are thousands of Mayan temples buried in the rain forests.

Here is one that we explored...with a resident bat.

It seems that at some stage, the once rich culture of Maya was decimated, probably due to the lack of bees, therefore, causing  systemic famine.  Where the jungle is now, was during the Mayan time, about 2000+ years ago, voided of vegetation, due to human  settlement and deforestation.

Ain’t that a lesson we should heed...

We were led to see the “prototype” of the main temple in the Palenque Ruin which we were to visit later in the morning, which itself is pretty dilapidated.  It is believed that this was a Beta Testing version of the real thing.

Continued on, we were led into the Plenque Ruin, a large constellation of Royal temples and Palaces of the Pakal era.

Palenque was a Maya city state in southern Mexico that flourished in the 7th century. The Palenque ruins date back to 226 BC to around 799 AD....( here is the Wikipedia link for more authoritative information.

The tomb of King Pakal’s mother was discovered in 1952, and was opened for visitation, besides the main tomb of the King.

The Royal Mother's tomb

And King Pakal's tomb.

King Pakal's Tomb

King Pakal's Tomb

And the Royal Palaces with its rooms, water system, toilets, courts etc.

And the tombs for the sons

and the calendar that got the World into a spin at the end of 2012....the Armageddon end!

A nice dinner was organised by our tour leader at a restaurant in the jungle, which we all had a good meal.

By this stage, I was beginning to feel  the onset of a stomach upset....likewise others too.  The Taco dinner the night before was probably the guilty party.

Next Post: Merida ( Cave swims & a Mexican Birthday BASH )

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