Holbox to Merida to Palenque

A couple days of whirlwind travel, but now I am settled in for a bit in the charming colonial city of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, southwest Mexico.

Let me see, I last wrote from Isla Holbox. We sadly had to move on from there on Saturday. We were thinking we could just stay one more night, but every hostel/hotel on the island was fully booked! I guess because of carnaval and also because it was Saturday. We left on the ferry and transferred to the first of 3 buses on our way to Merida. We arrived in Merida at 10 pm, to a fantastic hostel right on the main plaza. The architecture is old colonial spanish, and Merida is a much larger city than I had been in thus far. The hostel was called hostal el zocalo, and it was in one of the old buildings. I really loved this hostel, I think we were spoiled by it. It was like $8 a night for a really comfortable bed, a good shower, and the most amazing breakfast. Usually hostel breakfasts involve bread and coffee, maybe a juice or piece of fruit. Not this one. They had a massive buffet of every kind of fruit, then cereal, bread, yogurt, coffee... and they made us omletes!!! We probably ate $8 worth of food. 

There was another carnaval happening in Merida, and we considered going. It happened on a fairgrounds outside the city, and they had free buses from the centre. We went to the bus stop and saw hundreds of people waiting there. So we decided against it. Apparently the fairgrounds capacity was 50,000! The city was crowded enough for me. But because of the carnaval parts of the city were completely empty, so we had a lovely walk down an avenue lined with massive colonial mansions, and through the colonial centre. 

The next day we took the bus to the ruins of Uxmal, about an hour and a half away. These ruins are about 1500 years old, as opposed to the 3000 year old ruins at Coba, so a lot of the carvings were still visible, and the structures were less crumbling. It was very impressive, because the pyramids and other  buildings were close to one another, so you could climb to the top of one pyramid and see the whole site. We spent the afternoon relaxing in the courtyard of a cafe, and then we prepared for our night bus to Palenque.

Palenque is another ruin site, but it is in the middle of the jungle. We arrived at 4 am to our cabana site near the Palenque park, and we couldn't find anybody so we prepared to sit on a hard bench outside reception for 3 or 4 hours. Then we heard snoring, but we couldnt figure out from where. We looked into the dark reception office and saw someone sleeping on the floor! We woke him up and he got us to our cabana where we slept for 3 hours. Well I probably slept one hour. The birds and howler monkeys started to make a racket around 5. We had breakfast in "El Pachan" which is the collective name for the assortment of hostels and cabanas near the park. There was a tour office there advertising tours to some waterfalls so we went to ask about it. They told us they could take us to some waterfalls and then on to San Cristobal, our next destination. So we decided to do this. The tour left at 12 which gave us 2 1/2 hours to tour the ruins of Palenque, which were the reason we were there. These ruins were even more impressive and picturesque because of the location in the jungle. When you climb the pyramid you can see a great distance because the city was built just at the edge of the mountains. 

From Palenque we visited two waterfalls, one called Agua Azul had very blue water. Hence the name. I am not sure why it is blue, but I intend to look it up. The tour bus met up with a large coach bus and a number of us switched over to get to San Cristobal. The bus ride was supposed to be 5 hours, but in the end it was about 7. The roads are very narrow and very steep, and a trailer had overturned on one curve of the road. So we sat there for almost two hours. We arrived in San Cristobal at 2 am, and rolled into our hostel and fell asleep. Thankfully, no more buses for a few days.