 En route to Palenque, visited the Mayan city of El Ceibal, two hours by boat up the Rio Pasion, and completely buried by jungle, save for a few excavated structures and stelae. What you see here is one of the few excavated temples surrounded by thatch-sheltered stelae. | |
| Also en route to Palenque, spent a few days in Sayaxche, a ramshackle river port deep in the jungle, existing solely to ferry traffic across the river. |  |
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Still en route to Palenque, I missed a river barge in Sayaxche, then two buses, but finally, after a lift from a stranger and a four hour wait at a dusty agricultural crossroads, I managed to catch this bus. It melted an axle casing just south of NOWHERE, Guatemala. Night arrived shortly after this picture was taken. |
| Palace Tower at Palenque. |  |
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Palenque. |
Palace of Palenque. | |
 Palace of Palenque. | |
| Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque. |  |
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Palenque. |
| Palenque. |  |
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Returned to Guatemala from Palenque, México via a northern route up river on the Rio San Pedro with a friend from New Zealand. One hour into our journey, at 8:30 in the am, we found ourselves stuck in the backwater river village of La Palma, Mexico where absolutely nothing was going on except for a group of morning fisherman who drank heavily from roughly 9:00 to 3:30, and let me tell you, that got about as sloppy as you could imagine. Not knowing whether a boat would arrive that day or not, we napped, and waited, and napped some more. Finally, after waiting and napping until 3:30 in the pm, a boat did arrive, and thus we began the breathtakingly beautiful and occasionally hair-raising journey up the Rio San Pedro. |
| Journey on the Rio San Pedro. |  |
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Journey on the Rio San Pedro. Can you see the huge stork in the middle of the picture? (look at the treeline) The river was patrolled by loads of these graceful birds and many others. |
| Journey on the Rio San Pedro, dusk approaching. We would ultimately travel on the river for 20 minutes in dangerous pitch-black visibility. Our reward was a night in El Naranjo, an extremely remote agricultural hub. Power from 6:00 to 11:00 pm only. One main street of course, with five brothels and several pool halls, lined with rough and drunk cowboys and patrolled by packs of hungry dogs. We arrived around 7:00. The next bus didn’t leave until 1:00 am, and NO ONE would be driving out until morning. I will skip several stories of that five hour eternity and tell you simply that the room we napped in cost $1.50, had huge roaches, ants and blood stains on the wall. We were not sad to be on the 1:00 bus out! |  |