Aug 2 - Palenque

Our journey to the famous Mayan city nestled in the jungle began early. Our bus was 15 minutes late, leaving at 7:30. Just as we began to fall asleep, about an hour on the road, the driver stopped and informed the predominantly non-Mexican bus (in Spanish a 5 year old Mexican could understand) that "the brakes.. very little." For some reason that I'll never understand, we then drove all the way back to San Cristobal, apparently with "few" brakes. We made it safely and waited about 10 minutes for a new bus.

The bus stopped at the halfway point, a small town called Ocosingo (which also has some ruins), for a 15 minute food break at the bus station (cheap tortas and tamales... mmm). Our arrival in Palenque came around 2:45; it was a long day of tortuous mountain roads. We found a colectivo near the station to take us (for 10 pesos) back along the main road to El Panchan, a complex of hotels and restaurants in the jungle near the ruins that we had heard good things about. We walked through the complex past several restaurants and cabana places, arriving at last at Margarita and Ed's.

Here we nabbed the last room with AC for 360 pesos. The room was really nice with a private bath; it would easily be $200 in the U.S. After waiting out the short but incredibly powerful rain that we just barely missed, We went to one of the restaurants at El Panchan called Don Mucho's and ordered way too much delicious food. We went to bed exhausted after using the on-site Internet cafe for a while.