A short side trip to Misol-Ha waterfalls

 

After learning so much at Palenque the day before we decided to take it easy yesterday. There are a few destinations within quite easy reach from here, and the closest one is Misol-Ha, a spectacular waterfall about twenty-five minutes away. 

To get there we walked the fifteen minutes or so to the colectivo station (we found it without difficulty) and waited there until one had accumulated as full a load as possible while still roughly sticking to the time schedule of leaving every 40 minutes or so. The colectivos go to the town of Ocosingo, about 2 1/2 hours away, and if you want to go to Misol-Ha you're just dropped off at the turn-off on the highway. 

We walked a little over a kilometre down the narrow paved road, encountering nobody but two men working with machetes on a steep hillside where corn had been harvested not long before. The older one slashed the weeds (probably a never-ending process in this climate: the annual rainfall is 2,160 mm [85 in]!), the younger one cut down young trees. Before entering the site we had to pay a fee of 20 pesos per person. From a good distance already we could hear the roar of the water, and indeed, the sight that expected us was magnificent. Now, in the rainy season, a torrent of muddy water drops the 30m or so, and by the time we reached the end point of the stone path we were thoroughly wet. In the dry season the amount of water coming down is a lot smaller, of course, and the water is cristal clear, as a young man working as a kind of guard (probably making sure nobody falls in the churning floods, among other things) explained. Then, it is possible to not only walk behind the curtain of water, which sounds quite wonderful from descriptions I have read, but also to swim in the river below – though not too close to – the falls. He offered to take some photos of us and was happy to get a small tip for his troubles.

Since there was not a whole lot more to see and do we turned back after about half an hour and walked back up to the highway. There, we waited for the next colectivo, together with a man who had overtaken us on the way. I was just looking at a small tree with interesting fruits when he passed, and he told me these were wild, but related to papayas, only with smaller fruit, and were eaten here. Another couple of plants I asked him about were unknown to him; he just shrugged and said, 'flores', flowers. 

 

Not long after we arrived at the highway the man flagged down a small pickup with a tarp-covered platform. When they passed us the man waved to us, 'Palenque!'. Sure, this was faster than we had expected. We paid the 50 pesos the driver wanted for each of us (ten more than for the regular collectivo we came in) and climbed in the back which was fitted with two wooden benches. If I understood our fellow traveller correctly this vehicle can be used as a kind of colectivo, but it is also used for hauling freight. This meant he was headed for the mercado, the market, opposite the ADO bus terminal where we arrived, a few hundred metres before the regular colectivo terminal. Once again we had been taken advantage of, paying more for a shorter trip. “Live and learn” or, as a friend of ours is fond of saying, 'too soon old, too late smart.' Indeed. We still haven't learned our lesson: we didn't even haggle for the price, though I'm sure he would have taken us for 40 pesos, too, not that it makes a difference. It's just the principle of the thing.

Other than that, it meant that we got to walk a little further, which is not a bad thing, and the way to the hotel is familiar to us by now.