It's a misty morning here in Palenque, like most, I suspect. The air is saturated with moisture, and everything always feels a bit clammy, nothing wet dries easily. This is wonderful for skin and hair but not so great for clothes, towels, and things that need to be maintained, which we can see here in our small hotel, the Casssa Vlanca (no, this is not a spelling mistake).
We just returned from a short walk to the plaza to the Café Ajau, a small coffee place our wonderful host Fatima told us about. For various reasons I've had to miss out on my coffee for the last three days, and the day before all I could find was a cup of hot water with a greasy jar of nescafé on the street in Xpujil. I feel refreshed and restored and ready to write about the experiences of the last little while – except that we'll be off to the day's adventures soon.
We left Xpujil two days ago, our 'Ahorro' bus card charged the evening before for the ride to Escárcega with 'Autobus Sur': the ticket agent at the bus terminal told us that busses were leaving at five, nine and eleven in the morning. We arrived at the little terminal with plenty of time to spare, and, just to make sure, I asked the agent – a different one than the night before – if the time had changed. No, he said, nueve, aqui (nine o'clock, here). Two ADO busses left, and with them almost all of the people waiting, only a couple remained. A woman asked where we were going and advised us that the bus wasn't going at nine but at nine-thirty, and it wasn't 'Sur' but 'Caribe'. If the information we found online the night before was correct, a bus of the biggest Mexican bus company, ADO, was leaving Escárcega for Palenque at 1:30 pm, and we did have hopes of catching it – though with every half hour later that once again became more uncertain. Still, when the bus arrived at 9:40 we were reassured: this should be possible. The nerve of the ticket agents still irked us: to charge our bus card for the 'Sur' bus the night before when there was none, to tell us that it would arrive at nine when that most certainly wasn't the case, and a fellow passenger knew it – it's hard to fathom what to believe and how to make any reliable plans.
Of course the 'Ahorro' bus card didn't work with 'Caribe', and we paid in cash, which is not a big deal but certainly not right. This time we had landed on a 'chicken bus', not literally, mind you, but for sure the least comfortable of the busses we had used so far, used by the local population, many of them just to get to a bus stop or two or three further from Xpujil. There were several mothers with young children, and once again I marvelled how little fuss those kids made. They sat beside their moms, sometimes three siblings under the age of six, hardly made any noise, just sat on that bus like us adults, being rocked back and forth, sometimes dozing off. I thought of children in Canada or Germany, how toys would have appeared from bags, colouring pads and pens, snacks ... How is it that things are so different here? I don't think that these kids had no toys, though likely by far not as many as in our culture, but they are self-contained, and maybe this is what is expected of them. Moms are calm; I haven't yet encountered a situation where one raised her voice – or a dad, for that matter.
The bus driver was a potential race car driver, and at times I almost felt a bit uneasy when he took the bumps and potholes at his regular speed, but he did get us to Escárcega in good time: if indeed the ADO bus was leaving at the posted time we would have no trouble walking from the general bus terminal in town to the ADO one, a bit more than a kilometre away. Wiping the sweat off our brows -it was a hot walk in the midday sun - we waited in line at the ticket counter and, greatly relieved, got our tickets to Palenque, a ride of about three and a half hours.
This time the landscape was reminiscent of the Bolivian pampa. Far and wide huge pastures stretched in all directions, herds of sleek cows grazing, some with the huge heads, hanging ears and wattle typical for Brahma cattle in white, brown, tan and anything between, tended by flocks of white egrets. Gates opened to long lanes leading to estancias with cattle handling facilities: this obviously is the ranching area of the Yucatán. From time to time we passed a small banana or papaya plantation, and everywhere was water: rivers, lakes, watering holes, but water standing in pastures and fields, big puddles in driveways, too. The thundershowers that we experienced in Xpujil the night before must have passed through here as bigger storms. No wonder it is so green!
Of course the arrival time of five pm was approximate again, and by the time we reached Palenque it was close to six. We hadn't dared to book a hotel earlier before we had no idea if we really would reach it that evening, and to our delight (and some relief) the bus station in Palenque had good internet. We quickly checked the places we had found on booking.com in the morning and decided on a reasonably priced one close to the centre of town. Walking in the dark in a strange town without a complete understanding where we needed to be didn't seem like such a good idea, and we hailed a taxi to take us to the “Casssa Vlanca”, our chosen destination.
We were welcomed by a very friendly woman who, almost before we had properly checked in, proceded to show us a wonderfully detailed map of the town and its surroundings and pointed out everything and anything that could be of interest to us, marking each with a different colour of felt marker she pulled from a plastic bag. The Casssa Vlanca is an older hotel, and while it has everything we need – a good bed, a bathroom with hot water, very good internet – it is certainly past its prime, and, while clean, not the kind of clean newer hotels often boast. What it lacked in modern stylishness it more than made up in other attributes: the warm welcome alone would have made this a worthwhile place to stay. It was the first time that I understood almost everything we were told in Spanish, but to make sure that we really had understood, and in case we had any more questions, our hostess's daughter was summoned who speaks an amazingly good English, as does the son, as we found out later. What a lucky break! This is so rare, and it just feels good to be able to ask questions that for sure are understood. Fatima, the mom, and her daughter and son run the small hotel together, and with the asset of the young people speaking English they often have guests from abroad.
We looked at the key: room number 71. “How many rooms do you have,” we asked Valeria, the daughter, surprised since the place looks quite small. “Eight,” she smiled. “My mom is obsessed with the number 7.” It happens to be a number I like as well, for whatever reason, and Fatima was pleased when I told her.
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By now it is Wednesday afternoon, December 6, St. Nicholas's Day, which seems rather far away here. After a wonderful visit to the Palenque archaeological zone yesterday we've had a quieter day today, with a visit to a magnificent waterfall in the morning, about twenty-five minutes away by colectivo and a nice long siesta. I haven't been able to write anything about the amazing Maya sites we have experienced on this trip, a problem I've encountered before when reporting on a lot of facts is required, but after a great guided tour yesterday I will try to talk about Palenque later.
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