Palenque, Mayan ruins number three

Our first night in Palenque we arranged to meet Sarah for dinner in a local restaurant called Las Tinajas, and spent the late afternoon sorting out money and having a drink on the main plaza (which at dusk was invaded by thousands of squawking birds).

The meal in Las Tinajas was probably the best Mexican meal I've ever tasted, and the salsa sauce was one of the tastiest and hottest I've ever tried too. We all ordered local Mexican stuff, and it was all gorgeous.

Next morning, not too early, we got a minibus from just outside our hostel to the ruins of Palenque, only 8kms away. We paid the cheap entrance fee (the cheapest by far of all the Mayan ruins we've visited), and strolled about the site. Again all extremely impressive, and quite different from both Copan and Tikal. The setting here is fantastic, set in dense jungle, and this time we got great views of the resident howler monkeys. The sound these monkeys make really is incredible - I reckon it sounds exactly like nasty zombies in a horror movie or something, all very eerie and not a little disconcerting, and all extremely loud! (In fact, according to Wikipedia '...they are considered the loudest land animal. According to Guinness Book of World Records, it can be heard clearly for 3 miles.')

The weather was back to being spectacular again, and luckily this site isn't so large or spread out. So we took long leisurely rest stops atop temples and palaces, and just took our time ambling about (and eating our packed sandwiches from the top of the Temple of the Cross, the highest structure there, looking out over the ruins and the dense jungle all around us). One small criticism I would have about Palenque though is the number of hawkers allowed to push their wares inside the site itself (at the other Mayan sites the hawkers are all kept outside the gates). They were all over the place, all selling the same stuff, and it seemed a bit of a desecration of the ancient sacred site.

Anyway, on our way out of the ruins we visited the museum. Everything here was impressive, some of it extremely so, but the highlight by far for me was the amazingly huge and intricately carved stone sarcophagus of one of the greatest Maya rulers. It was beautifully presented I must say and certainly the single most impressive artifact of all the sites we visited.

Later that night we meet up with Sarah again, and a Turkish guy who was also on our trip from Tikal, and went for dinner in another guidebook recommended restaurant, La Selva. This time though the food was disappointingly mediocre, so of course the books don't always get it right.

That night we booked our last major bus ride up to the town of Puebla, from where we fly up to Tijuana. The bus was at 7pm though, so the next day we had a nice long lie-in and I spent most of the day using the Internet trying to organise our next major leg of this trip to Asia.