We met a woman who was swimming in the pool; she and her husband drive to Mexico from near Montpelier, Vermont, every winter and spend two months at the Maya Bell. She calls the campers “the mushroom crowd,” which is as fitting a description as any. We figured we were meant to meet Virginia, and her husband, Herbert, since we had so many intersections in our lives. They live in Vermont, and are active in the Bring the Soldiers Home effort, so we were surprised they didn’t know Nicole. Then she told us that they’re active with the humane society, and she answered a lot of our questions about dogs in Mexico – which are everywhere – and said that every year they take one or two home, and always end up putting them down because they either have incurable heartworm or a disease caused by tick bites that can’t be treated once it is established. Then we found out that Herbert graduated from Cornell, very near my alma mater Wells, and that he was there at about the same time as UBill. They were also the first people we had seen in Mexico, other than each other, who walked their dog on a leash and didn’t just let her run, a beautiful pointer named Moon. They have an ’89 Ford truck, and Herbert surveyed our rig and pronounced it “a beauty,” so we figured we were good to go.
We spent the afternoon touring the Palenque ruins, which are very impressive. We’ve both toured Caracol in Belize and Tikal in Guatemala, and Tom has been to Xanatunich in Belize. Palenque is interesting not only because it’s slightly different since it was a different city, but also because the level of restoration is different, and varies even in the different areas of the ruin. Some of it is as completely restored as possible, and some has been left as archeologists found it. I decided that while I love books about archeology, and love to tour the archeological sites, I’m definitely not patient enough to ever be an archeologist. I can appreciate the “one bite at a time” approach to putting things back together, but putting together entire cities composed of huge stone buildings, when you don’t even have a picture to work from, is way beyond anything I could hope to accomplish. Tom is more patient than I am, and he says he would have a hard time too, so we know it takes a really patient, special type of person to do the work we see at the ruins.
Tom took a video on our still camera, which I hope to post when I figure out how. The video quality is bad, but if you turn up the volume you can hear the howler monkeys. This was the first time on our trip that we’ve heard the howler monkeys and felt that we were in the jungle. It was very eerie, because we had gone to a part of the ruins that have not been restored, and we just happened to be there by ourselves, and the monkeys started. They’re only about 20 to 25 pounds apiece – about Louie size – but they sound like something huge and prehistoric. I read Michael Crichton’s book Congo at the beginning of this trip, and standing in the ruins with the howler monkeys in the background was a very Crichton-esque moment.
When we returned from the ruins, we talked to some of the other people staying in the campground. It was interesting, because most of the tourists we’re meeting on this trip are Canadian; we’re running into very few Americans, which is a shame, because everywhere we’ve been has been not only nice, but very interesting. We parked next to a couple who had shipped their rig via boat from France to Brazil, and were driving around the world. Their rig is a Toyota Land Cruiser with a custom camper module on the back; Tom has determined that when we do our next big tour, this is how we’re doing it, since it’s 4WD and smaller than what we’re driving/pulling, so it could get into almost anywhere. It’s fun to stand around and talk to people; a group of us were talking in some mixture of Spanish, English, French, and a little German, and we all understood what was being said.
Tom's perfect truck, shipped from France and headed around the world
We decided to run to town to get some groceries, which was an adventure in itself. We had foraged when we were on the Emerald Coast, but it was a small town. The actual town of Palenque has turned into a fairly big town, and we were running all over trying to get everything on our list. We were stopping at all the pharmacies to try to get a big band aid for my knee which was oozing, without any luck, and then we went to a store that had some of everything and I got my 10” tortilla press, which is the only thing I wanted to buy to keep from Mexico. We also found a mango stand, where we got a few mangoes for breakfast (which turned out to be absolutely perfect) and a bag of green mango with salt, cayenne, and lime, which is way yummier than it sounds and is probably one of my favorite foods. Then we went to the produce market, then to the beer store, then to a small regular market where we couldn’t find the milk until we realized that it’s in boxes with dry goods, not in jugs in the refrigerator section, then off to the SuperChe, the big supermarket chain in Mexico for everything we couldn’t find anywhere else.
We got back to the campground and made dinner, and listened to the live Mexican music from the bar as we went to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment