Palenque

We worked out that the easiest way to get to Palenque - our next port of call - was actually to join one of the day trips that goes there via the mountain roads and some picturesque waterfalls and just not come back with them (the official bus has to go a longer way round and ends up taking virtually as long to get there anyway.) Thus we found ourselves up at 3am and sharing a mini bus with a gang of keen, mostly Mexican, young people (the kind of people who happily taste termites, tramped through the jungle and step aside to let the oldies get by; it was actually a lot of fun.) We stopped for a roadside breakfast, took in the falls at Agua Azul and Misol-Ha, stopped again for the obligatory Mexican Buffet and had a slightly breakneck tour (in spanish) of the magnificent ruins and a bit of surrounding jungle (home to the aforementioned termites) before being dropped off, exhausted but happy, at our hotel and waving goodbye to our new friends as they set off on the long, nighttime journey back to San Cristobel...