Our Last Weeks in Mexico-Catch Up Part Two
From Zipolite we had to high tail it to San Cristobal de Las Casas to meet up with Jennifer and Vanessa. “Jenessa” as we called them are good friends from California who were coming for a three week visit. They flew into Cancun and took a crazy 18 hour bus ride to meet up with us in San Cristobal de las Casas. San Cristobal is a beautiful town perched in the mountains of Chiapas.
A few hours down the windy mountain roads from San Cristobal we stopped in a small town to visit the ruins of Tonina. These are some of the quietest and most accessible ruins we’ve visited so far. There were maybe 5 other people there. In Tonina you can still actually climb all over and go inside the tombs. This isn’t something you find very often in Mexico anymore, due to high volume of visits and unscrupulous visitors that abuse the freedom.
Along some more narrow windy roads we made a stop off at Agua Azul just south of Palanque. There was a small blurb about this place in one of our guidebooks, but we weren’t prepared for the beautiful series of waterfalls, with turquoise blue water running through the middle of the jungle that we found. This place is amazing! The weather wasn’t exactly cooperating with us when we were there, but on a nice sunny day, an afternoon spent swimming in this beautiful location would be the highlight of any trip.
A little further north, we arrived at the Maya Bell campground just a short walk from the ruins of Palenque. Maya Bell is set at the edge of the jungle, and you are treated to the sounds of howler monkeys waking up with you every morning. Some folks at the campground told us the monkeys had been coming out into the campground for a show lately, but we didn’t get to see any during our stay. From the sounds of things, they weren’t too far away in the mornings. The ruins of Palenque have been among our favorites so far. It might be that the location of the ruins fits the classic picture of tall pyramids nestled into the jungle that we often imagine with Mayan ruins. As our fellow traveller Dan Grec mentioned: you get a pang of Indiana Jones as you arrive to the ruins. Whatever the case, it is a beautiful place and well worth a visit. We never hire guides, but we hired a guide that we met at the grocery store the night before. He was a very nice and knowledgeable man who treated us to a whole different take on the history of Palenque residents of pre-columbian times than we had heard before. We’re not sure how much of what he told us was accurate or even true but it made it very interesting to look at the ruins in a whole different light. He is a bit of a conspiracy theorist with a very revised view of history.
Leaving the jungle behind we headed up to the west coast of the Yucatan peninsula on the Gulf side. We visited a few towns here that were interesting, but we all had a hankering to enjoy the beautiful beaches of the Caribbean, so we made a straight shot across the peninsula from Merida to Cancun. We’ve been in some pretty touristy places in Mexico so far, but I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the Maya Riviera. Public beach access is almost non-existent, as the beaches have all been taken over by huge all inclusive resorts. In Cancun, we ended up taking the ferry over to Isla Mujeres (12 bucks round trip), just off the coast of cancun and paying 50 pesos (4 bucks) a piece for a lounge chair on the beach, but at least we finally got our first day at a beautiful Caribbean beach enjoying the sunshine and warm water. We spent about a week with the girls driving down the coast of the Riviera Maya, enjoying the beautiful beaches, swimming in some cenotes (beautiful fresh water swimming holes, connected to underground river systems) and checking out the ruins at Tulum. It is hard to find a nice place to relax and enjoy the area without paying an exorbitant rate in this area, but if you look hard there are still some gems to be found.
After three weeks that went by way too fast we dropped the “Jenessa” twins off at the airport in Cancun. It was a little weird to be back to just the two of us again. After a few days of re-packing and re-supply in Cancun, we finished our journey through Mexico, making our way down to Chetumal and the border with Belize. It has been a little over 4 months since we came to Mexico. It is such a big country with so many different regions we could probably spend a lifetime exploring, but for now the south is calling.
