Mexico: Palenque Ruins

In all the heat, I trudged out to the main road and I tried to get the bus out to the ruins.  I was in the right place, but no mini-buses appeared.  I lasted five minutes in the sun.  Taxi!  There is no point in arriving alreay wrung out from the heat, I told myself.  The ruins, higher and more open, would not be quite so hot.  Or so I'd been told.

The Palenque ruins are not a place for people who can't climb.  You need to be a little bit fit, so you can climb and worse, descend, those high pyramid steps.  You need to be able to climb old, high, and uneven steps up into to the jungle if you want to see all of the site.  Between my arthritis and my weight, I can do neither.  So I didn't see the buildings inside the walled enclosures that top the large flat-topped structures.  I missed the homes in the jungle.  I stuck to the flat stuff.

The flat stuff was enough, as it turned out.  The site is not very large, yet it is still easy to find an area that very few of the visitors bother with, to sit and think about what life must have been like, to try and imagine buildings under construction, people shopping, messengers running back and forth, and craftsmen making tools.

I got there fairly early, and by noon I was ready to leave.  While I had been wandering, vendors had arrived, along with the tour buses, and suddenly the area in front of the Palacio was not an open park but a store.  I wasn't too wiped out, so I left for the shops outside the entrance.  Some corn-on-a-stick and even more Gatorade refreshed me, and I looked for the mini-bus.  It was much easier to find at this end.

The bus took me down the hill to the museum, where the finer artifacts are housed (in blessed air-conditioning).

Mexico: Palenque Heat

Palenque is a place of Mayan ruins and incredible heat.  Even with my conditioning from being in Merida and rarely having air-conditioning, Palenque was hard to take.  I had a bed in an air-conditioned dormitory, and still the main thing I remember is the heat.  I actually take heat pretty well. One guidebook describes Granada, Nicaragua in May as hell on earth, and I handled it.  But this was smothering, heat to take my breath away.  High humidity, high temperatures, and absolutely no air movement of any kind combined to make me feel I was being steamed alive, a lobster person.

Typically for Mexico, I couldn't find an air-conditioned restaurant in any reasonable proximity to my hostel.  I entered one, in a hotel, and aked it they had air-condtioning in the restaurant.  I walked in and sat down, then instantly realized that having air-conditioning and running air-conditioning are two different things.  The doors were open to the patio.  The customary ceiling fans were missing, because after all, why would one need ceiling fans for a restaurant in a western chain hotel that has air-conditioning?

Electricity in Mexico is really expensive, about three times the rates I used to pay in Florida.  But surely restaurants would get more customers if they actually used the air-conditioning?