The Mayan ruins at Palenque were, from the beginning, meant to be a focal point of the journey. They did not disappoint. We found a crazy cabana/camping village called “El Panchan” where we could hang our hammocks for 25 pesos per night (USD 2.50). As we walked in through the maze of drugged up hippies and tepid streams we could hear Hotel California drifting through the trees and it was immediately evident that El Panchan was something of a twilight zone for many young backpackers. Though the complex is not too far into the jungle, it gives a beautiful taste of the wild side of Chiapas (the southernmost Mexican state). An army of cats and dogs keep the creepy crawlies and jaguars at bay and, provided that you are in possession of a mosquito net, a hammock in the jungle is an incredibly pleasant place to pass the night. The morning we got to town, we met some German guys and some Belgian girls with whom we passed the day visiting some famous, super-touristy waterfalls and riding back through the mountains in the back of a pickup truck as the sun eased down into the crux of two faraway hills like a flaming asteroid into a bowl of piping hot lav. That night we were eating with the same folks and decided that in the morning we were going to experience the ruins the way it was meant to be done.
Before the sun, James and I swung out of our hammocks and slung our packs over our shoulders. Mist rolled over the narrow road as went to awaken our comrades. The Belgians, Ellen and Belle were up and ready to go and soon we were back on the road to the ruins. A few hundred meters before the first guard station we dove into the forest at the side of the road. Thus began almost two hours of trekking through the jungle with only a rough estimate of where we were headed. We were questioning our sense of direction when, atop a saddle in the hills, we found a pile of stones. Upon inspection we could see that the stones had been hewn (spl?) to their rough rectangular shape and that the pile was originally stacked to form of a wall. Whoa. There we were in the middle of a nearly untrodden jungle next to a structure that had been there for almost a millennium. Needless to say, this gave even more impetus to our quest for Palenque and on we plunged on through thick and thin. As we got closer and closer to the excavated site, we ran upon more and bigger ruined structures of stone. We were walking along the top of something that must have been enormous back in the day (think small stacked-stone ridgeline with squared corners) when we caught a glimpse of a brilliant, white temple—much less ruined than the one upon which we stood. We climbed down into a creekbed and turned a few heads when we pulled ourselves up the other side, rising to our feet not 25m from the central pyramid. 
It’s kind of bad, but we found it hard to count ourselves equal to all the other tourists at the site, especially when we went back to the river to cool off around midday. Mere meters off the main path we found a series of jungle waterfalls that might as well have been paradise.
A quest not to be forgotten, the day at Palenque ended in town with a pizzeria send off for our German and Belgian friends. After another wonderful roofless shower and night in the hammocks, we made for the colonial legacy and cool climate to be found in San Cristobal de las Casas.
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