There are a lot of butterflies in Mexico, but fewer now that we have driven through.  Not a day goes by that I don´t personally kill a score of these pretty little bugs with the motorcycle.  They leave less pretty yellow squish marks on my bike, clothes and helmet.

We are now in Palenque, quite a climatological shift from Oaxaca, where I believe I last posted an entry.  On Monday evening I was psyched to run into Chris and Chris from San Francisco/Oakland, they arrived on Sunday evening, and fortunately we stayed the extra day. 

On Tuesday we rode from Oaxaca back down to the coast.  I forget the name of the little town we stayed in, but I could never pronounce it to begin with.  I called it something like Teponepotectoctoligaligaligalan or something like that.  The scenery from the highlands to the coast was intense, rugged mountains and giant valleys everywhere, and the road was fun to ride.

Likewise, the ride the next day from the T town back up into the mountains of Chiapas to the town of San Cristobal de Las Casas was equally spectacular.  I read a trip report once saying that the riding from the USA down to the tip of South America was 85% boring and 15% interesting.  I´d say what we've ridden so far has been at least 95% interesting, and given we are perhaps a quarter of the way there then those people either chose the wrong route or were ridiculously hard to please.

San Cristobol was a very pretty little colonial town, founded by the Spanish in 1528 and still looking the part.  There were a surprising number of tourists there, but I guess the town does lie on the Panamerican highway and is a good waypoint for both Palenque and Guatemala.  This town was the site of the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 2004.  It doesn't sound like the uprising accomplished an awful lot aside from drawing in a huge number of military troops and police, and it also drew attention to the plight of the indiginous people of the area.  We have been through a lot of the military checkpoints around the country, but so far none of them have taken much interest in us.  I guess the same isn´t true for the local people.

The ride to Palenque was another spectacular one.  How did this country end up with so much amazing scenery?  Who designed these roads in such a way that we´d see so much of it?  I had been told that Palenque was down in the lowland jungle and very hot with huge mosquitos.  This has been only partially true.  As we came across the last of the mountains we could see Palenque right at the base, and the actual ruins are slightly up in the hills.  It is warm and very humid but it cooled off a lot last night, I was glad the cabana had blankets.  I think I saw a single mosquito.  The sun just went down - prime time for them - but I'm in a nice air conditioned internet cafe with remarkable upload speed, I hope you enjoy the pictures below.  Unfortunately many of my Palenque photos were too large to upload (and true to Murphy's Law they were mostly my favorites) and a lot of them were taken in portrait orientation, which is too much of a pain in the butt to rotate.  Just believe me when I say that Palenque is a really amazing site.  There is a nice balance between ruins that have been cleared of vegetation, very little rebuilding or restoration (which sticks out like a sore thumb) and quite a few ruins that were in a mostly natural state with the jungle growing out of every little nook and cranny.  The access was pretty good too, we were allowed in some of the buildings but kept away from some of the more sensative carvings with gates or unobtrusive little fences. 

Tomorrow we are going to try to get back to spitting distance from the Guatemalan border, perhaps even back to San Cristobal.  Research is showing that the La Mesilla crossing is the best.  It is also showing that the Pacific coast is still a mess and that maybe we should stay away from Lake Atitlan, which had recently been added to The List, and have to carefully consider whether Antigua is the right place to go right now.  Hurricanes can sure mess up little countries.

Saturday November 26, 2005 - 03:29pm (PST)