Reflections

Jungle. Monkeys. Toucan birds. Tuckered again. Last night we slept and slept. It was glorious. No classes. No tours -- a whole day to recuperate from the ruins yesterday. But it didn't quite work out that way. Bob wanted to visit, El Panchan, a 12 acre private nature preserve just outside the UNESO site of the Palenque ruins that had exhilarated and exhausted us yesterday. He wanted to visit a jungle.

So, as we sipped beer in El Pancho's open air restaurant this morning, I said to Bob," Well, if you want to hike in the jungle, we'll need a guide. We can't just traipse in. There might be snakes lurking there and God knows what."

"OK," Bob said. So, we booked a jungle guide for a tour. I said to the guide as we left El Panchan in a small van, "I'd like to see monkeys." Innocent request. What was I thinking -- that monkeys would suddenly bound down the path in front of us?

Our guide grew up near the jungle -- it was part of his synaptic wiring. For the next three hours, after we left the main path into the jungle, we stumbled over rocks and tree roots, crossed wide rocky streams (I'd left my hiking boots in the hotel room and my hiking poles in Caledon), my feet slopping around in leather sandals, our guide making monkey and Toucan bird calls.

We clambered up steep rocky slopes and over cascades of Mayan rocks, the crumbled temples of another world. And we felt the jungle the first Mayans who had arrived must have felt, must have decided would be the place with ample water and enough fertile earth upon which to build a civilization a few thousand years ago.

Now I'm sitting in our hotel lobby thinking about the remains of the Mayan world, of the very few structures so far that have been cleared of the trees and jungle that has grown back into the temples after the collapse of the civilization in 900 CE. For a while I felt as though I was back in Cambodia, walking around the temples of Angkor Wat that also were extracted from the jungle. In Palenque, only 3% of the almost 1400 structures have been cleared so far. It must have been quite a world back then.

What happened? How did it all end?" I asked our guide. "Well," he said, "a few things happened. One was that every 22 years, the nobility -- the 1%, restuccoed their temples, homes, galleries and observatories. They burnt 31 kilos of wood to reduce the lime mixture to one kilo of stucco.

Archeologists have found very little pollen in the last layers of stucco. So there were few trees left. Because there were no trees, the land dried and years of drought followed.

Eventually after years of praying for rain, the Mayans lost faith in their leaders, who had god-like status. People just left or starved to death. Overpopulation was another problem. Familiar story?

Our guide explained the two Mayan calendars meshed together, ingeniously simple and yet complicated. He described how year 0 was 3114 BCE and how December 21, 2012 is the end of the 13th Baktun. On December 22, 2012, the 14th Baktun begins, (a Baktun is 20 cycles or 144,000 days in the Long Count Mayan Calendar).

Bob has always been fascinated by the Maya. A long time ago I bought him a book called, The Secret of the Maya. There are fewer secrets now.

Among the photos of the ruins you'll see an aqueduct without the water, a model of one of the larger complexes and a small river still coursing on the site.

The guide took the photos of the Toucan bird and monkey -- impossible to see because they were at the very top of 150 foot trees. I discovered later that he'd snuck in a few shots of us too.

In a couple of hours we leave for an overnight bus trip to Campeche. I'm gearing myself up for it! The next blog, "Cross-eyed and Cone-headed"

See you in Campeche. Be well.