Sunday 13 July 2003
We decided to go for a 14-hour tour visiting two small ancient cities, one of them close to the border of Guatemala. The ruins were not the primary attraction to us; we just really wanted to see some of the rich nature around. The tour also served as compensation to us, when realizing that we could not make it to the famous “Tikal” in Guatemala for time and budget reasons.
The same driver as served us yesterday fetched us at the hotel 6 am in the morning. The tour was inclusive all meals and we got breakfast at 7.30 am in a restaurant on the way. The drive to Bonampak was some 3 hours in total inclusive the 1-hour breakfast.
Bonampak is an ancient Maya place with a few ruins of which only one was of particular interest and thus named the place. Bonampak means “painted walls” and that was exactly the attraction here. Three rooms were covered with vivid colorful paintings of Indians, horses among others. These paintings were of course worn of moisture and old age, but nevertheless impressive well preserved after 1,400 years.
This place was situated in a reserve and close to the rainforest; hence we were not allowed to drive in by ourselves. Instead the group was packed in a old worn down and rusty van used to transport us the 9 km into Bonampak.
After visiting the ruins, we took the opportunity to get a walk in the outskirts of the rainforest. The many strange sounds were fascinating and I recognized the shrilling noise that sounded like an angle grinder from Thailand. I suppose it is from a small insect, a kind of grasshopper or so with an incredible loud sound.
We also heard a lot of birds singing beautiful and some sounded very human. On our way back in the Dodge van, we saw a lizard crossing the gravel road. That was the first one we saw, but certainly not the last.
Later we drove additional 1,5 hours until we reached the Fronzerra Corozal, which is a border town at Guatemala. We had to pass some military checkpoints and passport control before we could enter a long boat, which could take us to Yaxchilán. The sail was nice, refreshing and took approximately an hour.
While sailing along the shore we were surprised to see thousands of butterflies around us. Some of them flew in front of the boat and were captured in the wind and not able to do anything else than keep up with the boats speed. Only with difficulty the butterflies could manage to fly off the “jet-stream”, which was quite funny to watch.
Yaxchilán is located on the Mexican bay of the river and is an ancient city with 2-3 temples of which the Acropolis was quite impressive. While the other tourists went to visit that, we chose wise and visited another ruin, the Small Acropolis.
We had the narrow path through the rainforest for ourselves, which gave us the opportunity to watch more lizards, butterflies and giant ants in a log row, moving bits of leaves to their queen. We saw some incredible big black caterpillars sitting on the trees, which also explained the thousands of butterflies around.
On the returning sail we saw a glimpse of an alligator sticking the head up in the river. It looked most of all as log, but the movements and the speed against the flow betrayed it. That was a nice unexpected extra bonus on this trip.
The 200 km drive back to Palenque was long, hot and humid and we were thankful of being in a new and convenient vehicle with air-condition.