Day 8: Recuerdo Palenque

Ok, so where was I before I went back to school and lost all free time?
Right, Day 8.

Day 8 started with the pleasant realization that in Rio Lacanja, you get your butter with a little shell imprinted in it. Aww.

Which was followed by the unpleasant realization that for some reason, there are no toasters anywhere and that "toast" is really just stale bread. Eww.

After breakfast, we got in the bus and went off to visit some ruins. For some reason, I like this pic of me.

Anyway, we had to take a boat to get to one site.

But they filled all the boats to capacity and there were three people left over: Christina, Mary Beth, and ME of course. BUT we then got our own private boat so that was cool.

And our captain was a model.

And I like this pic.

We saw a crocodile from our boat!

And the experience was just cool in general, cause as we went down the river, on our left was Mexico and on the right was Guatemala!

Here's a pic of me with Guatemala in the background.

So we finally arrived at our first pyramid site, Yaxchilan (sounds like Yah-she-lan).

Here are a million photos I took of the site.

In Yaxchilan, we found a ton of cool animals.

Like this spider, which was about the size of my hand,

and these adorable bats,

and this camouflaged frog,

and the howler monkeys of course!

These monkeys randomly screamed really loud (REALLY loud) and they were so cute, swinging around the trees.

This thing is called a stele and it has historical importance.

And this was a Mayan ball court. Some type of sport was played here that involved throwing balls through rings.

We had to climb SO MANY steps to get to one building.

And the steps are ridiculously steep and scary to climb down. Notice the people looking at their feet.
When my classmates finally joined me at the top (I was first to the top of course) they were all panting and fainting.

After looking all about Yaxchilan, we had lunch. Everyone was so thrilled that they had french fries at the restaurant.

But I was thrilled for that yummy pineapple drink. Mmmmmm.

When we got back on the bus, my schoolmates were sad to find out that the beer they had in the overhead compartment got too hot and exploded. It was dripping down onto their seats.

Hmm... an act of God maybe?!?!

We ended up going to another site, Bonampak (Bo-nahm-pock).

Pics!


We were only at this site for about 10 mins because we judged time poorly and they were closing the site. It's known for the paintings you can still see inside some of the buildings, but my camera couldn't take good pics of them. But they look like this:

My friend Christina bought some jewelry from this nice woman.

And we got back in the bus for a long ride (I think it was an 8 hour ride) to our next town. I just curled into a ball and slept most of the way.

When we got to Palenque, we got dinner, which was kinda scary, because while the place claimed to be a resturant, we were totally eating in someone's dining room. At one point this kid came downstairs in pajamas and was probably thinking "Why are there so many people in my dining room?"

After the "restaurant," we went to our hotel.

The hotel assigned me and Zach to some room that had a unicorn painting above the bed!

But there was only one bed so we got moved to a room with two beds.

I then got to walk around Palenque and seriously, this might have been my favorite town of the trip. If I ever go back to Mexico, I'll have to stop by Palenque again. And we only got to be in that town for one night : (

When I got back to my hotel after a walk around town, I found another animal hanging out outside the door to the hotel.

Aww.