Category Archives: Central America

Palenque Ruins, Chiapas, Mexico

Quite a shock to me how the Mexicans have done up their part of the Mayan world, very touristy and very tacky. Outside at the entrance were tons of mexicans offering themselves as your tour guide for us$60. There were souvenir stalls right inside the mayan site trying to sell you their mayan inspired craft wares, quite sacrilegeious if you ask me. As with all their tourist sites, it only opens at 8am to 4pm, by this time it gets way too hot to walk around, the site was bare and there are hardly any trees sheltering the place. The tourists came in droves, flooding the whole place. It was the Mexican school holidays with many families coming all the way from the major big Mexican cities and noisy kids on their school trips.

Templo de las Inscripciones, the tallest building in the site.

Templo de las Inscripcions, image taken from el Palacio. It was so sweltering hot while I was here, I had to hide in the Palacio complex to recover from the heat.

Typical pyramidal structure of this mayan era. There were many similar like pyramids in the site. Top of the structure is the foliated cross design typical of Palenque.

Grupo Norte. It was like Mayan temple street aligned with stretches of temples. This image was taken from Templo del Conde where Count de Waldeck lived for a few years. This eccentric world traveller and explorer lived here for 13 years, mediating and practising his own version of the lost Altantic spirituality which eventually became the popular new age Mayanism belief. He was living here with his native mistress.

On the side note, Palenque is also the place where the Western travellers come in search of psychotropic mushrooms vendors for their psychedelic induced experiences.