Blog 5 : Palenque & Panchán 12/12/1212
Haight Ashbury and Harvard Square
in the mid-60s. Rishikesh and Katmandu in the ‘70s. Berlin and Prague in the
early ‘90s after the Wall came down, Barcelona at the millennium. Panchán in
2102.
Five kilometers from Palenque
City, five meters before the entrance to the Zona Arqueológica
de Palenque,
turn left on a ruttypuddle-gravel road, and before you can blink you are
encompassed by jungle, the real triple-canopy kind with thick green understory,
umbrella-leafed middle tier, and soaring many-limbed giants peopled by parrots,
toucans, and howler monkeys. This clump of jungle is known as Panchán: not a
village, a community. The gravel road swings left by the community’s
restaurant, Don Mucho’s: perhaps fifty tables, some under a roof, some arrayed
along a stream, some just set into whatever adjacent open space the jungle
offers. The gravel road branches. Fifty meters further along what might be the
most substantial of the branches is Mono Blanco, breakfast joint and bar, with
its two-dozen or so tables strewn around a small clearing. The now dirt road
branches again, the branches branch, those branches twig, and you find yourself
in a warren of maybe a hundred cabins and huts, camping areas, and tiny hotels
and hostels, one or two reachable by car, the others by narrow cement path or
jungle trail.
Our path takes us to Margarita
and Ed’s (recommended to us by Deborah, Abby, and Libby, who have stayed here
multiple times). Margarita and Ed’s consists of half a dozen ramshackle wooden
cabins, a two-story moldy-blue “office” building, and three little 2-story hotelitos.
We had tried a half dozen times to make reservations, by phone and by internet,
bur failed utterly do the fact that—as we found out on arrival—the
ir phone
works only sporadically, it only gets picked it up when someone happens to be
in the office, and no one who works here knows how to use the computer. Still,
we lucked out: there was a vacancy in the new building at the farthest end of the
path. It turns out to be a gorgeous second floor corner room with ample plugs
and lighting, a balcony jutting into the jungle, a desk and a couple of chairs,
screened windows, an air conditioning unit, a spotless bathroom and shower, and
all the mod-cons that
we didn’t expect to find out here but are willing with
glee to put up with. Having now surveyed the rest of Panchán, it’s clear we
have the nicest digs in the jungle, well worth the $35 a night.
Panchán is swarming with people,
most of them in their twenties. Lots of long hair, the women’s in long falls,
braids, or sweeping cascades; the men’s often in ponytails or dreadlocks, and
maybe half with bear
ds. Visible tattoos on shoulders, but no full sleeves: ink
here is a hip statement, not a way of life. The girls sport granny dresses or
tight jeans draped with lacy layers of blouse. The men wear cargo pants, jeans,

or shorts. It’s clear that clothes washing is a sometime thing. There is lots
of dangly jewelry, most of it in earlobes or around necks, some on eyebrows,
noses, and lips, and slightly more of it on the women than on the men. No
shoes, few boots; mostly sandals or bare feet. There seem to be no older
children, but there are lots of wee ones up to about age seven, as befits a parent
cohort in their late 20s. The chatter, at least so far, is in Mexican, English,
French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Hebrew. A few middle aged men, scruffy,
bandanas or backwards baseball caps on their heads, stroll the paths or sit
solitary, with a hollow-eyed look that says “I used to surf, but, you know, the
beach scene, like somehow, you know, here I am now in this jungle.” In the time
we’ve been here we’ve seen only a half-dozen folks who, like Linda and I, are
of a “certain age.” This is a happening place, but mainly it’s a young-peoples’
scene.
Commerce is woven through
Panchán, of course. It’s mostly hippy stuff, not much different from what the
pioneers in Harvard Square, the Haight, and Washington Square established in
the 60s as the array of stuff that authenticates the happening. Cheap jewelry,
stamped out silver filigree and beads, arrayed on blankets (local, ethnic) on
the ground, or on trays set across saw horses. Crystals. Faux-peasant clothing.
Holistic massage. The tables at Don Mucho’s and the Mono Blncco are filled most
of the day with people drinking beer: Panchán is not a margarita sort of place.
A slat-sided hut functions as a mini-7/11 in the forest: toiletries, soft
drinks, batteries, chips, bottled water. Antoher will do your laundry by the
kilo. There are a couple of booths with agents signing up people for day trips
to nearby tourist sites: ruins, waterfalls, boat trips. The booths don’t quite
square with the overall atmosphere, but enough people use them to make it
profitable to keep them open. One gets the feeling that some of the foreign
contingent in Panchán came intending to stay a day or two to see the Palenque
ruins, but that once they’d seen them they forgot to leave. As best we can
tell, these semi-permanent residents don’t actually do anything, they just hang
out near the restaurants and braid hair and play chess or their guitars and
stare at the jungle and enjoy the laid-back scene.

The only counterpoint to the
prevailing sense of mellow in Panchán are the several handwritten signs posted
at the restaurants and on nearby trees: no drugs, no mushrooms, no drums.

In the midst of this self-replenishing
international congregation of folks of a certain style and cultural
predilection, a small Chiapas Indian and mestizo population goes quietly about
their business. Some farm corn and vegetables, rabbits and chickens and
turkeys, on small plots carved out of the forest. Some work at the lodges and
hotels as room or grounds cleaners, they staff Mono Blanco and Don Mucho’s, or
they are part of the maintenance crew at the Zona Arqueológica Palenque. The
farming men get out early, early enough so that when I set out on a jungle
trail this morning a little after dawn, I hadn’t walked a kilometer when I met
a farmer returning from checking on a couple of cows that he had pastured high
up the hill. At three out of four houses, in the early hours I see
backpack-laden foreigners blearily emerging from their rooms on their way to
Mono Blanco for coffee to jumpstart their day’s adventures. At the fourth, l see
groups of four or five local women clustered on white molded plastic chairs
outside the door of one of their houses, sharing a cup of joe and gossiping
about their neighbors.
For the outsider community, Don
Mucho’s restaurant/bar is where it all comes together from about four in the
afternoon until eleven. Saturday night is a madhouse. Tables fill, and empty,
and fill again. Linda, exhausted, decided to sack out early, so on Saturday I
am here alone. To my left, a couple in their early thirties are sitting with a
woman who could be the mother of one of them or perhaps the grandmother. The
three are arguing in English whether to visit the Palenque ruins tomorrow
morning or the day after, while the older woman interlaces complaints about her
trials in getting the contractor to finish the new roof on her garage back
home. They order dinner by pointing at the menu.
Two tables to the other side are
two young women. One is clearly Mexican, rather heavy set, dressed
conservatively in slacks and a generic university sweatshirt. The other, more
European-featured, is a nymph, two layers of diaphanous lace over a black tank
top, tiny tight blue shorts, sandals, long blonde hair, a dangling feather. She
can’t sit still. She dances up to the bar, chats for a couple of minutes with
one of the waiters, and waltzes back with a tall glass of water and a blue
straw. She and her companion laugh hysterically over something, high, piercing,
joyful giggles. Three young men are drawn to the table, sit down; one says something
funny, the laughter explodes again, two get up and leave, and the third, now
introducing himself to the two women, calls in native-Spanish to a waiter for a
menu.
Though I failed to hear enough of
the joke to share in the laughter, I did overhear everything that went on among
the three men at the intervening table that was right next to me. At first I
had trouble placing the language, but then I caught a Hebrew phrase and my mind
switched gears. I got about half of what they were saying. The three men were
all 6-footers in their mid twenties, all bearded, all big shouldered and
obviously fit as prize fighters: I surmised that they were off doing their
decompression world tour after military service. Most Israelis know multiple
languages, but if these three did, neither Spanish nor English were among them.
They were having a devil of a time making out the menu. The tallest of the
three, a thin pinched-faced fellow who also had the longest beard, and might
well have been what the Israelis call a “religious,” knew some Italian, and he
was using that as a crutch, translating for the waiter from the Hebrew into
some sort of mélange of Italian and Spanish and English words. “So, how exactly
is the chicken cooked? What are these vegetables, this chaya thing here?”
“Chayote,” the waiter supplies. “A little like calabacín, zucchini.”
“If my friend doesn’t get the
chicken with this set of, these vegetables, could he get the vegetables anyway?
No, not those ones there, these. But not the chaya. No, wait a moment.” He turned to his friend. “Atah rotzeh beitzim? Najon? He’ll have them with eggs. Just
eggs. Eggs and vegetables.”
The Israelis weren’t asking for
help, and they were seeming to manage, if awkwardly, so I didn’t volunteer. The
waiter spent a full five minutes with them, listening to their pigeoning in various
bits of language and watching them point to this and that on the menu in the
candlelight. As he left the table with their order he looked at me and rolled
his eyes.
That crisis having passed, I
spooned into my cream of spinach soup (excellent!), and watched the action.
Young men, often in pairs, buzzed around the tables of the women. Groups of
young women, generally 3 or 4 at a time, flitted around the tables of young
men. People getting up, sitting down. I saw the group of four girls at one
table stand up, join three young men who had been clustering around them, and seek
a longer table at the other end of the bar. Success.
As my strips of beef, stewed chayote, lettuce and tomato salad, rice,
and garlic bread arrived (combination plate #2, enough for about three of me),
at the far end of the restaurant area a young woman in a swirly-tan dress and
the requisite long hair, took out her violin and launched into a Bach partita.
Riveting. Warm applause. She began something by Debussy. In a patch of dirt by
a tree that stood in the middle of a cluster of tables, a construction crew of
four-to-six year-olds worked building roads for their toy cars. Under another
tree a woman was giving a shoulder massage to a man whose head was buried in
the cushions of her massage chair. The violin was laying down some serious Mozart,
and a couple of night birds, loud, but far off, went for counterpoint but
completely missed the beat. The rest of Panchán seemed to be getting it,
though.
David & Linda
PS. I probably ought to say a
couple of things about the archaeological site of Palenque, which is what
attracts so many visitors to this part of Chiapas. The lords of Palenque ruled
most of this part of the world between around 700 and 950 CE, and their
capital, at the border between the coastal lowlands and the central Mayan
mountains, reflects their power, their wealth, and their exquisite taste. The couple
of things I have to say are these:
(1) Wow!!
[2] Rome, eat your heart out!