We Need Jungle, I'm Afraid

I'll often say, self-deprecatingly, that one blog or another is indulgent. But even if they're personal, they'll still largely have some sort of theme. This is three days of diary entries while I was in the jungle without data or wi-fi. I think I'm allowed to call this one indulgent.  

Day 1 

Things start inauspiciously. Several locals direct me to a particular road where I stand for an hour as dozens of combis pass, none of them going where I need to go. Too late, I recall researching Mexico and reading that Mexicans are so friendly they will often confidently give you wrong information rather than be obliged to say they don’t know or that they can’t help. It’s also possible I misunderstood something, my Spanish is at a crucial tipping point where I can ask questions and receive answers but there’s almost always something lost. 

Either way, all the chaos of trying to find the right spot (which I did, eventually) means I forget to do the single most important task I had in Palenque: take out cash. They don’t have card terminals in the jungle. This will become a problem later.

The combi is a white minivan that is part bus, part freighter. It fills up with people and also boxes of produce, which are they dropped off all along the route. Nothing in Mexico is built for a man of my scale and even less so a combi which is packed with teetering crates of bottles, mechanical parts, boxes of water filters, but I remembered how to ask to sit al frente, which saved me from 3-4 hours of folding myself up like an accordion.

Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico, with one of the highest indigenous-identified populations. Palenque itself is overflowing with hotels and restaurants, almost all of them serving the spectacular Mayan ruins of the same name. It is a pyramid economy. Everywhere there Mayan murals, Mayan themed restaurants and cafés, Mayan sculptures. I ended up finding the combi depot because it is behind the Maya cabeza - a roundabout with a massive sculpture of a Mayan head. 

The road to Lacanjá is a single long highway, running parallel to the same mountain ridge, a constant companion out the right hand window. It is very green and very hot - 37 degrees when I last check. Every few kilometres there is another identical small settlement - a tienda, a mechanic, a bakery - busy with pregnant dogs, chickens, families. The line between bar and shop can be vague - if it sells beer and has some plastic tables scattered outside, it might as well be a bar. Lots of men are getting drunk. There seems to be a half-hearted construction boom. Many new concrete buildings pass by the open window (unlike the corrugated-iron or chipboard ones which form the majority on the roadside) being worked on by one or two people or none at all, just grey empty shells on cleared, churned patches of land. 

There are lots of rivers and waterways. Each one that the combi passes is speckled with flashes of colour. Children swimming and playing in their clothes, splashing each other, enjoying the shade of the riverbank. Every time the combi stops, women by the side of the road make their way over waving something to sell. Usually small plastic bags of crisps or plantain, unlabelled bottle of what might be agua fresca but could also be booze. Nobody in the combi engages. I don’t know who else would even stop. 

I don’t really know how to write about these aspects except to describe them. I am not travelling to see poverty (or to avoid it), but the poverty is here. 

Several hours and countless stops later, each one unloading another passenger or box of something or other, I get to the crossroads and get out. Anticipating arrivals, there are a couple of moto taxis waiting to scoot anyone leaving the combi to the cluster of cabins and homestays in Lacanjá itself, another 10km into the jungle. I pay a fee to enter the national park, I am ripped off by the moto taxi driver, who clearly makes up a number in the hope that I’ll say sure, fuck it: I do. My approach to being ripped off while travelling is largely that I allow it to happen, unless it’s completely egregious or I’m in a bad mood. Haggling over these things is bad for the soul. This is an indigenous community which now relies a lot on ecotourism. I can afford it. 

Through my mangled Spanish I eventually discern that I can pay through PayPal, which is great, but there is no mobile signal or wi-fi, which is not great. It isn’t totally clear to me what the solution is to this, but she seems happy - I think I might simply get a bill. Do they trust me? Or do I need to climb a mountain until I have enough signal to get into my account? I hate having to talk to someone in a jungle village about PayPal. 

I don’t think there are any shops here, so I pay extra for breakfast, lunch and dinner. By this point it’s about 6pm, and the evening is drawing in. I am deposited in my cabin. Instead of windows or a ceiling it has green mosquito netting in the frames, and a high angled roof above cabin and terrace. It does have plug sockets, which is good, this means I can charge the various devices which I won’t need to use, though I am writing this on a laptop - I feel the need to conceal that fact from the other people staying here, in case they judge me for not having a sufficiently disconnected Jungle time. “I’m not doing real work,” I want to tell them. “This is essentially the same as writing in a notebook, but it’s been so long since I had to handwrite at length that it makes my hand hurt now, my writing muscles have atrophied”. I can’t tell them this, because they are French. 

The cabin overlooks a lake, possible fed by a river. I hear the trickling of a waterfall in the foliage beyond. It doesn’t look like the sort of lake you go in. It is cloudy and green and I assume has fifteen different species of leeches. It also means that even by jungle standards, this is a spot which is heavy with insects (hence the netting). I coat myself in the most brutal bug spray I could find in Palenque, and spend the evening reading Open Veins of Latin America in my hammock while the sun sets and the buzzing, shrieking, fizzing night-time jungle chorus rises up around me. 

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I realise that, though I vaguely told several people I was going “into the jungle”, I didn’t say anything about no mobile signal. Hopefully they join the dots and nobody feels the need to raise the alarm because I don’t reply to any messages for 4 days.

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They have fireflies. Fireflies! Like little green sparks, only sparks whose movement is clearly directed, weaving hither and thither. When they get close enough you see their little legs illuminated by their own light. They’re bigger than I realised. 

Day 2

My decreipt Kindle, which is older than some footballers, has chosen the most disastrous possible time to give up the ghost. I don’t think I have ever been further from a book in English than at any point in my entire life. Now, every so often, it will decide to skip back dozens of pages. I don’t know which connection exactly is fucked. If it’s only on one side I can avoid touching it at all. I tried switching from the Galeano to Lowry (if you can pick up a theme here; books about Mexico, books set in Mexico) in case the ebook was corrupted but the whole thing seems to be knackered. I am going to have to spend the entire time writing or in peaceful contemplation.

#

Panic over, I’ve remembered I have Baldur’s Gate II installed on my laptop.

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I knew they would be loud but the noise of a cicada is extraordinary. All night I heard them. They have a curiously dopplering or stretching sound, like a loud motorbike passing you on the road, a high pitched mechanical rattle. In the morning I realise the shells of their nymphs are all over the trees from where they emerged as full adults. The trunks and branches are covered with these brown, dessicated insect-shapes, all in exactly the same pose, clinging on with a split down their back from which they burst. 

There is a light on all night outside the bathroom, so it is something of a social space for nocturnal insects and lizards. In the morning there is a good sized moth with fluffy forelegs and one of the offending cicadas in the flesh (carapace). They are colossal. The patterning on their irridescent abdomens is blue-green, and does look Mesoamerican, though I suppose I would think that. 

Despite the DEETiest bug spray I could find, no more than 10 seconds after giving myself a coating I see a fly land on a patch of skin which still glistens with droplets of poison. Don’t know why I bother. Unfortunately after seeing biting insects or becoming aware they exist (in swirling thickets of wings around the lights at night) I start feeling itches and stinging pains all over, regardless of whether there is a perpetrator. I know this because the sensation of feeling bitten often happens on a part I can see, and there’s definitely nothing there. Just one of those things.

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Why do I like the jungle so much? I love the natural world and insects in particular, so part of it is certainly the unbelievable abundance of life, things to look at, poke, not-poke-but-want-to-poke, all the bright flashing colours of things I’d seen in butterfly houses and zoos before. I still can’t quite get my Anglo-Saxon head around the fact that iguanas and basilisks really do just amble around, giving you filthy looks or breaking into a comical, gangly-legged sprint because you get too close. A huge butterfly with bright orange wings lands near me, opens and closes them lugubriously for a few moments, then closes them entirely, revealing only underwing - brown, patterned, indistinguishable from a dead leaf. Then off it goes again, flash-flash of orange. 

Abundance is also relative. I am from the United Kingdom, which has set about destroying its biodiversity as efficiently as possible. I am pleased to see one butterfly at home. Seeing a lizard is an event worthy of recording. Even such nature reserves as exist are still largely man-made. 40-year-old Sycamores, ragwort, fields of grass, the occasional Small Tortoiseshell or kestrel. The UK did once have ancient woodland, its own “jungle”, and in some parts still does, but vanishingly little. It is a small island which has been consistently populated and consistently managed by humans for millennia. Being around nature in England, for those who live in cities, largely involves being in a managed park. Walk your dog, recharge your battery, be near something which is at least mostly green, for some of the year at least. No wonder I was miserable. 

It’s also possible that being in the jungle is a level of overstimulation which suits my particular neurodiversit(ies). There’s always something afoot. I think I would have to spend a lot of time in it to exhaust it of interest. 

It’s time to go to Bonampak.

#

I am alone at Bonampak, which was one of my main reasons for staying (rather than taking a marathon day tour and waking up at 5am to spend all day in a minivan. Bonampak is the first of two Mayan ruins, the other being Yaxchilan, which is only accessible by boat. Some Mayan ruins are made up of distinct, free-standing pyramids. Bonampak’s acropolis is more like a rambling, slumped complex, build into an existing hill in a series of terraces. This gives it a different kind of scale - it feels partly geologial. Its most astonishing feature is the three rooms of frescoes, preserved extraordinarily well by having been once sealed in heavy stone chambers.

The uncut grass in the grand plaza fill my socks with seeds. At the entrance I write my name and nationality into a book at the behest of a friendly but entirely mute man. I thought perhaps he only spoke Mayan, but I see him communicating to someone using sign language. 

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I should correct myself: I have no idea what the cicadas in particular sound like. Are they the ones who make a noise like rubbing a wet thumb across a balloon? Are the ones the ones which sound like passing motorbikes? Are they the ones which just scream? Or is that a frog, or a gecko, or a bird, or something else? I have no idea. I will try and ask the guide on the walk tomorrow, as long as I can also pay for that with PayPal somehow. What a fucking disaster. 

My phone is picking up a bunch of wi-fi, I’m not sure why they said there wasn’t any. I don’t want to ask and seem like the idiot gringo who is hopelessly tethered to his phone, but I would really like to pay them so I can stop worrying about it. Then I can return to my prelapsarian jungle state, with nothing but the sound of screaming fauna. 

The insects may be taking the piss out of my bug spray but I haven’t been too badly bitten yet. Generally I don’t get too targeted. I once spent a night in a tent in Scotland with my then-girlfriend and presumably a bevvy of midges - she was bitten 16 times on her face alone, I escaped without incident. Scottish midges aren’t going to give you Zika or Malaria though (I assume). 

Last night I deliberately left my porch night on for an hour at night, to see if I could lure in any saturniids or sphinxes, but all that turned up were 9000 mosquitoes and micro-moths which made me unenthusiastic about leaving the cabin to go for a piss. 

#

Cash problem solved, it turns out there is a cash machine much closer, in a town which I wanted to visit anyway, if only because of its name: Nueva Palestina. I wonder why? It’s a 30 minute moto taxi away and I can stop worrying. Also I can’t pay for any activities with PayPal so there was no other way I was going to be able to afford to do anything else. 

Everything is very expensive here, far in excess of anywhere else in Mexico. But as above, it’s an indigenous community who use the money to conserve the forest and the pyramids. You’d have to be really quite grasping to take offence. Still though I do wince a little bit. What am I going to do, not see the pyramids, not go hiking in the jungle? It’s the whole reason I’m here and it’s the only game in town. 

#

Nueva Palestina is not a nice place to visit. It is a depressed, featureless town which looks like it was all built in the last 30 years. A very drunk man outside of the bank won’t leave me alone, keeps shaking my hand and not letting go, attempts to follow me into the moto taxi. The bank doesn’t work so I have to go to a phone shop where they will give cashback at a steep commission. The stares begin to bother me, and doubly so once I have a stack of cash in my pocket. I don’t think they get a lot of gringos here.

I am still a bit dialled-up and tense as we leave the town, and I’m ready to get back to the cabin and lie down, but my driver takes an unexplained turning down what looks like a random side-road. It turns out it’s a semi-derelict crocodile sanctuary. He wants to show me some crocodiles, though at this point everything is telling me that I’m just being taken somewhere private to be robbed.

If it is a robbery it’s a very smoothly planned one. The driver and his friend keep up the chitchat as they discuss the length of crocodiles, how many there are, what they are fed. This in spite of the fact there are essentially no crocodiles at all. I see what in a tiny cage which could easily be dead or made of plastic. Of the three lagoons, the crocodile count is zero, until right at the end where there is another small concrete pen. A pissed-off crocodile lunges out of the water, stopping short at the wall.

Number of crocodiles: 1.

It becomes apparent that the driver is using taking me as an excuse to do some chores in the neighbourhood. He stops, chats with people, picks up packages, gossips. None of this is ratcheting down my tension, though at this point it seems likely I am not being robbed after all. Anyway we make it back and it costs me an extra £20 for the privilege of being driven around very slowly, on top of the commission for taking cash out, and on top of whatever the hell my bank charges me on top because I didn’t have enough money in my travel card or any mobile data to transfer it.

Afterwards I feel guilty about thinking ill of the completely friendly driver, who was as unsettled by the treatment in Nueva Palestina as I was. But sometimes when you're travelling you have to balance not assuming the worst of people with following your gut. For what it's worth I've been wandering free all over Mexico (albeit not too far off the beaten track) and not had so much as a whiff of crime or danger. And I'm not counting this either. There's parts of Manchester I'd be more worried to walk at night.

Anyway: I try not to think about it. I need the money, else I’m just going to be sitting in the cabin doing fuck all anyway. There are more pyramids to see. They had better be fucking good!

Day 3

I don’t know if I’m going to the pyramids. I can’t afford it.

I won’t repeat myself. Indigenous communities can rip off tourists if they want, and I’m sure most of them can pay. Unfortunately I’ve done the maths and I cannot. I could go into my savings but I can’t access them out here anyway. The prices are extraordinary. I realised this when being given a price for something I had already priced up myself, when I was planning to do it independently. A moto-taxi, a 30 minute colectivo which is going up the main road anyway, a short ferry up the river, the entrance fee to a pyramid. Can that cost north of £60? I already emptied my bank account (plus god knows what else to pay for the moto-taxi there, the huge commission, whatever conversion fees, plus the price of the meals on-site, which, look, I’ve said I’m not complaining) and I still can’t afford to do everything.

The accommodation was also very expensive (for someone who has been mostly hostelling) but when I booked it I reassured myself that the expense was worth it because then I’d be here. In the jungle, a short taxi hop from things, I could probably even walk to them. But everything has to be accessed by vehicles which run on powdered diamonds. The expensive accommodation is just a start.

See I’ve still ended up sounding a little bitter here. I’m not annoyed with them but I am sad for myself. I think I can scrape together the money to do one activity, so I will. I didn’t come all this way to sit in my hammock writing this. Money spent is quickly forgotten. I almost asked the boss to explain the price but that would have been acting out of irritation. So I’ll hand it over and they can think that I’m a stupid gringo and I’ll get to see the pyramid. And then I’ll get the 5 hour colectivo back Palenque and decide what the hell I’m doing next. 

But I’m taking today off to read, write, explore the village, and probably drink several beers. Depending on how much they cost. 

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Do you think that mosquitos know they’re going on a suicide run when they land on your arm? They seem much more heroic in that light. Dodging the wild swings of the behemoth to take a tiny, life-giving sip, risking instant death for a taste of ambrosia. Little fighter pilots, slaloming around Godzilla, teeth-gritted, the sweet taste of the last kiss from their beau lingering on their lips. Hope it was worth it you little bastard. She’ll be weeping into her nightgown tonight. 

I saw a colossal beetle on the ground on the way to the bathroom, its abdomen hollowed out by the three wasps working away inside of it. Its forelimbs still switched, however. Its internal organs seemed to be a bright, science-fiction blue, from what I could see under the furious activity of the wasps, who pushed and shoved to get at the goo. I don’t think I trod on it myself, but the paths are both dark and teeming at night. A cicada flew into my shin on the way for a wee and it was about the weight of a golf ball.

I don't do any more activities. It's too expensive. I spend the day in my hammock writing. It's a good day. I see a tree frog, a millipede, more butterflies in one place than I've possibly ever seen. I hear howler monkeys. I get bitten by so many insects that I lose count. I feel satisfied that I've had adequate Jungle Time.

The End