Palenque, Chiapas
From the way it was described, I expected little more than a very long day, sequestered in the back of a van; driving across remote challenging terrain. As it was, as the very unofficial group photographer I garnered a seat in the first row, able to ‘collect’ bits of the world moving by.
While in The Netherlands doing a pilgrimage during Holy Week several years ago I was reading one of Philip Yancey’s inspiring books, Soul Survivors. He provided fifteen biographies of people who lived very large lives that made the world feel smaller, safer, and more intimate. I have often been reminded of his citation of GK Chesterton’s wonderful belief that flecks of paradise could wash up onto the shores of our lives at any time – sometimes it could even happen twice.
I have often felt like I this has happened to me countless times. For decades I have been allowed to see the colors of our world up close and intensely. I recall while on that Dutch pilgrimage wandering into a small town and being caught up in a wondrous pink blizzard. Flowering cherry trees were caught in a sudden breeze and the result was clouds of pink petals swirling all about me. There was a profound sense of awe and enfolding that inspired me to write an essay called “Pink blizzards.” Today it happened again, not once but multiple times.
Shortly after packing up and snagging the front seat once again, we set off on a ‘highway’ into some really remote jungle lowlands this side of Chiapas, still in the Department of Petén. The small town of Las Cruces was offered as a place for visiting nature. While the group found solace in a small turquoise facility shrouded by lavender crepe myrtle, I suddenly realized I was in an explosion of color. In the space of fifteen minutes I took more than sixty images of a town painted in every possible color of the rainbow in a morning atmosphere of stunning clarity. Photographers know that stunning semi-aureate clarity that comes on rare mornings. One can do no wrong with a camera. So it was just now.
A very short time later we came to the end of the road, literally. The pavement just stopped, cut off as a grand opening ribbon would be. Over time the road became little more than a packed earth strand in the jungle. On one side a city of the dead appeared. Out here in the green landscape appeared sarcophagi, mausoleums, and tombs in every conceivable color. Our driver has quickly developed the blessed reflex of coming to a stop the minute I lift my camera. I can shoot through the window or hop out. Hopping out I was able to scamper through this chromatic wonderland and capture the remembrances of lives departed, in every conceivable color of the rainbow.
As money became scarcer and more remote, the road became narrower, in places a single track of dirt. We were advised that we would be approaching the Usamacinta River in about an hour where we would cross the border from Guatemala into Mexico in a long boat. Having driven into Mexico many times I expected a non-descript cement building, not unlike those I have sat in for as long as five days in years past when trying to import medical equipment. We came upon two small thatched buildings on one side of the river, set in a lake of color. These two buildings were in a field of zinnias and other shimmering summer flowers. I became aware of scintillating movement under the cerulean tropical sky. Suddenly, I was back in Holland. Clouds of color were moving everywhere around me. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of butterflies of many types were dancing in the torrid air. Not even in the great apiaries of the London zoo or the Calloway Gardens in south Georgia have I seen such clouds of enchantment. I could do no wrong with my cameras.
The group picked up on the number of photos I was taking and we were still a ways from our pyramid climbs of the day. It became a footnote that the most incredible palette of color was unfolding for us today. Clearing Guatemalan Customs proved magical and we soon found ourselves on the shore of the Usamacinta River where porters loaded our gear into a long boat – essentially a vast canoe with thatched top. There are no bridges between Mexico and Guatemala along this river which forms a true natural boundary. It turns out these long boats are painted in a surreal palette of intense colors. Ours was painted in alizarin and cobalt, making for the most sublime foreground composition of dozen of grand images of the swift river. As we travelled this crocodile filled river we saw no less than four of these giants from a lost world. Collecting images of these giant beasts became a bit of a game – snagging images before the sound of our outboard gave them cause to slither into the murky waters. Any urge to go for a swim soon abated. Moving down on the food chain was not on my itinerary for the day.
After an hour, perhaps ninety minutes in blessed breeze from our rapid forward movement, we found ourselves at a single set of unmarked cement stairs twenty miles upriver, going up into the dense jungle. One definitely needed to know where one was going.
Yaxchilan is one of those places straight out of Harrison Ford’s Temple of Doom, one of the adrenalin-pumping archeological thrillers describing the adventures of Indiana Jones. Temples encrusted in time and green moss hidden away in dense jungle gave forth a sense of remoteness of great magnitude. Even in the Amazon I never encountered clouds of mosquitoes such as we found here. We had this archeological treasure to ourselves. I can’t but wonder if the mosquito here might not have once been the Mayan state bird – except there were far grander birds to be found in the vast tree canopy overhead. Billed toucans, red crested wood peckers, cormorants, egrets, parrots, orioles, and others populated the upper world.
Uncrowded, actually deserted, I was able to lie down on fifteen centuries of time to take images of magnificent door lentils carved with picto-glyphs. Few cities have been found with these as most cities made use of wood lentils in order to gain wider spans at a trade off in long-term permanence. It was splendid to be able to complete a video and still photo survey of this lost emerald world.
The silhouetted mountains with crimson, cadmium red, and alizarin framed our sunset entry into Palenque, where we plan to spend the night. In the morning we will visit the ancient mountain city of Palenque.
My thanks to GK Chesterton for his observations. A chromatic tsunami washed over my life today. Beauty is an infinitely renewable resource. The odds are 100% you will find it, if you but look for it.
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