Tulum to Palenque and Everything Inbetween

We had little that we wanted to see between Tulum, Quintana Roo and San Cristobal, Chiapas, 600 miles away, but not having the inclination or vehicle for doing it in a single day, we spent five days covering the distance. Our first stop was at Laguna Bacalar near to Chetumal. The lake is a shallow freshwater lake, with an astonishing colour, ranging from bright turquoise in the deeper areas, to almost white in the shallower area. We stayed at the Cocalitos campsite for a couple of days, swimming in the lake and visiting the nearby town.

The town of Bacalar is a Pueblos Magico (magic town), an accolade awarded to a small number of Mexican towns with unique natural beauty, or cultural and historical significance. I’m willing to believe that it deserved this accolade at one time, but in its current state I would find it hard to describe it as magical. It clearly suffered massive damage in the 2007 hurricane, and as it lies now, the town has no more charm or character than hundreds of others nearby. Nevertheless it remains popular with tourists and during an evening spent in the town square we met a number of interesting travellers from Europe and America. We spent a fun hour or so chatting to Randy and Dave who are travelling the Americas in their awesome Westfalia VW.
The day that we left, we got straight onto Mex 186 and started heading west from Chetumal to Escarcega. This section of road is home to a large number of Mayan ruins, most of which share a unique style know as Rio Bec, and it had been our intention to visit a few. The biggest and most well-known of the Rio Bec sites is Calakmul; most of the site remains unrestored, but it was undoubtedly one of the largest cities in Mesoamerica. Various municipalities and landowners have shares of the 60km access road and site of the ruins, unfortunately this has made Calakmul an extremely expensive place to visit as visitors must pay three separate charges before finally accessing the ruins. Once a visitor has paid to enter the access road, pass the visitors centre, and access the ruins, the costs is more than 200 pesos, which may not sound much by internationals standards, but makes Calakmul one of the most expensive archaeological sites in Mexico. The cost, combined with the impracticality of driving the 120km round trip off of the 186, meant that we had already decided not to visit Calmul before we left Bacalar.

Instead we stopped first at Xpujil, a small site, and the easternmost of the Rio Bec sites accessed from the 186. The Rio Bec style is unlike any other ruins that we’d visited, and remarkably different to the other Mayan sites on the peninsula. Xpujil was quiet, and pleasant to explore, but is not in noteworthy condition and is not the kind of site I will remember in years to come.

We had intended to visit Becan, further west, but about a mile down the dirt access road, construction work was taking place. When we approached, the workers immediately started to shift a pile of gravel which had been dumped in the middle of the road, but after five minutes of waiting we could see that it was going to take them a long time to clear enough space for us to pass. We reversed the mile back to the highway and got back on the road heading west. We knew that we wouldn’t make it to Palenque the same day without a long drive in the dark, and so we stopped for the night at Centro Conservacion de la Vida Silvestre.

Silvestre is part campsite, part fruit farm, part ranch, and part conservation park, and is an amazing place to spend some time. Part of the site has mature forest, many of the trees in which have been carefully labelled with the Latin, modern and Mayan names. The forest has a number of marked trails through it, and it was a rare treat to be able to walk Boris in a shady forest without risking a poked eye are scratched legs. Another portion of the site has been planted with fruit trees, and is filled with orange, lime, almond, mango, avocado, tamarind, and banana trees; I'd guess that later in the year campers could eat well without making a mark.  The owner of the site lives nearby, but most of the time visitors will have the place to themselves.

After an evening spent in the beautiful surroundings at Silvestre, we got back on the road the next morning and drove onwards on the 186. Not wishing to risk doing any portion of the mountainous Mex 199 highway to San Cristobal in the dark, we stopped for the second time in Planque, and were happy to spend another night at the Mayabell campground.