Palenque - finally!

This is a photo of my hostel - although I've not actually looked at it myself yet as I arrived so late tonight! I was meant to arrive around 20:45 but we were delayed so it was more like 22:15.

So the actual direct journey from San Cristóbal de las Casas to Palenque is around 5h 15m. However, due to frequent and unannounced protests against the government that last weeks on end that block this main road (think, Just Stop Oil style, but much bigger) that have been going on for years, all of the main coach routes are now officially only taking the diverted route, making the journey 9 hours instead! The direct route is also known to be unsafe - which is another reason many avoid it.

For example, this was my Google maps, 2hrs into my journey. I started at the yellow star, my destination is the red circle, and the blue dot is where I actually was at that time - further away from my destination by 2hrs!

This is where I was 4hrs and 6.5hrs into my journey respectively:

So as you can see I pretty much did almost an entire circle. Excitingly, I did enter the state of Tabasco for around 10min and then exited again.

I have two extremely busy days in Palenque so hopefully I'll have time to blog but it may be a job for on the coach to Campeche on Saturday morning. Tomorrow I'm visiting the Palenque Ruins and two waterfalls, and then on Friday another waterfall. We are very much in the jungle here!