As we had to be ready to leave the hotel at 7:45am it didn't leave much time to see Merida. We did a quick walk to the main square and also visited the Cathedral San Ildefonso which was open. The Cathedral is one of the oldest in the Americas built in 1599. The bus trip was not too bad however the driver must have wanted to be home in time for Christmas as he drove very fast and we made it to Palenque in 8 1/2 hours not the 10 we were expecting. We checked into the hotel and called Bernie and Chris to say Merry Christmas using face time on Bernie's iphone. We also spoke to Bernie's Mum and Dad. David then called his Mum & Roger but it was a very bad connection using skype to her phone so he had to use the headset. We then called Megan also using facetime and spoke to Catriona's Mum and a couple of other family members.
In the evening after dinner the group met on the roof top balcony of the hotel to celebrate Joey's 30th birthday and Christmas eve. Lorna and John had bought a piñata and Joey had a hard job trying to break it open as he only had a plastic table leg to hit it with. We drank the bottle of Havana Club we bought at the airport, John and Lorna had bought 3litre bottles of coke and sprite and others had bought 1.2L bottles of Victoria and Corona 'mega' beer. We ended up going to bed at around 11:30pm as we knew we had a big day at the ruins on Christmas day.
It was a short drive from the hotel to the Palenque Arqueologica zone where we had a 2 hour guided tour through the ruins. We walked around, up and in many of the ruins on our tour and then after by ourselves. We also walked through the jungle and found as yet to be excavated ruins and heard the scary howler monkeys in the trees above us. We had a fantastic day and ended up with very tired legs from all the climbing.
We went out as a group to a restaurant close to the ruins. There were many hippies there and we found out there had been 65000 at Palanque for the end of the world. They were expecting space ships to come and take them away! The ones left were probably those that couldn't affort to get back to where they came from, or maybe they lived at Palenque.
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