U.S. presidential election (24): will there be a contested convention?
April 8th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
In Wisconsin this week, Ted Cruz soundly beat Donald Trump in the Republican race, while Bernie Sanders stormed to victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest. But, on 19 April when the New York primary is held, Trump expects to triumph and Clinton is hoping for a decisive win.
Meanwhile there is increasing speculation that Trump could arrive at the Republican convention with the most delegates but no overall majority. Much less likely, there is a scenario in which Clinton find herself lacking a convincing majority of pledged delegates. In this situation, we are in the territory of what is called a contested or brokered or deadlocked convention.
A contested convention happens when no candidate arrives with a majority of pledged delegates. On the first ballot, these pledged delegates will vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. But, in any subsequent ballots, delegates are then free to vote for whomever they want. This could include the other candidates or even – subject to the rules of the convention – people who are not candidates. Delegates keep on voting until someone wins a majority.
The most famous deadlocked convention – it involved the Democrats – took place in 1924. It required 103 ballots to chose the Democratic candidate – who then lost to the Republican candidate in the general election.
The last deadlocked convention was experienced by the Republicans in 1976, when Gerald Ford did not have enough delegates before the convention to claim the nomination (his opponent was Ronald Reagan), but eventually won the nomination (Reagan withdrew) and went on to lose the general election.
The last time a contested convention produced a candidate who went on to win in the general election was in 1932 with Franklin Roosevelt.
For the 2016 convention, the Democrats will have a total of 4,763 delegates including super delegates and so, to win the nomination, the Democratic front runner needs a total of 2,282 delegates. For the 2016 convention, the Republicans will have a total of 2,472 delegates including unpledged delegates and so, to win the nomination, the Republican front runner will need a total of 1,237 delegates.
The Republicans will have their convention in Cleveland, Ohio from 18-21 July, while the Democrats will hold their convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia from 25-28 July.
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Post Office’s Network Transformation Programme gathers pace
April 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
The Post Office network is currently undergoing its largest ever restructuring through the Network Transformation Programme (NTP). Under the programme, the vast majority of post offices will convert to one of two new operating models – Post Office Mains and Post Office Locals.
The programme gathered pace towards the end of 2015 and, by February, there had been just over 2,500 Locals and 2,500 Mains conversions under the NTP; more than two thirds of which converted in the premises of the original post office. Another 500 Post Office Mains and up to 3,000 Post Office Locals are expected to convert by the programme’s end in March 2018.
Citizens Advice (CitA) continues to meet with Post Office Limited (POL) on a weekly basis to review proposals for branch changes; and to date have secured improvements to approximately sixty per cent of branch proposals.
Citizens Advice hosts a Post Office Advisory Group (POAG) which brings together CitA, POL, and stakeholders with an interest in post offices. POAG meets quarterly and I have chaired it for many years.
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It’s “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history”, it’s still continuing, and you’ve never heard of it
April 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
“Nearly 20 million Bangladeshis are still drinking water poisoned with high levels of arsenic despite millions of wells being tested and hundreds of thousands of safe ones having been bored to avert a major health crisis, a new report has suggested.
The lack of progress in improving what the UN’s World Health Organisation called “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history” in the 1990s is blamed on government nepotism, rich country neglect and NGOs losing sight of the problem, says Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Latest estimates suggest 43,000 people in Bangladesh die each year from arsenic-related diseases. These include skin lesions, cancers, and cardiovascular and lung illnesses.”
Full story here.
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The Panama Papers scandal is HUGE
April 6th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
The leak of files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca continues to create upheaval around the world. The documents were leaked to the German daily “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, which shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the “Guardian”, the BBC and other media organisations.
Both the amount of information and the number of individuals affected in countries around the globe are enormous.
This is the largest leak in history. An incredible 11.5 files are involved. To put this in context, the Wikileaks scandal of 2010 involved 1.7 GB of data; the Panama Papers leak is a whopping 2,600 GB.
In all, the details of 214,000 entities, including companies, trusts and foundations, were leaked and this data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.
Already there are links to 12 current or former heads of state and government in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries. More than 60 relatives and associates of heads of state and other politicians are also implicated.
I suspect that eventually there will hardly be a major country in the world where political and business leaders are not caught up in some way in this evolving scandal. For now, for a summary of some of the more prominent individuals in different nations who have been implicated so far, see here.
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What I missed most while in Mexico
April 5th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’ve just returned from a wonderful two-week holiday in Mexico. I took my iPad and managed to access the Internet in each of the hotels where we stayed – but, oh, how intermittent and how slow it was.
It was like being back on dial-up and I spent long minutes watching that thin blue line edging over to the right so s-l-o-w-l-y.
It’s good to be back to fast broadband.
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Highlights of Mexico (15): Chichen Itza
April 4th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It was the last full day of our holiday – Day 12 (Sunday) – and Cox and Kings had managed to organise the programme so that effectively the best had been saved to the last: a visit to the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.
Roger and Vee were awake at 5.45 am (the clocks had gone forward an hour in the night) which gave us plenty of time to pack and have breakfast before Raul collected us at 8 am. The weather had changed totally overnight: the temperature was down to 29C/84F and it was cloudy and rainy, so it felt much cooler and much pleasanter.
We drove due east to Chichen Itza which is mid-way between Merida and Cancun, a journey of about an hour and a half. Since it was drizzling, an enterprising local was selling yellow plastic ponchos for $5 each but we were delighted to have such more equable weather conditions which enabled us to spend a comfortable three or so hours touring the site.
Chichen Itza was a ceremonial centre of the Mayans over several centuries and was inhabited for about 800 years, so the oldest buildings date from 600 AD and are Classical Mayan, while structures built after the Toltec conquest of 950 AD exhibit Toltec stylistic elements, and it is this blend of Mayan and Toltec architecture that makes it such an extraordinary site.
The most famous of the many notable buildings on this vast site – only a small proportion of which is open to the public – is the Temple of Kukulcan, the Mayan name for the god Quetzalcoatl who is usually represented as a plumed serpent. It is a pyramid reaching 25 metres (82 feet) high with a temple at the summit. It is the not the tallest pyramid that we had seen (and since 2010 one cannot climb the steps), but it was the most interesting because of what the construction represents.
The whole thing is a giant calendar. It consists of nine levels faced with a total of 52 panels – the number of years in the Mayan-Toltec cycle. The staircases on each face of the pyramid have 91 steps making a total of 364 which, with the square platform at the top, totals 365 – the number of days in the solar year. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadow cast by the sun on the northern staircase appears to cause a massively long ‘snake’ to crawl down the building and link with the stone serpent’s head at the foot of the staircase. You can see the effect in a short video on YouTube here.
AnotherIt was the last full day of our holiday – Day 12 (Sunday) – and Cox and Kings had managed to organise the programme so that effectively the best had been saved to the last: a visit to the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.
Roger and Vee were awake at 5.45 am (the clocks had gone forward an hour in the night) which gave us plenty of time to pack and have breakfast before Raul collected us at 8 am. The weather had changed totally overnight: the temperature was down to 29C/84F and it was cloudy and rainy, so it felt much cooler and much pleasanter.
We drove due east to Chichen Itza which is mid-way between Merida and Cancun, a journey of about an hour and a half. Since it was drizzling, an enterprising local was selling yellow plastic ponchos for $5 each but we were delighted to have such more equable weather conditions which enabled us to spend a comfortable three or so hours touring the site.
Chichen Itza was a ceremonial centre of the Mayans over several centuries and was inhabited for about 800 years, so the oldest buildings date from 600 AD and are Classical Mayan, while structures built after the Toltec conquest of 950 AD exhibit Toltec stylistic elements, and it is this blend of Mayan and Toltec architecture that makes it such an extraordinary site.
The most famous of the many notable buildings on this vast site – only a small proportion of which is open to the public – is the Temple of Kukulcan, the Mayan name for the god Quetzalcoatl who is usually represented as a plumed serpent. It is a pyramid reaching 25 metres (82 feet) high with a temple at the summit. It is the not the tallest pyramid that we had seen (and since 2010 one cannot climb the steps), but it was the most interesting because of what the construction represents.
The whole thing is a giant calendar. It consists of nine levels faced with a total of 52 panels – the number of years in the Mayan-Toltec cycle. The staircases on each face of the pyramid have 91 steps making a total of 364 which, with the square platform at the top, totals 365 – the number of days in the solar year. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadow cast by the sun on the northern staircase appears to cause a massively long ‘snake’ to crawl down the building and link with the stone serpent’s head at the foot of the staircase. You can see the effect in a short video on YouTube here.
Another impressive structure is the Ball Court, a common feature in Mayan cities but in this case the largest in ancient Mesoamerica. This would have been the scene of a complicated game in which small teams of players attempted to pass a heavy rubber ball through a stone hoop high up on the wall. The ball weighed 3-4 kg and could not be touched with the hands or feet, so it had to be kept in the air with elbows, knees, hips and backside. A score could take hours so one score was sufficient to win the game. We know that some the games concluded with the beheading of the losers. As Raul put it: “This was a brutal place”. A bit different from soccer but perhaps not so different from the behaviour of some English football fans abroad.
Many of the other structures on the site have exotic names: the Temple of the Jaguars and Shields, the Platform of Skulls (festooned with carvings of 2,000 skulls and eagles tearing out the hearts of human victims), the Platform of the Eagles and the Jaguars, the Temple of the Thousand Columns (actually ‘only’ about 860), the Ossuary, and the Snail (a kind of observatory).
Another remarkable feature of the site is one of the 7,000 ‘cenotes’ in the Yucatan peninsula. These are sink holes created by water wearing away the limestone terrain. The one at Chichen Itza, called the Sacred Cenote, is big: 60 metres (200 feet) in diameter and 35 metres (115 feet) wide. Apparently, on one of the explorations of the bottom of the green water, they found the skeletons of 127 children aged 11-13 – the only such case of human sacrifice known in the Mayan world.
Lunch was at a nearby restaurant called “El Jardin” which was more popular for being the site of another cenote called Ik Kil and this one – as we saw – is where you can go swimming (although the children use life belts because the water is very, very deep).
Finally, at 3.30 pm, we arrived at our sixth and last hotel where we said farewell to Raul, the best of our guides. It was a place called Hacienda Chichen whose cottages were originally the homes of archaeologists of the Carnegie Institute, who established their headquarters here in the 1920s, before they were extensively refurbished and redecorated for tourists.
On the last evening of our trip, Vee and Roger invited fellow traveller Susan to join us for dinner at the hotel. Roger – who is not noted for his alcoholic consumption – decided that he should conclude the holiday with a shot of the national drink tequila and chose something called ‘hornitos reposado’. A happy holiday ended with a happy man.
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Tomorrow we fly home from Cancun to London Gatwick so effectively our holiday is over. I hope that you have enjoyed these daily accounts of our travels. When we are home, I will copy and paste all these 15 postings into a single narrative with some hyperlinks and later some photographs.
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Highlights of Mexico (14): Uxmal and Kabah
April 3rd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Day 11 (Saturday) was spent visiting two small Mayan sites to the south of Merida. As usual, our local guide was keen to leave earlier than the official programme so that we avoided the crowds and the heat, so we departed at 8 am instead of 9 am.
Driving through Merida confirmed just how pretty this colonial city is, with its cobbled streets lined with single-story buildings in all sorts of light, often pastel, colours such as cream, pink, sky blue, russet, lime green, ochre, sun-kissed yellow. There are lots of little squares with trees and love seats (a pair of stones seats connected but facing towards each other).
Before we left Merida, Raul wanted to show us the General Cemetery, the oldest and the largest of the city’s seven cemeteries located on the outskirts near the airport. He explained the local burial traditions. Coffins are buried in a hole, but no soil is put on top, only a capping stone. Then some three-five years later, the grave is opened, the casket is brought out, and the bones are cleaned before being placed in small ossuary which is positioned at ground level. All this is done by the family of the deceased. If this practice seems bizarre to non-Mexicans, then to older Mexicans at least it is quite normal even necessary.
There are plots in the cemetery for various wealthy families or government departments or labour unions and there is a large memorial to a guy called Felipe Carrillo Puerto who is something of a local hero. He was the founder of the first Communist Party in Latin America and a socialist governor of the state of Yucatan before in 1924 he was executed together with three of his brothers.
It was another hour’s drive south before we reached the first of the Mayan sites that we were visiting today. Uxmal (pronounced ‘ush-mal’) is smaller than the other pre-Hispanic sites that we had been to earlier in the tour: Teotihuacan (outside Mexico City), Monte Alban (outside Oaxaca), and Palenque (outside the town of the same name). But it was the best presented with a modern visitors centre built around a courtyard with cafe, shops, and toilets and with descriptions around the site in Spanish, English and French. And, in any event, less than 5% of the site is open to the public.
It was fractionally cooler today with a temperature of ‘only’ 36C/97F! So we all wore hats or used umbrellas, took every opportunity to seek shade, and did not climb the steps of every pyramid. We spotted quite a few iguanas who confirmed to us that it was really, really hot today.
Uxmal means ‘thrice built’ in the Mayan language but it was actually built five times. It was inhabited from around 500 BC and was the seat of Mayan political and economic power in the 9th-12th centuries AD. It is a classic example of one of the five main architectural styles of the Mayan civilisation – the one called ‘puuc’ in which the temples have an elliptical base that emulates the elliptical shape of the thatched roof houses in which ordinary people lived.
Recurrent motifs at the site are zig-zag patterns relating to the the twisting of a snake and diamond patterns relating to the scales of a snake and representations of snakes entwined with one another. For the Mayans, the snake was a sacred animal – which did not go down well with the Catholic Spaniards who viewed the snake as the cause of the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden. .
The first temple we saw is called the Pyramid of the Dwarf because there is some evidence (which we saw) – including a small stone chair in a theatre and a stone throne decoration on a wall – that the ruler at one time was a person of limited stature. The pyramid rises to 38 metres (125 feet). Next we strolled through the Quadrangle of the Birds, named because there are birds decorating the walls, and the Quadrangle of the Nuns, named because of the 88 cell-like chambers. Other locations included the Ball Court, the Palace of the Governor, and the House of the Turtles and finally the Great Pyramid rising 32 metres (105 feet).
After around two hours walking round Uxmal, the heat was really getting to us and so we were pleased to find that lunch was in a restaurant just by the entrance to the site. The place was called oddly “Coole Chepa Chi”, a reference to a popular woman who served the original explorers if Uxmal. As the latest of the explorers, we enjoyed cool drinks and a three-course meal.
Suitably refreshed and revived, at 1.30 pm we set off to see another, smaller Mayan site which was another half hour’s drive further south. It is called Kabah and we spent an hour there. Like all the pre-Hispanic sites we visited, the origins went way back – in this case to around 500 BC. But, again like all the sites we visited, there was a ‘golden age’ – in this case, from 700-1000 AD.
Many buildings at archaeological sites have more than one name. Here in Kabah, the main building – a long, lowish structure – is known either as Codz Poop’s Altar of Glyphs which is Mayan for rolled-up carpets (because part of the front could be said to look like such carpets) or La Mano Ponderosa which means ‘powerful hand’ (because two statues at the back have out-stretched hands). Another special building is called the Palace of the Masks because it is decorated with 260 ‘masks’ – actually stylised faces with missing noses.
Before leaving the site, Roger and Vee bought a souvenir of the Mexico trip: a hand-carved representation of the face and crown of Pakal, the famous king of Palenque. We purchased it from the carver himself who dated and signed it – he was called Jesus. Close by the site, we drove first through the little town of Santa Elena where some locals still live in ‘housing’ in the Mayan style – a elliptical-shaped structure with a thatched roof, open doors and no windows. We were back at our hotel in Merida at 4.45 pm.
Fortified by his superior geographical knowledge of downtown Merida gained from his meanderings of the previous evening, tonight Roger successfully led Vee to a local square which was the scene of a special Mexican Evening with singing and dancing, before returning to last evening’s venue of “Cafeteria Impala” where he devoured another of those gorgeous banana splits while Vee indulged in a brownie and ice cream.
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Highlights of Mexico (13): Merida
April 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Day 10 (Friday) was another flight and another state.
To give ourselves good time for dressing, packing and breakfast, we were up at 6 am as we were departing the Chan Kahn Resort outside Palenque at 8 am. Since there are no flights to Merida from Palenque, we made the two hour drive to the airport at Villahermosa which is actually just across the state border into the state of Tabasco (known for its sauce). Compared to the road journey to Palenque, this was a dream: a straight road across flat terrain with none of those accursed ‘speed bumps’.
The AeroMexico flight from Villahermosa to Merida was in a turboprop aircraft the ATR 72 600 and took 70 minutes. We were now in another state, Yucatan, and we had another guide, Raul, who doubled up as our driver. Arriving in Merida at about the hottest time of the day (1.10 pm) was like walking into a sauna – it was a blistering 39C/102F!
Raul led us to our minibus and joked “The problem is that the air conditioning is not working”. Actually the joke was on him because it turned out that the air con was the only thing working. So we had to abandon this vehicle and wait for the local travel company to send along another. The group persuaded Raul to take us first for somewhere to have lunch, partially because we were hungry and thirsty and partly because we want to wait foe the heat to die down a little.
He obliged and took us to a place called “Los Almendros” (“The Almond Trees”) which serves traditional Yucantan food. Both Vee and Roger ordered a local dish called ‘cochinita pibil’ which is made with suckling piglet marinated in recado rojo (a regional condiment), wrapped in plantain leaves, before baking.
We were suitably refreshed and the temperature was a little lower when we left the restaurant at 4 pm. Raul briefed us ion the history of the city. Merida was founded by a hundred Spaniards in 1542 on the site of the Mayan city of Ichkansiho. Today it is the capital of Yucatan state – the fourth and last of our holiday – and has a population of about 700,000.
Raul led us on a walking tour around the lovely main square which is called appropriately Plaza Grande. We went up to the first floor of the City Hall for a good view of the whole square. Next we viewed the oldest residence in the city, La Casa de Montejo built in 1542 with a facade depicting conquistadors standing on the heads of indigenous people. We looked inside a small museum which is now located in part of the residence (the rest is now a bank). On another side of the square, we visited the Cathedral – completed in 1598 – which is very plain compared to the other cathedrals we had seen on this trip but has two claims to distinction: it is the oldest church in mainland America and it houses the largest indoor crucifix in the world.
Finally we entered the Governor’s Palace which on the first floor has 27 murals around the external walls and inside a large hall. These pictures depict historical events relating to Mexico generally but Yucantan particularly. Raul seemed disappointed that these works, by local artist Fernando Castro Pacheco, are not as well known as the murals by Diego Rivera in Mexico City. This might be because the style is more impressionistic and darker both literally and metaphorically.
After an hour and a half of walking around, we were wilting in the heat and returned to the minibus where Raul gave us cold bottles of water and cold flannels. Feeling fresher, we were then driven around the city for a while to obtain a better feel for the place. Particularly notable was the Paseo de Montejo, a wide, long, classy boulevard that is Merida’s equivalent of the Champs-Elysees, and the Monumento a la Patria, a striking sculpture in the middle of a roundabout which has a huge Mayan chieftain flanked by stone murals of Mexican statesmen.
It was growing dark when we reached our hotel at 6.30 pm, over 10 hours since we had left our hotel in the morning. Our accommodation was the Hotel Gran Real Yucatan which is situated in the historic centre of the town. The property was converted from the former 19th century mansion of a wealthy family which produced a native plant called henequen. Today it is a hotel with 73 rooms, each with a small balcony, and there is lovely central courtyard with elegant classical columns.
Sensibly Vee decided to spend the evening chilling in the hotel, but bravely Roger thought that he would try to walk to the main square to see a re-enactment of the Mayan ball game that was to be held there. He strode on down poorly-light streets that all look the same, along seriously uneven pavements that regularly trip one up, while the heat and the humidity too their toll.
After half an hour he gave up. But then it took another half hour to return to more or less where he started. By this time, his legs were starting to turn to jelly and his body was dripping with sweat. There was only one thing that would revive this intrepid explorer and fortunately he found it at a place called “Cafeteria Impala”: a delicious banana split.
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Highlights of Mexico (12): Palenque
April 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Often on these exotic holidays, Roger succumbs to some kind of stomach upset while Vee has a stomach of steel. Day 9 (Thursday) began early for Roger with three bouts of ‘Montezuma’s revenge’ which meant no breakfast at all. Fortunately Imodium did the trick and he was able to proceed with the programme.
Today was all about the ruins of the ancient city of Palenque. The site was only 15 minutes from our hotel and we deliberately went there early (8.30 am) but there were still lots of tourists and just as many hawkers (Vee bought herself a necklace with a symbol from the Mayan calendar for the time of year of her birth). Also it was extremely hot (36C/97F) and really humid (around 95%), so we had to take every chance that we could to take advantage of shade. There was no toilet and no cafe so for Roger at least it was just as well that the Imodium worked.
Palenque, which means ‘palisade’, was the name given to the site by the Spanish, but the inhabitants probably called it Lakamha which means ‘big water’. This magnificent ancient city of the Mayans built at the foot of the Chiapas Mountains originated around 100 BC but reached its peak between 600-900 AD, before falling into decline in the 10th century, and disappearing into the jungle. It was one of the first Mayan sites to be discovered (starting in the mid 1700s) and remains one of the best preserved.
In terms of what has so far been excavated, Palenque is a medium-sized Mayan site, smaller than such huge sites as Tikal in Guatemala or Copán in Honduras (both of which Roger and Vee visited in 2014) or Chichen Itza, (which we will be viewing later on this trip), but overall it features up to 1,000 temples of various sizes and contains some of the finest architecture, sculpture, roof comb and bas-relief carvings that the Mayans produced.
We started by standing in the main plaza at the base of a row of four large temples which from right to left are known as the Temple of the Skull, simply Temple XIIA, the Temple of the Red Queen, and the Temple of the Inscriptions. The last and most impressive is a very tall stepped pyramid that holds the extraordinary tomb of Palenque’s ruler King Pakal who died at the incredible age of 80 in 683 AD. The stone cover is estimated to weigh some eight or nine tons. The tomb was only uncovered in 1952.
Moving on to the Plaza of the Cross, we viewed three temples built by order of Pakal’s son: from left to right this time, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Cross (the largest), and the Temple of the Foliated Cross. Unlike the previous of temples, these three can be mounted via steep stone steps and Roger climbed up to the top of the third of them which has the fewest steps. The third main area we examined is known simply as the Palace which is a very large and extensive structure of connected living quarters and courtyards plus a tall tower.
After almost four hours at the site, the heat and the humidity were wearing us down and we drove the short distance to a restaurant called “Los Leones” where a three-course meal with drinks was provided – particularly welcome to Roger who had so far eaten and drunk nothing and to Vee who was wilting in the tropical climate.
After lunch, we returned to the site of Palenque to visit the museum. This is small but well done with some superb incense burners in the form of decorated faces and a full scale replica of Pakal’s tomb compete with detailed glyphs. At the museum shop, Roger bought a book on the history of the Mayans.
We were back at our hotel at 3.15 pm and said farewell to cheerful and chatty Alberto after four days as our accomplished guide. The rest of the day was free, so we spent it napping (in Vee’s case), swimming (in Roger’s case) and (in both cases) reading, surfing, eating and drinking.
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Highlights of Mexico (11): from San Cristobal de las Casas to Palenque
March 31st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Day 8 (Wednesday) was essentially another travelling day so it was an early start again: alarm at 5 am and departure from the hotel at 6.15 am with a packed breakfast. We were journeying from San Cristobal de las Casas north to Palenque in our minibus along a single lane road – a trip of 220 kms (140 miles) with a major scenic stop on the way.
We were fortunate because the Cox & Kings itinerary had warned us that, due to frequent demonstrations by local communities and subsequent restricted access to certain roads, it might be necessary to take an alternative route which would be both much longer and miss our the scenic site. Indeed the two previous days, such demonstrations were taking place, but the Mayan gods must have been shining down on us because today the road restrictions had been lifted.
The first section of our journey was through the lush scenery of the Chiapas highlands, passing through pine forest covered mountains, coffee and banana plantations, and Indian villages. The good news was there were no road restrictions and, as we drove through the indigenous village of Temo, we saw the pile of rocks that had blocked the road the previous two days. Indeed we saw other rock piles in other villages just waiting for the next protest.
The bad news was that the road was constantly twisting and turning and there was an unbelievable – repeat: unbelievable – number of ‘speed bumps’, making the ride somewhat challenging. Every village and every stall and every commercial endeavour (even a couple of kids selling drinks or fruit) would have ‘speed bumps’ constructed across the whole width of the road both before and after the location. Locals had created these ‘bumps’ in order to make the occupants of passing vehicles more aware of their existence and offerings.
Soon the road started to weave its way downwards from the cooler highlands to lower and lower elevations where it was hotter and hotter and more and more humid. After about two hours, we had a coffee and comfort stop. Then we went through villages that were strong supporters of the Zapatista uprising and we encountered a military checkpoint searching for drugs. After another hour and a half, we reached our scenic stop: the waterfalls of Aqua Azul.
This is a wonderful location at any time of year with a succession of waterfalls surrounded by verdant jungle. We were visiting the site in the dry season which meant that the flow of water was less (but still significant) and the water was at its most colourful (a dazzling turquoise which gives the site its name). It was here that our guide Alberto and Roger discovered that they shared a passion for movies when Alberto described the shooting of a scene from “Predator” at these falls.
After Aqua Azul, it was another hour and a half to reach the town of Palenque where we had lunch at the Hotel Ciudad Real. Our accommodation for the next two nights was different from our previous three hotels. First, it was not in Palenque but a 15 minute drive out of the town. Second, it consisted of separate bungalows. The Chan Kahn Resort was built on arid land originally used as a cattle ranch but now reforested to restore the surrounding jungle of some 50 acres that one sees today. The resort comprises 79 bungalow-style buildings called casitas surrounding a separate restaurant and an open air swimming pool.
From our hotel this morning to our hotel this afternoon had been a journey of nine and a half hours, so we were pleased to leave the heat and humidity and enter our air conditioned casitas.
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