I´d been looking forward to getting to Palenque for a while now. I´d heard a lot of good reports and it was going to be the first place in Mexico that was out in the middle of nowhere.

Palenque is an ancient Mayan city deep in the jungle, not too far from the Guatemalan border. After staying only in towns and cities so far in Mexico I decidedto get back to nature and get myself a hammock in the jungle not too far from the ruins. By the look and smell of them, most of my fellow campers had been there for years. They all seemed extremely devoted to their life in the jungle, washing their clothesin the stream, wearing their homemade shoes and spending hours making fires and cooking up extremely dodgy looking dinners. I´m not sure if I ruined their illusions that they had completely shut out the modern world but they certainly didnt look too impressed as I circled the site with my shop-bought flipflops, trying to pick up wi-fi on my ipod before settling down for a dinner of a tin of peas , a bag of doritos and a bottle of fanta.

I´ve decided after my first night in Palenque that I want to sleep in a hammock for good. It´s just so darn comfortable! What made the experience even better was that when I woke up it was business hours for the howler monkeys who all started roaring and screaming. Added to the constant singing from the birds and the crickets and frogs it was almost such a perfect way to wake up I was close to start on my own ´jungle shoes.´

Since the monkeys had woken me up anyway, I decided to head to the ruins early to avoid the crowds. They ruins themselves were awesome and very impressive. I´d been told the guided tours were a bit dull so decided to pass on the tour and just wander around myself, humming the theme to Indiana Jones the entire way.

The only downside about sleeping in the jungle is that when it gets dark you´re pretty much forced to go to sleep seeing as there is absolutely nothing else to do, especially if you only brought 2 small candles as I did. So it must have only been around 8.00 when I climbed into my hammock, expecting another extremely comfortable and peacful night. It was all going to plan until I woke up in the middle of the night to hear something or someone scratching around my rubbish bag. At first I assumed one of my fellow campers had decided my leftovers were a better choice than their own questionable supper but since I couldnt smell anything I quickly realized this wasn´t the case. The scratching and rustling continued and as I realized it must have been something wild I started to get a bit nervous. My pitiful candles didnt reach that far so I could see nothing there but the noises kept going. As I went through the possibilities of what it could be I started to get more and more scared, but thought staying still in my hammock would probably be the most sensible thing to do. I couldn´t quite reach my backpackto get my swiss-army knive, though, even if I could I don´t think a cable stripper or a tin opener would do too much against a wild animal. I was able to just reacj the ground so picked up a rock and threw it against one of the posts for my hammock. The noise did the trick and as it ran away past one of my candles I could just make out a black cat-like thing, not too big but certainly big enough to do some damage!

Though it had gone, I was nervous that it had got a taste for Nacho Cheese Doritos and would return with its possy, so I decided the manly thing to do would be to sleep in the toilet until it got lighter. When the morning did come I decided I should probably not chance my luck with another night so headed back to civilisation to catch the bus to Campeche, before making it to the coast.