Tag: Palenque

Rolling into Palenque marked my first time navigating a Mexican city on my own – I don’t think I had even done any solo runs to Tijuana at this point although I’d spent a few days exploring Panama City. The streets were overrun with hippies in town for the Rainbow and at least two sectors of the local economy were booming. Every single hotel, hostel or guesthouse was at full capacity and I would hear a boast repeated several times that the attendees had “bought all the drugs.”

Before finding transportation out to the Rainbow I needed to walk to a Post Office to send a letter to LaPorsha. The complexity of this errand was made especially comical by the fact that I was with her in Santa Monica on the day it arrived nearly a month later. I needed to buy an envelope and the Post Office didn’t sell them – I remember walking to several little shops and repeating this query until I found satisfaction:

“Tienes sobres?”

With that out of the way my next errand was especially easy considering at least half of the people on the street at any given time were trying to do the same thing. I was directed to the corner where a fleet of heavy duty black pickup trucks were making the ten mile trip for 50 pesos in each direction. The road was rougher than I had expected – winding through thickly forested mountains and across several streams. The driver was hamming it up for the mostly European passengers:

“He says he has just eaten a mushroom and God has spoken to him to tell him that we will arrive safely!”

In the chaos of loading and unloading passengers and luggage I became separated from my turquoise colored rolling suitcase. Of course I felt some degree of panic but the citizens of Mexico are far more altruistic and honest than negative stereotypes would have most Americans believe. I feel far safer about my belongings in the Mexican cities that I’ve visited than I ever would in an American city of comparable size and most visitors would tell you the same thing. I waited around the entrance tent until the next wave of arrivals brought my suitcase with them with no sign that it had been opened or tampered with.

I wasn’t in much of a mood to be social or find a group of people to camp with so I found an out of the way spot to stash my suitcase and lay out my sleeping bag at the base of a tree. Attendance was in the thousands at this point, maybe even as high as ten thousand, but I didn’t have any concern that someone might come across my suitcase when I wasn’t around and steal my stuff. Rainbow Gatherings have several clearly defined taboos and theft is one of them.

Another one of these dogmatic prohibitions would bring me into minor conflict with almost everyone I interacted with. My Congress tape deck was charged up and I hadn’t really gone anywhere without a background soundtrack for the last year. I just really wanted to play some Donna Summer with Giorgio Moroder but I turned the volume down to a 3 out of 10 in respect. It turned out that there wasn’t a volume level that would be viewed as acceptable – every person I passed repeated the same generic chastisement:

“No electronic music at Rainbow brother!”

I understood the spirit behind the proscription – I’ve been to more remote parties or gatherings than I can count where what should have been communion with nature was violently jarred by the buzz of generators and the booming bass of dubstep or whatever else the hippy techno flavor of the month was. Still I felt that there was some room for subtlety: alcohol is forbidden but every brightly painted bus most likely held a resident herbalist with an array of tincture bottles. Eating meat is forbidden but in the humid, tropical weather there’s no way that some kind of tiny insect wasn’t finding its way into the otherwise vegan meals.

Rules are never totally black and white. They exist as ongoing negotiations where all the involved parties reach a consensus on what level of strictness and enforcement will be actually tolerable. In a way I did find and define this line with all the people around me because Donna Summer on 3 wasn’t getting me kicked out or asked to leave – it just meant that I would be quietly yet constantly reminded that I was in the wrong. A group of Italians who had brought and constructed a pizza oven near my camp spot tried to explain it in a way that would become especially poignant in light of future events:

“You wouldn’t go to church in your underwear right?”

The afternoon of the final day of the thirteenth Baktun came around and I had to decide how I wanted to spend it. A group of people from both the Gathering and the nearby Mayan village were going to walk through the night until they reached the ruins of Palenque. This is normally the kind of activity that would appeal to me but I didn’t find myself in the mood. The same could be said for psychedelic drugs at the event – there was constant chatter that they were around but nobody was outright offering and I didn’t feel like jumping through the social hoops to get somebody to give some to me.

I think a major part of my decision to skip the epic trek was the knowledge that if I did undertake it I would have to make the journey without the soothing strains of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder.

The arrangement was frowned upon but a group of locals had installed themselves just outside the entrances to do a brisk trade in cold beer. This turned out to be exactly what I was in the mood for, especially as nobody on the opposite side of the Festival entrance would be wagging their fingers at me for listening to Disco. I took my caguama over to the nearby arroyo and made myself comfortable. A local species of large brown hummingbird arrived to convey its displeasure with my newfound presence, flicking its distinctively shaped tail like a feathered war flag.

I was considering relocating my camp to this spot and either drinking through the night or seeing what the beer vendors were going to get into when it started to rain. From what I heard from the locals later it hadn’t rained for a fairly long time before this and the weather wasn’t typical for this time of year. It had only been falling for a few minutes when it started to course through the arroyo bed in a way that clearly indicated moving my camp here would mean waking up under a full blown river.

I went back to my tree and found that although the canopy did help to reduce the rain I would probably need to seek out more substantial coverage. I hadn’t actually made any friends and I wasn’t in the headspace to impose on the Italians so I made my way to the only shelter I knew of: the white entrance tent. It was one of those portable pavilions like you would see setup at a Farmer’s Market or to go get your wristbands at a Festival.

As the downpour continued to rage through the night this asylum became more and more crowded with what can only be described as the dregs of the Rainbow. Like myself my companions had neglected to bring any tents or other coverings for themselves and lacked the social graces to convince any of the thousands of other attendants to share one. They all more or less fell under two major classifications: sketchy, annoying old dudes and cringey, overly enthusiastic young dudes.

The rain was extra: cataclysmic world ending rain. We were protected from above but the ground beneath us became a vicious mud slide that somehow pulled the black snakeskin and leather shoes directly off my feet. I had been searching the ground for them but there was one spot I hadn’t been able to search because the obnoxious old guy sitting there absolutely refused to move for five seconds so I could search it. I’m sure you’ll know the type as there are one or two of these dangling on nearly every regional music scene in America.

The type of old guy that never produces anything of value, isn’t interesting to talk to and seems to be incapable of empathy because any problem that somebody else might have just reminds them of a similar situation when they were the victim:

“I lost my shoes at a London Backpacker’s in 1988! I had to go to Oxford Street and buy another pair!”

I forced myself to be as cordial as I possibly could under the trying circumstances:

“I truly empathize brother but I just lost my shoes right now and unfortunately we are a long way from Oxford Street. I happen to wear a size 12 and can tell you from experience that the shoe stores of Chiapas only go up to a 9 in Men’s. Under these conditions do you think you could please move out of the way for just a second so I can search for my shoes?”

He finally did but my shoes weren’t in the mud underneath of him either. Even in the light of the dawning era of the next morning they never manifested themselves. The only explanation I can think of is that the Fourth Sun, after years of being fattened on blood sacrifices by the priests of the Mayan and Aztec empires, required one last offering of paltry leather.

The younger guys who were most likely tripping on whatever they could get their hands on through the night offered constant commentary in the form of cliches. As the storm built up into supernatural strength this consisted of vocalizing the most obvious of anxieties: what if it never stops raining? What if the sun never rises again? Eventually the sun did rise and the rain did stop. Water started to evaporate off the surface of a newly birthed world. Somewhere under the tent somebody was quoting hippy scripture:

“What a long, strange trip it’s been!”

I walked barefoot back out to the road which was now covered with a waist high rushing River that would prevent the trucks from arriving for several hours. The chief of the Mayan village had arrived on horseback in roughly Western looking attire and was high fiving everybody in genuine excitement that the rain did stop and the sun did rise and we were looking outward at a world fresh with optimism and wet from birth.

The center of the Rainbow camp had also been transformed. What was dry land the night before was now a series of pools crawling with smiling, naked hippies like the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. There were some downsides as I heard that several people had left their tents and passports in positions that had been swept away by the surging waters but nearly everybody was having a good time.

Somebody had suspended acrobatic silks from a sturdy tree branch high above the largest pool and I got to give a clownish performance: grotesquely parodying the burlesque movements of the curvy female performers with my own scrawny frame and masculine morphology.

I ended up running into somebody I knew – Clay from Tucson who I met at INC and his friend Danny. They were into a non-profit organization called Clowns Without Borders and levitating street performances respectively. Danny had his car with him and was driving to the ruins at Palenque so I decided to tag along.

It was my first time visiting this site and I was excited to see Pakal’s elaborate sarcophagus, jade mask and other funerary artifacts. I saw a lot of things that were less exciting. The Rainbow hippies had crowded into the temples and were sitting on the floor singing songs from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. With hundreds of voices and the natural acoustics of the buildings it just felt like they were taking up an obscene amount of space in a sacred location where Mayan families were attempting to have culturally appropriate experiences.

Someone had decided to strip completely naked and was being arrested by the Park Rangers as it is against the rules and considered disrespectful. Some hippy girls were screaming at these guards and calling them fascists for upholding a certain level of decorum and doing their jobs. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the comments I had heard about going to church in your underwear a day or so earlier.

I ended up barefoot and soaking wet on the streets of Palenque. I had just confirmed that not a single shoe shop or second hand store in town had anything approaching my shoe size and was feeling serious misgivings as to when I would ever find shoes again. I also would have really liked to get a room and shower as all of my clothing and the contents of my suitcase had become soaked the night before.

I was buying a 200 peso ticket that would take me all the way to Mexico City on the following morning when I came face to face with a little bit of Rainbow Magic. Some other travelers in the bus station had managed to get a hotel room but wouldn’t be able to use it as their bus was leaving that night. They gave me the key to their room and mentioned somebody had left a pair of shoes behind as I was visibly barefoot.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when they turned out to be size 12 skate shoes, soaking wet and not exactly my style but an absolute godsend considering my predicament. I aired out my suitcase and hung all my clothes on the shower pole to dry as I snacked on a bag of candy that had been left on the bedside table. It was the type of Hershey Kisses that they call Hugs because milk and white chocolate had been twisted together. The whole situation had me thinking of the Gathering a lot more charitably although I still wish they hadn’t given me so much grief about vibing to Donna Summer.

I got the old Congress good and charged up for my trip to Mexico City.

I filled the time waiting for my bus the next morning by sketching the mural for a local business called Bar La Bestia. It featured a kind of chimera: a Jaguar with a lion’s mane, a unicorn’s horn and imposing claws. I stopped in for a beer and the proprietor got excited when he saw my sketch. Apparently they would be moving locations soon and had to find somebody to recreate the painting as the original artist was no longer in town.

I wouldn’t be able to do that unfortunately but drew them up a sketch they could give to a painter if they wanted to switch out for a more full body view that incorporated parts of even more imaginary animals. I can’t remember exactly what it looked like but I think I gave it wings and a snake for a tail.

I slept through all of Oaxaca as the bus pulled me on to Mexico City in time for the Midnight Mass on Noche Buena or Christmas Eve.