#misol-ha

[emphatic-nomadic]

Misolha waterfall in Chiapas, Mexico 🇲🇽

[venus-garden]

Misol-Ha

flickr / vscogrid / instagram

(please keep the caption)

[venus-garden]

Misol-Ha

flickr / vscogrid / instagram

(please keep the caption)

[whereoneartharethey]

Cascada Misol-Ha and Jules in her happy place

[leognecchi]

¿Cuándo volveremos al momento?¿Cuándo aprenderemos a parar el tiempo?

[emphatic-nomadic]

Misol-ha waterfall in Mexico 🇲🇽

[lupitapeimbert]

Nature: Travel to Cascada de Misol-Ha, Chiapas. 

(Solo-Travel) Not far from Palenque, Cascada de Misol-Ha offers a breath taking opportunity to walk besides its waters, giving you a unique experience. You can feel the energy of the water falling down, and you find yourself happier and more energetic.

Misol-Ha is located on the way to Palenque; next to it there is a restaurant offering delicious local food and antojitos, a souvenir and textile…

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[canonicalmind]

Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico

Pictures

Writing a travelogue is quite a commitment. Especially when the memories are slowly escaping one’s mind. But when you have created happy memories with your most favourite companion they are destined to come back to you. 

We are two brave girls from India, traveling from all the way across the world to the land of Tacos and Mariachi and a few of the most ancient civilisations. Our goal was to travel by public transport from cities to cities with a scanty knowledge of Spanish in our arsenal. By the time we took our first inter-city bus my less-proficient friend could identify the word “pais” (= country) and was eagerly replying “INDIA!!” to the question “¿Donde esta tu pais?” (= where is your country?). By this time I also had my chance to flaunt my scanty spanish, surprisingly enough I was appreciated. My greatest achievement I thought was when a policeman thought I was latino. 

We were traveling to the ancient Mayan city of Palenque from Mexico city. Again from the ADO bus station off San Lazaro stop on linea uno. Our goal was to visit the Palenque ruins and possibly Agua Azul waterfall and then leave for Merida at midnight. Two consecutive nights of over-night bus journey was something I definitely was not looking forward to. My friend, with her characteristic exuberance, was trying to convince me that we could visit ruinas de palenque, Agua Azul and Misol ha waterfalls all in one day. Agua Azul is 70km south of palenque and Misol-ha 30km on the way. We could not find any obvious transport online. Relying on taxis or collectivos on the top of the worry of making it to our next inter-city bus on time seemed like an impossible ambition to me. I hesitantly agreed to figure out if this was even a remotely plausible plan once we get to plaenque. 

Sleeping on an overnight bus is definitely a challenge. I am not sure if it was the comfortable seat of ADO bus or the trip to Xocchimilco earlier in the day, we both slept like babies on our way. It was only later on we learnt about various instances of robbery or theft  on overnight ADO buses around Chiapas region. Thankfully our trip went uninterrupted in that respect. Although around 6AM we had a change of bus somewhere near Palenque and my otherwise eloquent knowledge of Spanish failed me at the hour of need. My map told us that we were still about a 100km away from Palenque and from their hand gestrues we figured that we needed to wait until our bus comes back with fuel. Well, we did not have an option but to wait. 

In any case, we reached Palenque around 8AM. Did we end up going to the waterfalls? Yes! Right outside the ADO bus terminal we were surrounded by taxi drivers offering us rides and tour companies offering us tours. Would we fall for such offers? At least not in India. But then they said a day trip would include Misol-ha and Agua Azul for M$600! I could see the awe on my friend’s face and clearly I did not have a say. They came to our hotel to pick us up at 9AM! I took a quick shower before leaving. It was a small van (collectivo) and unsurprisingly all other tourists were from Spanish speaking countries. Our fabulous guide enthusiastically described the history of the surroundings on the way, in Spanish. He instructed us to meet back at this parking lot about 2km away from the entrance of the archeological site in two and half hours, again in Spanish. I definitey did understand all of that, but my otherwise astounding knowledge of Spanish was lacking confidence.  However the lush tropical forest in the backdrop of the exotic sight of ruins from thousands of years ago did not trigger the alarm of safety in our head. We forgot to ask the name or the phone numer of our driver. More so, we had a very faint recollection of how he looked like. The only smart thing I had done was to take a picture of the number plate only to find out later on that the picture was not going to come to our aid in retrieving the way back to the van. 

While walking around the ruins we tried to keep track of one person that we thought was one of our co-passengers from the car. Nonetheless, the tall pyramids and the mere joy of climbing them to get a better view of the tropical forest and the ancient Mayan city was too distracting. We bought Necklace carved out on stones corresponding to the Mayan month of our birthdays. We climbed as many pyramids as we could in the two and a half hour that we had. After that we started heading back to the parking lot that we thought where we would find our collectivo. From the lost look on our face or probably even otherwise many collectivos ranging from fancy ones to precariously old ones offered us ride. We said in response, “no gracias. buscando mi carro.” (= no thanks I am looking for my car.) They looked amused and left. Eventually when we were at the verge of giving up on finding the parking lot in time, we took an collectivo for M$20 each. At some point I screamed, “aquui aqui aqui!” (=here here here!) and we got off the collectivo. Unfortunately what I had thought was the parking lot was not the parking lot we were probably supposed to go to. In any case, we finally were able to find our guy and headed over to Misol-ha waterfall. My friend looked happy, the trauma of being lost did not seem to have an effect on her. And there would be many more times during the course of next six days when we will lose our way, including once when we almost got lost swimming in a cenote (a cave full of water).

Misol-ha is a beautiful waterfall and had a bat cave behind it. You could literally walk in to the bat cave. We knew all of that, but being there was a whole different experience. We were in our slippers but we did not expect to be in waist deep water inside a dark bat cave. I was a little weary of getting my passport wet. My friend, characteristic of her, waded her way into the cave before I could warn her. Soon she was there with her backpack dipping in the water. By the time I caught up with her it was too late. Also we were busy trying to make our terrible cameras take a good picture of the bats hanging from the ceiling. Yes, she did get her passport wet. But again by mere work of luck it did not get completely ruined. 

We went on to Agua Azul through the mountains. It was unbelievably blue. Later we found out that the colour comes from high mineral content in the water. We did not have our bathing suits on, somehow we did not guess that we would be able to get into the water. The water was too attractive. Disappointed, we decided to look for the nacimiento de la cascada (birth of the cascade) and hiked quite a bit up the river. We came across many more less touristy and silent spots where one could take a quite bath away from the usual hustle-bustle of the enthusiastic tourists. Up there at some point the waterfall became a river and it went on and on through a forest. We were running out of time and did not want to make the same mistake of losing our way again. By this time we were friends with our driver, we had a discussion about poverty in India and Mexico. He said, “una pregunta, escucho que hay muchas pobres en India” or something like that. I replied that it was similar to many other countries. We have many people and hence the number was bigger. Who knows if he understood any of that. We made our way back to the hotel, intact. It was quite a day. But we were excited to be on ADO bus again. We were excited about what Merida had in store for us.