My photography files are like an iceberg gone south. Today I looked at my Mexico files and found at least 200 photographs, in b+w, colour negative and Kodachromes on Palenque in Chiapas. I was there in 1981. In those days I traveled alone. 

When I did this in Mexico in the hot summer and rainy season I was accompanied by a box of Flor de la Costa cigars from Veracruz to keep mosquitoes at bay.

I remember leaving in the morning from a ramshackle hotel in Palenque where I was told by the front desk clerk that they had no way of giving me a wakeup call. This meant I was unable to sleep that night knowing I had to make it to the Villahermosa airport on time to take my Mexicana de Aviación flight.

I remember that the third class bus had many forward gears and every time it had to stop to pick up or drop off passengers with pigs and fowls that it took quite a while for the bus to pick up speed. I was worried but  could not but notice that the wire fences had strange slim wooden poles that were all sprouting green leaves.

In many ways I felt like an amateur archaeologist traveling at a time when at least in Palenque there were no Americans and Expedia was as alien as Starbucks in Oaxaca.