We stayed at El Panchan for about 9 days before even visiting the ruins of Palenque. Some of our most memorable moments there centred around insects – our first experience of an ant invasion was quite horrific. All of a sudden we were aware of leaf-cutter ants running along our window-sill outside... they started to get in through a hole so we squirted insect repellant into it. We knew our room was far from bug-proof but we were unprepared for the sheer size of the army that was swooping towards us. After trying to stem invasions in various corners of the room we noticed that ants were swarming across one of the beams in the ceiling. The cabin had gaps all around the ceiling so Richard suggested making a solution of repellant and water, & brushing it all around the gaps. When he went out for a cup of water, he returned horror-stricken and told me to look outside. The ground by the side of the cabin was a mass of ants, and files of them were climbing the walls of the cabin & pouring into the cabin above ours as well. They were on the rampage all right – annihilating any creature small & unlucky enough to be in their path. It was brutal - I saw a beetle trying to run and they were at its legs like rugby-tacklers, bringing it down & swarming all over its body in a tight ball.
We started brushing down the gaps in our walls, realizing that we were fighting a losing battle… then, to top it all off, I wiped the solution along one of the beams and dislodged a black scorpion which fell at my feet. This was too much. We were both shrieking like hysterical teenagers by this point, I tried to trap it in a cut-off plastic bottle but the horrible, rattling noise it made when it fell inside was just too grim and I dropped it. The scorpion scuttled to the wall & lodged itself under the skirting-board, but it was too tight a space for it to get through so it’s stinger tail was left sticking out. To our horror this began to curl & uncurl like some disgusting black worm. We also discovered that several cockroaches had come in, quite possibly to try to escape the ant army. At this point we decided just to go out for a while, and come back later in the hope that all the carnage would have died down. It did – the one thing to say for the ants is that they sweep through pretty quickly & then move on. But as unpleasant as roaches, spiders and beetles are, it’s still a bit upsetting to see the ruthlessness & efficiency with which they’re slaughtered by the ants.
The night after this we heard a commotion outside the adjoining cabin. When I took a peek there was a girl shaking out a plastic bag saying ‘is it gone? Is it gone?’ while a man stood by with a machete. It turned out they too had been visited by a scorpion… I don’t know what role the machete had played in its eviction, but if I’d had one handy the day before I would’ve been tempted just to chop the thing to bits. Not very Buddhist of me know, but… Later on we moved to a different cabin, one with a thatched roof, and again we realized how happy we were to have the mosquito net. This cabin was Cockroach City, and from the fact that we often found them lying on their backs waving their legs in the air, we deduced that they were probably dropping out of the thatch. Ants and spiders too. In fact once we found a monstrously large spider, though not a tarantula, which was somehow all the more disgusting for the fact that it had three legs missing, all on one side. Perhaps the man with the machete had been at it…
However… we did see some beautiful animals during our stay there… raccoons, lizards of all kinds, and a jet-black squirrel. We also had our first experience of fireflies. To people who are used to fireflies our enthusiasm was probably a bit strange – we spent a good hour crouching in the dark watching them. We were surprised to find that they were not at all frightened of us, in fact several times when they were crawling in the grass they headed straight for our feet & began to climb up our legs. It was bizarre trying to make out what they looked like from the strobe-like bursts of light they gave off. They looked like fast-moving beetles but with an unearthly greenish glow coming from underneath them in incredibly bright, regular bursts. It reminded us of the ancient Mayan myth from the sacred book the ‘Popol Vuh’, where two brothers are tested by the lords of Xibalba. They are given two cigars to smoke in the night, but told that they have to return them intact the next day. To fool their guards they put fireflies in the ends of the cigars and thus ‘smoke’ them all night but still manage to return them whole in the morning.
Other creatures we enjoyed watching were the geckos and the hummingbirds. I discovered that geckos sing – what I took to be bird-noises were in fact coming from a gecko in the corner of the room. And I suspect that it was a mating call, because very soon it was entwined with another gecko. And I became very attached to a tiny green hummingbird that built a nest right outside our cabin. Really it was a stupid place to build it, because it was right on the main path through the campsite and there were always a lot of people around there. I kept expecting it to abandon the nest, but the last time I looked it was still stubbornly trying to hatch the tiny eggs it laid there. The nest was a truly tiny affair, with soft feathers inside & tiny pieces of moss stuck to the outside, and I was able to watch her building it in the early mornings when there was nobody about. The other animal abode we came across was an incredible cluster of anthills out in the forest – it reminded us of some of the ruined cities we’ve been visiting, because of the way it was laid out like a deserted but imposing settlement overlooking a picturesque stream.