La Venta Park, Villa Hermosa

We went to the heads. I saw baby monkeys and a baby chick, 28 heads, and 2 raccoons, 10,000 plants, and so many kinds of turtles, 4 snakes, coalis, 50 birds. We saw army ants carrying leaves and 20 crocodiles. It was intriguing. Each head was different. I also bought a wallet, 35 pesos. The time is 6:14. We are in Chiapas. I swallowed some ink from the pen.
- Caleb is cool




We went to the heads. On the internet it showed they were mad. But they looked nice and friendly .Mom liked the heads. I bought a wallet. Mom and Ginger.bought purses. I saw a stone human.
/ Augustus/

There was a museum in Villa Hermosa that houses all the artifacts recovered. One man in 1957 saw the waste of the entire ruins and set about making them known and is known for being the person who saved the ruins from absolute ruin. At the museum they also had a zoo with animals local to Texas, deer, raccoons and Caracara birds, although they spelled Caracara differently, probably correctly, calling them Guaracura.



Then on to Palenque passing through land still under water from the recent rains, said to be the heaviest since ‘78
Hotels are hard to find. We spotted one five miles from town, away from food but we had some stray food left over and ate well. It was a better hotel than the last, and was to get even better as we ended up staying two days there. For one thing, it had a bilingual shower with two knobs, one marked C for cold and the other marked F for frio. We also had a TV that received two channels. We had planned to watch Discovery Channel that evening because they had scheduled a program about Tabasco Under Water, Discovery was not one of the two channels. Tabasco was the state we had just traveled through seeing the flood waters just receding.
- Grandpa



La Venta Park in Villa Hermosa was enchanting. The front part was a zoo. But as we progressed to the back, we discovered a jungle in the middle of this lovely city, bordered by a lake. Sand bags around artifacts gave testimony of the recent floods. Four Olmec heads are located at this park, and the biggest surprise for me was how friendly they look! Regrettably it just doesn’t show up on the pictures. These huge heads were originally placed by the seashore, a hundred miles from the basalt rocks from which they were made. Why? I think they were the original Jaredites at their landing place, and they placed their likenesses there as a welcome to others who come to the promised land. That’s a crazy theory, but in fact they are individual faces, with open, not dominating expressions, unlike so many Maya statues. There were many other artifacts scattered through the park as well, including large tiles that formed faces.




Monkeys chattered and swung in the trees above our heads, picking leaves, then letting them fall, floating to the ground.

Angela wearing a hat dropped by a monkey

The kids were excited to find ant trails, with the ants carrying leaves over long distances. (Why? there were plants everywhere!)
-- Naomi
The ants go marching one by one