Honduras II

After waking up the next morning in San Pedro Sula I spent a couple hours exploring the city and looking to buy a return ticket to Managua in case it was too busy to find a bus during Easter. It seemed like a friendly city and I explored a market and the central park. I also needed to find a bank because I had almost no lempiras which is the currency in Honduras. The lempira is worth almost exactly the same as the Nicaraguan cordoba, but they only have bills, no coins. This means that rather than having a pocketful of change, you have a thick wad of bills in your wallets. It felt strange peeling off two 1 lempira bills (about 5 cents each) to pay for a little plastic bag of water but I soon grew used to it. I then caught a bus to the town of Copan Ruinas which is just outside the famous Mayan Copan Ruins.

After a four hour bus ride that went through the cool mountains of central Honduras, we arrived at the valley where the ruins are located, near the border to Guatemala. I checked into a very nice hostel that only cost $4 and was recommended in my guidebook as one of the best in all of Central America. It seemed nice and everybody put their name and nationality on a main blackboard, but it was almost empty when I arrived. I had a few hours left of daylight and I wandered around the town. The town was very picturesque and the central park had a Mayan theme with an old church and a very interesting Mayan museum. I also wandered down some of the country roads and noticed that the town had many taxi tuk-tuks going up and down the hilly roads. I hadn't seen any of these in Central America so far and they are apparently a recent development here, being shipped in directly from India. I found the entrance to the Mayan ruins about 1km outside of town but it was getting dark so I left it until the next day. Back at the hostel I met two friends who were traveling through Central America. One was from Sweden and the other from Oregon and they had come from Mexico, through Belize and had just arrived that day from Tikal, another major Mayan ruins in Guatemala. We found a nice restaurant in town and enjoyed supper. It turned out that the part owner of the restaurant also was the owner of the hostel and he also offered a number of tours and different excursions around Copan and Honduras, one of which my new friends signed up for.

The next day I got up early to get to the ruins right when it opened at 8 am. The entrance gate was covered with very tame Scarlet Macaws, which are the national bird of Honduras even though there are no real wild ones left. The ruins were stunning, ancient temples and intricately carved figures hidden in the jungle. The site is especially well known for Stelae, which are statues, usually of a ruler, and on the back they are covered in Mayan hieroglyphics describing the date and story of the ruler. There are many temples, some only partially excavated with tunnels going inside them, an ancient ball court, and living spaces for the upper class. There is also a hieroglyphic stairway where each step was covered in hieroglyphics. This detailed story tells the history of the city and the rulers and greatly increased our knowledge of Mayan hieroglyphics. In 400 AD, at the end of a spiritually significant 400 year period, a stranger arrived and conquered Copan. Using religion symbolism, he was looked upon as a god and declared his 400 year reign. Him and his descendants built many of the temples and artifacts and turned Copan into one of the great Mayan cities. After 400 years, it appears that the king at that time declared the era to be ended, built a number of buildings signifying this event, and Copan was abandoned within a hundred years. I was practically alone for the first hour of wandering around and it was very awe-inspiring. By the time I worked my way through the entire ruins the big tour groups started to come in and I decided to move on. There was a nature trail through the jungle that led to some excavated houses as well as a lot of unexcavated mounds. I then visited the museum at the entrance. The museum centerpiece was a replica of one of the temples, reproduced exactly as it would have looked when it was built. It was covered in stucco and painted bright red with many designs painted over the walls. I always imagined the Mayans living among dull gray stones, just like the ruins look like now, so this new perspective was welcome. They also had some of the more intricate original sculptures inside protected from the weather as well as some examples of white stucco-covered houses of the nobles.

After enjoying the park I was planning to head to Antigua Guatemala to enjoy the Semana Santa celebrations there but I was told that the town would be crammed with people and it would be necessary to pay over $100 to find any hotel room. I decided to leave Guatemala for another time and just spend the rest of my vacation in Honduras. This meant that I had time to sign up for a 'Hidden Copan' hiking trip that I learned about the night before. Our tour guide was a long time backpacker from Belgium who decided to settle in Copan. It was me, the two girls I had met the night before and a group of about 8 Dutch tourists who had joined the tour at the last minute. We took a group of tuk-tuks a couple of miles outside of town and were warned to prepare for ticks. We headed through a couple of cow pastures, passing under barbed wire fences, and noticed that many of the hills were shaped like temples. Our tour guide mentioned that there were many unexcavated ruins all around, but nobody had the money to uncover them. We continued along a foot path through the mountains and passed through two isolated Indian villages. Strangely, these villages had lost all their traditional clothes and food in the last 40 years while just across the border in Guatemala lived groups with all their traditions. The tour guide was a wealth of information and opinions. He was a member of the Honduras tourist board representing backpackers and talked about the many problems facing Honduras. He explained about one particular project that was intended to improve the lives of these villages. The Japanese government have donated a lot of money for improving the area around Copan in return for exclusive access to the ruins. One of the projects was to provide running water to the villages. The project was started four years ago and was supposed to provide water in a couple of months. Thanks to a lot of mismanagement and corruption there is now just a pump and pipes that are still not connected to anything. The people in the village still have to make a long trek to collect water from the clean stream. He also talked about the major gang problems they have in Honduras. It is the main country that receives cocaine from Columbia and gangs are constantly at war over this lucrative business. The gang wars have made San Pedro Sula the city with the highest murder rate in the world, and Tegucigalpa the fifth highest. We walked right up to the border of Guatemala, and due to the relative remoteness of the area, it was the most popular area for smuggling drugs into Guatemala. A person could get $50 taking a kilo of cocaine across the border, an afternoon of work, taking the same kind of path through the mountains that we were. Needless to say, there is never a lack of volunteers. We returned to the road again where our tuk-tuks had arrived to pick us up and take us back to Copan. I again ate with my new friends in the same restaurant where this time we had some interesting Asian-style food.