The Copan Companions
Trip Start
Aug 09, 2009
1
18
28
Trip End
Mar 16, 2010
Copan, Honduras
Thursday, October 29, 2009
We arrived in Copan just as dusk was settling in. The usual assortment of touts and taxi drivers were waiting for us outside the station and, on the way to a tuk tuk taxi, I had a little accident.
As I stepped off the pavement onto the road I failed to realise that the step was quite high and as I put my foot down, my ankle turned in an ugly way resulting in me falling down in pain. Al and Lynda rushed to my aid as I flailed around like a tortoise on its shell (I still had my big backpack on my back at this stage). I couldnt put any weight on the foot but luckily it was not swelling. We decided to head to the hostel and see if the foot got worse, before heading to the hospital.
Hostel La Manzana Verde was quite charming, and very dark. The town was suffering from a power cut which had lasted for most of the day so I hobbled around in the dark to the room and collapsed on the bed whilst Al and Jules went to go find some ice or really cold water bags to put on my foot. Lyn stayed with me till the boys got back with their finds, water bags and fixings for a pasta meal. We stayed chatting in the room for a while with our roomates, a Peace Corp worker from Virginia and the most annoying person I have met on my travels so far, a French Canadian guy whose name I have forgotten.
This was a man who was not supposed to travel, especially by himself. He was scared of everything and too cautious about things. In the three months that I have spent travelling in Central America I have only personally used a mosquito net once, and that was in the depths of the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica where we had been mauled by mosquitos. This guy put his up in the hostel in Copan, a place that doesnt normally strike a person as maleria hot spot... still I could be mistaken but we did think it was a little over the top. He also had this annoying habit of cutting into our conversation with useless bits of information - we would be chatting to Peace Corp guy and he would suddenly pop up with, "Just for your information, the word asado means grill"... when we were not talking about grills, in Spanish or otherwise! I was very relieved that my own opinion of this irritating little man was felt by Alan, who when we were in bed listening to him go on and on about the dangers of drinking tap water, wrote on my Lonely Planet guide "he is the most annoying person I have met!"
So between my painful foot and this idiot, my first night in Copan was not the best. The next morning, however, I was determined to still get up and do stuff so we all took a walk down to Via Via and some other hotels as Manzana Verde was fully booked up for the weekend for the massive Peace Corp Halloween weekend, an annual event in Copan. This is when all the Peace Corp workers in Honduras meet up for a crazy weekend of drinking and partying in fancy dress, a time to let your hair down and go wild. The town was already full of PC´s walking around in big groups, some were already drinking and it was not yet noon.
We managed to find a place to stay just opposite Via Via and had a lovely brekkie at Via Via with Piers, an English guy we had met on Utila who had also stayed at Alton´s. He had done the Copan Ruins the day before and was catching a bus to Antigua that afternoon to do some volcanoes. We spent the rest of the day wandering around the center of town, getting some new books from a book exchange and doing some much needed internet time at a internet store that also had a sideline as a hair salon... needless to say it was extremely hot in there with all the blow drying going on!
Later that evening we decided to check out the Peace Corp party at Via Via. We walked into what looked like your average college frat party (or, having never been to an average college frat party, what I imagined one to look like!). It was not yet 9pm but there were a lot of drunk people falling about, with a very loud (but not bad) band playing a variety of hits but with a strong hint of country. Drinks were cheap and flowing quickly. We stayed for a while people watching and shaking our heads in amusement at some of the fancy dress costumes on display, one girl dressed as a bag of dog food, another guy dressed up as safe sex complete with condoms stapled in a bullet belt style across his chest with dildos in a gun holster intermingled with punk rockers and some cowboys. Despite my injury I danced to songs I liked and sang along when I couldnt dance and generally had myself a good ol time. Unfortunately we had an early call the next morning as we were hitting the ruins so we headed home around 12ish for some sleep, leaving the Peace Corp to it.
The next morning we got up hellishly early to do our very first of what we know is many Mayan ruins to come, Copan. We caught a tuk tuk taxi to the entrance which was only about 10 mins ride away from the town and were the very first tourists there, in fact I was the very first person to pay my entrance fee that day!
Copan was the dominant mayan city in the south of their territory, and was part of the larger and more lavish cultural cities of the new world. It certainly was impressive to us even more so with the animal life that we saw on the way in and out of the ruins. Macaws squawked in the trees, their noise leading us to the entrance. There were two pairs, one in the trees and one sitting on the fence - just nice and close for pictures! We also managed to see some Aguti´s, big ratlike creatures without tails. They were quite tame and waited till we had taken our pictures before scampering off. We even got to see a baby and its mother walking a trail.
As we were the first people in the park we managed to have a lot of the ruins to ourselves including the Great Plaza, the Hieroglyphic Stairway and the Acropolis. Each of these were truly amazing and we managed to climb around to our hearts content, careful not to slip on the very mossy areas, although Alan had commandeered a nice walking stick and was doing his fair share of bundu bashing through the more jungle parts of the site - a regular Indiana Jones is Al! The surrounding jungle was also awesome to look at and we just marvelled at how the Mayan´s had managed to find the spot and build these wonderful buildings without the aid of all the scientific tools and electrical machinery that we have today. In fact all through my travels to various parts of the world that has been a question in my mind, from the awesome St Peter´s Basilica through to the mosques of Morocco, the architecture takes your breathe away.
It was only once we got to the residential quarter that the crowds started to pull in and we were engulfed by the tour groups that had pulled in on the big Pullman buses, by this time however we were on our way out having taken our fill of pictures. Lynda and I hit the gift shop for a magnet (naturally) and then it was a tuk tuk back to Copan to have breakfast with Jules before getting our shuttle back to Antigua, Guatemala. Our brekkie consisted of one of the nicest toasted sandwiches I have had in Central America, a ham and cheese on homemade farmstyle bread, with a funny scone with custard as a little side - absolutely delicious! Jules was rather envious of our breakfasts at Via Via as he had gone to another place closer to the square for a granola and fruit breakfast that had cost twice the price of ours! Still he managed to get a few bites in from me.
12pm and we were packing our stuff into a shuttle bus, pleased to find that Sal and Stu, our Aussie friends from Utila, were on the same shuttle to Antigua. Looked like it wouldnt be such a bad ride after all with some extra company to keep us busy...
