We left Tegucigalpa early on Friday morning for San Pedro Sula. We managed to catch an earlier bus to Copán Ruinas; one of the old yellow American school buses. It was pretty uncomfortable and seemed to overheat every 30 minutes or so, meaning we had to pull over, turn the engine off, turn it back on and continue.
A note on the 'chicken bus':
I’d put a tonne of new music on my iPod though, so I was happy, plus the fact that Honduras is one of the most beautiful countries I've ever driven through; everything is unbelievably green. We finally arrived around 3pm, a casual 9 hour trip; I, for some reason, thought it was closer than it was. Copán Ruinas is a beautiful town; cobbled streets, tiled houses and a pretty central plaza. It also has some really good restaurants and amazing street food.
Street food
These chicks had been hand dyed with food colouring; I couldn't quite work out why. Poor chicks!
The hostel, En la Manzana Verde, was perfect; we had a 5 bed dorm to ourselves, with a bathroom, for $6 a night. The porch was a little haven and you could refill your water bottle for 2 lemps/litre; yes, I do find this exciting.
We got to the ruins early on Saturday; they open at 8am and at this time, they are fairly deserted (as we were leaving the site, 1,000 students arrived, along with the bus loads of older American and European tourists) and it’s also much cooler. We hired a guide, Juan, who was hilarious and really knowledgeable about the ruins and Maya history; it was a bargain at just over $4 each for a 2 hour tour. The tour was fascinating, and the ruins are beautiful. The Mayas had thought of almost everything; when Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in1999, huge parts of the country were destroyed; Copán did not even flood, due to the aqueducts built by the Mayas. After the tour, Allie, Oskar and I trekked up the road to Las Sepultras; the area where the aristocracy had lived. It highlighted how essential it is, in my opinion anyway, to have a guide; the difference between being able to imagine the ruins as a Maya city and wandering through an unidentifiable pile of rocks. We then walked along the Copán River and hitched back into town.
Macaws
An altar for animal sacrifice; the turtle is a symbol of fertility
An altar for human sacrifice
The pelota arena
The Hieroglyphic stairway
The Sun god
Juan, our guide
The amphitheatre
On both Friday and Saturday night, we ended up in Papa Chango’s. It was a huge bar/club, which had it been anywhere else, would probably have been great; the bar had swings instead of seats and the music was the standard, catchy, Latin American cheese. As it’s in Copán, on Friday, it was deserted (preferable) and on Saturday, it was full...but full of sleazy men wearing cowboy hats (I’ll take an empty club any day).
Every bar should have swings!
On Sunday, after deciding to leave at 11.30am instead of 7am, we finally arrived back in Tegucigalpa at around 9.30pm, sweaty and dishevelled...luckily the bus station had gates as downtown Comayaguela is definitely not high on the list of late night hotspots! The journey between Copán and San Pedro had taken 5 hours as opposed to 3; the first bus had detoured through the back streets of almost all the small towns between Copán and La Entrada and stopped for a while, for some unknown reason, leaving us to sweat in the midday sun. Despite being sweaty, I was happy as I’d just started reading ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and couldn’t put it down! The second bus, an old yellow school bus, which despite having broken seats, had 2 TVs, played old school tunes (Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Ray Orbison and Britney) through terrible speakers at insane volumes. Again, I was fairly happy singing along. Oskar said at one point that ‘it couldn’t get any worse’; don’t tempt fate! Through various Mozambican bus experiences, I know that it can in fact, get a lot worse.
I’d have loved to have stayed longer; you can ride, visit the more remote ruins, coffee plantations and the thermal springs, plus the town has a laid back vibe, perfect for just wandering around.
I realised this weekend that working and living in Tegucigalpa has made me almost bipolar in terms of my patience; during the week I’m incredibly patient, I have to be, and therefore, unconsciously, at weekends I become intolerably impatient, making group travel more than a little stressful. I don’t mean to be so impatient, but I spend the entire week fitting my life around the life of my family and so at weekends, I seem to become quite selfish. I just know that from experience, if you wait for group action/decision, you often miss out on doing things. Slow people have always driven me a little insane...yes I know, people function at different speeds, but some people are just unbelievably slow! What’s more frustrating is when a group decides to do something at a certain time, and then don’t stick to that time/plan. I’m organised and it’s trying when things don’t go to plan; lesson learnt from this – be more flexible. It’s not that I have to have my own way, I’m perfectly happy to follow someone else’s decision; it’s just that, if a decision is made, I like to get on with it and stick to it. It’s strange that things that really shouldn’t make me stressed do and things that really should make me stressed don’t!
I think I’ll go to Valle de Angeles on Saturday, for the day. I also need to finish my dissertation proposal! At the moment my proposal is to focus on something along the lines of a ‘historically and politically contextualised reading of Sarah Maldoror’s, Sambizanga’. One of my lecturers thinks that there is a chance that I can contact her directly with some research questions which is great.
