Semana Santa in Comayagua

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Easter week is the holiest time of year for many Catholics. Feeling very pious and loaded down with rum (beacause someone told us that booze was prohibited on Good Friday), we descended on Comayagua for the festivities.

This beautiful colonial town is the best place in Honduras to witness the religious celebrations. The local people are very proud of their traditions and spend months planning detailed alfombras; sawdust carpets. The work begins on the eve of Good Friday and people work throughout the night to create incredible, coloured displays. By 9.00am the sun is beating down and the well-dressed crowds are out in force admiring the artwork. Very considerately, the groups have provided stepladders for us tourists to climb and get a good snap-shot. By 10.30am the most sombre Via de la Crucis procession has begun to trample the painstaking work of the night before.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole event is the mass participation. Easter excludes no one; man, woman and child will follow the nightly parades, sometimes for up to five hours, culminating in a mass. Thursday night had a fun atmosphere, young people meeting in the plaza in their best clothes, food stalls serving all night to keep the tired workers fuelled for the task ahead, ice-cream and souvenir shops stayed open late for the sight-seers. The processions had a very serious tone to them, almost as if we were attending a funeral. Some ladies wore black lace veils and dabbed their eyes, small children were dressed as Jesus and Mary and carried solid wood crucifixes, the crowds walked slowly behind the image of Christ accompanied by a brass band playing a slow march. Though it didn't stop the ice-cream men and hot-dog sellers who jingled their carts despite the solemn events.
In contrast to the Seven Angels parade, which was almost a beauty pageant. Young girls in brides dresses and painted faces, were carried aloft on sultan chairs around the plaza and into the cathedral.

What we couldn´t work out was the significance of Ku Klux Klan outfits...I know the Spanish Inquisition used to wear similar attire and roots must be in the Catholic Church somewhere...any ideas?

Anyway, it wasn't all serious stuff...we found a hotel that let us use it's pool and spent a couple of days cooling down by it. Yours truly found a karaoke bar and entertained the troops with outstanding renditions of 'I will Survive' and 'Dancing Queen'. The ladies that do lunch found a great clothes shop and got ourselves glammed up. The greedy guts among us discovered that Wendy's menu economico was much cheaper than any other restaurant, even if you ate two of them. Despite the consumerist lapse, we came away feeling cultured and lucky that we'd had a chance to witness such a touching event.

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