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Copan Ruins
Scarlet MacawThey say you learn about yourself when you travel. One of the things I’ve learned (or resigned myself too) is the fact that I don’t sleep well, or at all, on buses and planes. Unless I’m lying down my body just won’t sleep. Tipping the seat back a degree or two isn’t enough to fool the old bones into thinking it’s time for a nap. If I do nod off momentarily I wake up excited that I’ve managed to drop off for a while, until I check my watch and realise only 10 minutes have passed. I count myself lucky to get 30 minutes of sleep during a night flight so saying that you can imagine how jiggered I was when I arrived in San Pedro Sula after a night flight from Sao Paulo via Miami.
By the time my pick up dropped me at the hotel I was ready to crash out. And I did. The day passed me by as I slept in glorious air-conditioning. I decided to have a lazy day the next day and read my book in the sunshine in a hammock beside the pool.
I was excited to be on my way to
Copan the next day. Honduras has only one major Maya ruin, and it’s here at Copan. The village itself was quaint. It was all cobbled streets, colourful painted houses with iron work over the windows, tuk tuks, gift shops and men wearing Stetsons. I checked in and headed out for the ruins just a 10 minute walk out of town. It was incredibly humid, uncomfortably so. The walk to the ruins isn’t to be missed. If you did then you’d miss 2 highly carved stelae; one in a field and one beside the path. The tall stone pillars gave me a hint of what was to come.
I ended up seeing the ruins over 2 days. By the time I had been there half an hour on the first day the heavens opened. It was raining so hard that taking my camera out just wasn’t possible. I was soaked to the skin in minutes and since it didn’t look like stopping any time soon I sloshed back to town for a coffee.
The ruins were a delight. Walking through the jungle towards the main plaza scarlet macaws swooped above me and chattered in the trees. A strange little
brown mammal scurried across the path in front of me, it looked like a large guinea pig but walked like a deer. (I asked about and found out that it was an agouti (pronounced ag-wa-ti), a rodent common in Central and South America.) I was enthralled and I hadn’t even seen the main ruins yet!
The first glimpse of Maya structures happens to be a radial pyramid, flat topped with staircases on each side. A modest example of the iconic Maya pyramid structure. The plaza opens out to a sculpture garden of stelae and terraced seating on the left, and to the right the Ball Court, Acropolis and the Hieroglyphic stairway that claims the longest known Maya hieroglyphic text. The carvings on the stelae are intricately detailed and almost 3D. The faces of the rulers still look proud and omnipotent. Stylised macaw heads adorned the ball court and even the terraced seating had traces of carvings on them. Although the hieroglyphic stairway was covered from the elements it still looked impressive. Each brick on each step looked like it had once been a masterpiece. To preserve the carvings from the elements some reproductions had been made by plaster cast,
the originals left in the museum, the copies outside. To be honest sometimes I didn’t know if I was looking at the original or not which left me with mixed feelings.
My sightseeing was complete and I headed off to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras for a week of relaxing and diving. A holiday from my holiday.
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