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Published: August 25th 2010
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Copán
The central square Copán
Monday 16th August
It’s another long travelling day today as the alarm wakes us up at 5:15. I wake up with the song “Total Eclipse of The Heart” in my head. How did that get in there?? We’ve got possibly 9 hours of travelling ahead and I’m sure I’m going to get beaten up by the rest of the group if I can’t stop myself singing that.
We’ve got quite a complicated journey ahead to get from
Roatán to
Copán, our next destination. Our journey will be by taxi, ferry, taxi, bus and then one more bus and will take us back through
La Ceiba and
San Pedro Sula again. Let’s hope we make all the connections!
We do make all the connections! The final bus, from
San Pedro Sul to
Copán we make with just a couple of minutes to spare. It’s standing room only on the bus, though, with a 3 hour journey ahead of us. But the conductor finds us some plastic stools to sit on along the aisle - I even have enough space to write this! We lose Susan temporarily, though, when the bus goes round a bend
Watching The Rain
streaming down the main street and she is thrown off her stool and into the toilet. Fortunately she emerges unharmed and smiling as always. I’m not sure of the value of having a toilet on this bus - no-one is going to be moving anywhere for the next three hours. We don’t get any clowns on this bus but I’m sure I spot the Chuckle Brothers squeeze onto the front of the bus about half an hour before we reach our final destination.
Copán
The nearest town to the Mayan ruins is
Ruinas Copán. We arrive late in the afternoon and check in to our hotel, the
Copán Plaza, just off the main square. We seem to be moving up the luxury ladder as we go from hotel to hotel. Here we have a TV {
doesn’t work}, aircon
and a fan, a fridge (!!) and an extractor fan in the bathroom.
Copán is a small town with a laid-back feel to it - I spend a relaxing afternoon the next day wandering about the town, taking photographs.
We eat that evening at the
Asada Copán. Just after we arrive a storm breaks and the power goes off. That doesn’t
stop our waiter from being able to take our order and cook the food in the dark while we watch the streams of rainwater pouring down the main street. The food is again a good choice but I feel I’ve eaten way too much meat over the last few days!
Copán Ruins
The ruins at
Copán are within walking distance of the town. We arrive as soon as the ruins open to try and get round before it becomes too hot.
The ruins have a different “feel” to them than those we visited a few days ago at
Tikal.
Tikal is a bigger site with lots of high temples but at
Copán there seems to be more detail, certainly in some of the carvings. It is easier to get around the site in a reasonable time and I think I get a better feel of what the city was actually like.
The nearby museum is also well worth a visit. It contains the originals of a lot of the stelae and artefacts from the ruins {
the ones on show at the ruins are replicas} and a replica of “Rosalila”.
Rosalila is a temple
found by archaeologists when tunnelling under another temple. The Mayans tended to build new temples on top of previous ones meaning that there are often several temples buried underneath the one which is visible at the surface. It is estimated that only 20%!o(MISSING)f
Copán has been discovered. Rosalila has been protected from the sun and the weather by being buried and the original colours can still be seen.
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