The Copan Ruins

It was intoxicating for me returning to Copan after so many years. Watching the place unfold before me as watery memories crept from the structures and from the very earth. Honduras has proven easy to forget but difficult to put completely out of my mind. I feel that when I went there I perhaps took the course of my life into my own hands in a way that I seldom had before or have since. It fills me with curiosity to think of going back to La Esperanza although time isn't very forgiving; we can never truly go back. Only to the same place in a different time.

Our tour guide, it seemed to me, was very listo; he had taught himself English apparently by simply guiding tours. He stumbled along in English about his visit to Denmark and his anthropologist brother but did little to bring the ruins to life the way I have seen a good guide do. After our ruins tour we wandered off onto a free nature trail at the ruins' edge that took us through a shady glade with raised trail and standing water breeding mosquitoes and all other kinds of diverse rain forest life.

Copan isn't quite the sequestered, wild place Tikal has become through the efforts of the Guatemalan government. While signs of wilderness are everywhere, especially in many birds and butterflies and the variety of trees at the park, one doesn't sense that the only thing keeping the jungle at bay is the light of day.

Copan

After a lazy day of Mom's trip-planning and Charlie's web-conferencing we finally had a meeting of the minds as to how to spend Mom's remaining time in the country. I think Mom felt a little more at ease once she had a plan.

The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn and off for the eye-rattling seat-gripping three-and-a-half our bus to Antigua. Once there, we were churned out of the bus's human conveyor belt, luggage and all on the edge of Antigua. We hauled all our luggage to the corner of town and worked tour-booker lane until we had secured a ride to Copan Ruinas, Honduras for sixty quetzales apiece or about eighteen bucks total.

I don't know how we managed the five-ish brutal hours between Antigua and Copan, but somehow we found ourselves sipping cocktails near a room we rented in a family-run place preparing ourselves for the ancient adventure to come.

Tikal

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="431" caption="Tikal at sunrise"][/caption]

It wasn't until we went to set our alarm the night before that I learned we had arranged to leave for the ruins at 3:15 in the morning the next day. We set out amidst barking howler monkeys and chirping cicadas down the four-kilometer trail to Tikal's tallest structure, Temple Four, to catch the sunrise from its top. It turns out they were only allowing tour groups to do this for another ten days. After that they were to adopt UNESCO hours of opening and closing.

Something you have to realize about a place like Tikal is that it really is an ancient city. Many archeological sites, it seems, are more on the scale of a town. We were hiking at a good clip for about an hour and a half just to get to the middle of it. Because Guatemala's rain forest is protected, they've really just cleared off the structures and left trees and brush to grow around which gives the park a unique feel. The only place you really gain a sense for what it might have looked like in its day is in the central plaza where you kind of step out of the pyramid-strewn jungle at the end of the tour, into a grass-covered open field completely surrounded by structures and two stories off the ground. Incredible.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="431" caption="Lori checks out the view at the end of the tour. The tower in the upper left is where the picture at the beginning of this post was taken from."][/caption]

Lori and Beth and I held up pretty well throughout the five-hour tour, and even did better than most with our backpack full of goodies we had procured the evening before in a fit of wisdom. But by the time eleven o'clock rolled around under the glaring sun, I could tell that morale had begun to dwindle and we were all quite ready to go. Too bad for us, we had to sit in the bus aisle. Poor Beth kept nodding off with no place to lay her head. If I had known it would come to this I would have insisted we book with a different agency.

By the time we got back to our hotel I was so spent and sleep-deprived that I went right to sleep.