Sunriser

We started our Guatemala roundtrip actually in Honduras. We took the bus to the border, and crossed on foot over to Honduras where a minibus would take us to Copán. But we were badly surprised by the punctuality of the Honduran transport: due to heavy traffic on the way to the border we entered Honduras at 18.02, just 2 minutes after the last bus. Under a rain downpour, in the dark, we inquired with the border police, asked for taxis, called the hotel to pick us up, but nothing worked. Luckily, a kind fellow tourist took pity on us and offered to take us with her group in a touring bus full of Honduran tourists on their way back from a Guatemala holiday. So we were dropped on the big road near Copán, where all power was out because of the rain. With the flashlight of our phone we navigated through the town and muddy unpaved streets to our hotel. When we told the receptionist of our adventure (and the fact that the number of their hotel was wrong) she answered “what an adventure” with a smile.

The unfortunate start was more than compensated with the visit of Copán, the most southern of the big Maya cities. Because of the much harder rock in this area compared to the northern cities of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, the inscriptions and sculptures have been exceptionally well preserved. In order to understand the inscriptions we first had to learn how to read the Mayan language and their way of writing numbers. As a good teacher, our guide explained everything with writing in the sand, and after passing the test we were allowed to see the real thing.

The text below: The 13th successor of the founder is “18 Rabbit”. As this was one of the major contributers to the site his picture was seen on several places.

Many other sculptures are also beautifully preserved.

Near Copán there is a bird sanctuary for the breeding of Macaws and their training for survival in the wild. It is also home for parrots which have been kept as pets and cannot fly. They are let out of their cages everyday to play showmodel for the tourists. We admired unknown birds to us, like a tropical species of vulture and various tucan varieties.

When getting out of the bird park I could not help myself and asked the keys from the tuktuk…

To end our stay we took a ride around Copán visiting the sunflower fields, which reminded us of Van Gogh, and a finca (farm) with a kitchen which looked like it had been taken out of a Vermeer’s painting.

We will now continue our roundtrip to Antigua in Guatemala.