true life planet

We,ve been here for about 2 days, in the town of Copan Ruinas. The town is very small, touristy, and has a good infrastructure for tourists without losing it’s Honduran flavor.
It is located right next to the Mayan Ruins of Copan, as well as lots of other things of interest.

We had decided to come here for New Years, thinking visiting the Ruins on New Years Day would be a good start to a good New Year. When we arrived the hotels were all full as well as the cheap hostels, so we kept asking prices and finally ended up in this strange hotel near the cemetary.

The hotel is run by a rather energetic Honduran woman, her husband, and numerous relatives seem to live there. As a matter of fact, only family seems to live there-we have only seen 2 other guests there the entire time we have been there! They seem to have a multitude of businesses going on, including a hair salon off the dining room… The husband works at the grounds of the Ruins, and also is a mosaic artist. He showed us photos from his job is Spain, outside one of the large museums…many photographs of a large mosaic with entirely white tile. He also has created an enormous mosaic from found tile in part of the house. The entire family is a bit looney but very friendly.

For New Years, we didn{t want to go to the typical gringo hangouts, so we walked to a place to eat, ate some food, then walked around for a bit (didn{t want to get back too early-one of the men in the family has taken a liking to Moira!) and we were walking down a strreet when we glanced into a cantina and saw a little band playing. We just stood there watching from the street-it was typical music for this area, and consisted of two guitars and an accordian player.
The three guys playing were all Honduran cowboys-and when they saw us watching, they motioned for us to come in.

It was a typical cantina here, just men-no women. Certainly no gringoes! They only served beer and local bootleg hard alcohol….everyone was already quite drunk, including the owner.
Everyone who was sitting got up and offered us their stools (there were only three stools in the place) and we sat down and watched the band.

The band played for quite awhile…we requested some love songs in Spanish, traditional songs…they were really good. They left the bar after awhile as they go from bar to bar all night, playing for money.

We got home by 10:30 or so, not wanting to deal with the scene in the bars or in the gringo hangouts…turned on the tv in our room onto some strange sci fi movie-and fell asleep early.

Because….

The next morning we went to the Ruins of Copan. There are no words to describe this place, this amazing beautiful place of Mayan history. It’s useless to try-you have to see it for your self. It just takes your breath away, that it is in the condition it is in. You can still see the colors of paint they painted everything with, you can walk up right to the monuments and see the craftsmanship.

The ball court part is the most impressive part to me- a court not in the sense we think of, as in tennis court or basketball court, but different entirely. It is a long narrow field of green, bordered on each side by sloped rocks, which are topped with the carved heads of macaws.
The object of the game was to play a game similiar to baseball-but hit the ball only with your hips or arms, not with your hands. They wore elaborate headresses and special clothes, and padding on their arms when they played. If they hit the macaws with the balls they were decapitated immediately at the adjoining shrine.!!

It’s a beautiful place, where the ruins are, and you can see why it appealed to these people to build their monuments and community there. But it has so many places for sacrifices and such a gory history, that it’s not simply beautiful-it’s a very complex place with a complex history. As I was walking around there it was beautiful, yes, and remarkably preserved, but also I felt like I could still feel the violence. There are numerous shrines and tables in the shapes of animals, for example, that are very beautiful-but in them are carved special grooves to let the blood run down from a freshly decapitated head, for example!

On a lighter notte, today for the second part of the day, spent many hours at the Macaw Mountain Bird Park, which is a hefty walk uphill out of the city. The mountain has been called Macaw Mountain since Mayan times. It was awalk utterly worth the view(and to see the town outside the touristty center-much more the real Honduran vida outside of the towns center).

The bird park is beautifully landscaped and has rescued birds from all over Central America. It is also beautifully landscaped, and has a nature trail up the entire mountain which is wild and true jungle. Its a bit like a rainforest-every plant you can imagine. The birds themselves are fantastic, and you get to see many birds up close that you wouldnt get to see in the wild.

I talked to Pat, the guy who runs the place for awhile-very cool guy, and has a real appreciation of the both the birds and the native plants. I mentioned that in the morning when we ahad visited the Ruins of Copan, we had seen the Macaws at the entrance to the park.
He told me that only recently has his staff been able to take over feeding the Macaws the special diet they need-in the past the Macaws at the Ruins got only tortillas. Their colors of their feathers were getting brighter, he said, with a better diet. I noticed that they seemed smaller and not as brightly colored as the Macaws in the reserve.

Wishing all of you a Happy New Year. Keep the comments coming, helps me on the hard days…
We’ll be here for a few days, then when the weather-storm coming-blows over, we’ll be heading to the Islands off of Honduras in the Carribean.

gg

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