Day 30 – Copan Ruinas and Hot Springs Infernal

Due to my crappy sleep pattern of waking up every few hours during the night, getting up at 3:30 wasn’t actually that hard. My gear was mostly packed already and I was down in the foyer with about 5 minutes to spare. Out of 16 new comrades, I think only two were present and accounted for. As the rest trickled in, it was clear that the 4am start was not as glorious for them and they would not be fit for active duty for a while. I settled in for my freebie coffee from the foyer and watched as the bags were hefted onto the bus roof with more style than grace.

The early start was necessary as we were fleeing Guatemala after only one night. (No, the foyer coffee wasn’t really that bad.) This was the first real day of our tour and we were about to gun it to Copan, Honduras. Phase One of the extraction plan involved getting clear of the traffic around Guatemala City although we were in Antigua. Confused? The traffic to Guatemala City is so bad – epically bad – it’s probably inscribed on a Mayan stelae somewhere in glyphs that look like little Hyundais – that we had to get up so early just in case we got caught in a traffic jam. What a sad decline for the Mayans who were such proud builders of the white roads called sacbes that paved the way between the cities for quick and easy travel. Mayan society also didn’t have the wheel so no congestion on the I-90 turnpike either.

The gods smiled on us in the darkness as we avoided the traffic in our mini-van. Technically, we weren’t gunning it straight to the border. There was a mercy breakfast stop for the gringos which was fortunate for everybody involved – HockTales has to eat or it’s HockZilla for the rest of the day. We pulled into what appeared to be a petrol station and I saw a restaurant with dinosaurs out the front!!! So cool!!! Then crushing disappointment. That wasn’t our restaurant. With heavy heart, I abandoned all hope of eating with a twenty year old damaged fibreglass triceratops and entered a plain old restaurant with no dinosaurs. So boring.

We ate out the back near a pool with a reconstructed fibreglass mountain with waterslide. Two of our party hopped in. I was a bit baffled. It was only 9am. It wasn’t hot. Then it dawned on me; they were English. Due to their infernal weather, their countrymen worshipped the sun with a Bronze Age intensity using bathers or hotpants. I would come to suspect that a few of my trip mates could regress back to early amphibious life forms at will, hopping into any available body of water with such gay abandon that I wondered if they possessed mutant gills. I happily ate my scrambled eggs with minced meat, plantains, tortillas, and two coffees of course. One of the girls told us that there was an alligator in a cage over in the back but I really didn’t want to see the condition it was in, so declined the offer.

Like the coffee, trouble was a brewing. Guatemala was the land of the Q (quetzale) but would take $US. However, the restaurant would only accept Qs or perfect US bills. Absolutely golden, sweet, freshly minted, no creases, just out of the ATM bills. There were lengthy delays also in that we were all trying to get exact change in US for our border crossing which required slipping a note into the passport. According to the day, it would either be in US or in Honduran limpia. So we had to have the right amount in US in case we could give that immediately or in limpia to change it. I can’t remember exactly what it was but I think it was about $13 US. A few of the people got caught paying for their breakfast with less-than-perfect US and we had to wait ages for that to sort itself out. Eventually, we were on the road again.

Copan Town is called Copan Ruinas. It’s not the ruins but the town near it. The trip was a couple more hours. That included a border crossing that I don’t recall being too onerous. I exchanged some US into limpia, or limpies as I decided to call them because it was funnier. Our time in Honduras was the equivalent of taking a shower with a broken leg. Quick lick and a spit and you’re out. We gunned it to Copan town today, tomorrow AM we were visiting the ruins (one of the main reasons I decided to take the tour) and afterwards we were hightailing it straight out to El Salvador. There was no real need for serious limpie investment, although I did want to purchase some Copan goodies increase the difficulty on my backpack carrying to boss level. (I like to have one thing from each of the ruins.) Honduras is a bit of a rough place. Our tour guide, Pamela, gave us a lecture in the mini-van but I am sad to say that I have forgotten a lot of it. (Sorry Pamela, people generally have to be dead at least 500 years for me to remember their history.) Around the tourist areas like the Mayan hotspots, everything is sweet though so we were safe as houses.

We stayed here!

To be more specific, I stayed in the room down the stairs!

It was pretty on the outside with the garden. But the room was pretty basic. It was the worst one of the entire trip actually. But it’s not like I was in there for very long and it had wifi in the room as the router was relatively close, so not all bad.

A chunk of the group went to a macaw sanctuary for a couple of hours. However, I wanted to check out Copan’s archaeology museum so no brightly coloured birds for me. Plus, Pamela had told me she didn’t think the sanctuary was as ethical as it could be so I was even happier. A couple of others wanted to check out the town too, so Pamela led a handful of us down the steep slope to Copan Town. It’s much steeper than it looks here!

There’s a town square with wisteria. There’s a coffee shop and a small market. There’s an ATM. The best thing I found was an alleyway of jewellery sellers with a lovely girl selling earrings. I’m a total sucker for earrings. These were in cool Mayan designs from the Copan ruins – the girl even Googled it to prove it. One was the facade of a temple I was going to see tomorrow! Goodbye limpies. I struggled to keep some in the back pocket as I’d only just got here!

The Copan archaeology museum is small and I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t provide more exhibits and context, but it did excite me for what was to come so I guess it served its purpose. English was sporadic but I muddled through with good old Google Translate.

This is K’Inich Yax K’uk Mo’. He was the founder of Copan. We know this because he is depicted in the starting place on the corner of the Altar Q which is a big square block with carvings of all Copan’s kings in order. He ascended the throne in 426 AD and possibly founded the first Specsavers. (The big boggly eyes are a link back to Teotihuacano style representations of Tlaloc, the rain god which look a bit like this. This guy was not from around here. Actually, he was from the Yucatán.) This is an incense burner in his image. So burn baby burn, disco infer Mo.

Copan has a hieroglyphic stairway. More on this next post. But this was a taster. Not sure what this slab was. It was super cool though. And remember what they carved all of this with. Not exactly modern day mason tools. Flints, chisels and swear words were it.

The Maya loved jade as a representation of power for the elite. Jade earrings, jade necklaces, jade cuffs. These were beautiful pieces of artistry that were traded to the top strata of society, possibly for cocoa beans! But some of the more powerful nobles and members of the royal families went one better by deforming themselves, embedding jade fragments into their teeth in an act possibly not covered under their comprehensive health insurance policy. The jade would have created quite the impression.

This skeleton was found in Copan somewhere. Its placement and assemblage of goodies was reconstructed. We can see the jade earrings and their favourite green Thai curry cooking pot. I have no idea what was going on here. The Mayans did believe in provisioning the soul on its way to the Underworld so food and drink may have been left in the containers. Although the ceramic ones could very well have been decorative.

There were a couple of reconstructions of the major monuments and stelae of Copan but it seems a waste to load up photos of these when I’ll be talking about the real things at the site in the next post, so you’ll just have to wait! There were more things in the museum but not much context around it all. I’ll save it all in the next mega post at the actual site.

I am struggling to remember what I ate for lunch and have come to the conclusion that I must have scarfed some service station snacks upon returning to the hotel. There was not enough time for me to have seen the museum and eaten a sit-down meal. We had left the land of the street taco, so there had been nothing to grab. (God, I missed them. So handy. So delicious. So cheap. So good except for that one that I think gave me the trots.) Anyway, the top layer of my backpack was typically edible at any time. These were most commonly my beloved salted plantain snacks and an array of almonds or protein mix nuts. I believe this was probably the first red flag …

That night, we went to the Copan Ruinas Hot Springs (possibly not what they were actually called). We went via a supermarket to pick up some supplies, given our intelligence that beer couldn’t be purchased at the springs . I have a definite memory of purchasing more almonds so evidence that I had scoffed mine was mounting. The drive out to the springs was meant to take only 3/4 of an hour or something but the drive went on, and on, and on and on. Literally, it was more like 2 hours. We travelled in two buses. I remember being pretty jolly at this point at the promise of ‘The Fabled Honduran Rum’ that awaited us. I consumed a can of the Honduran national beer on the bus. It was staggeringly average, but my mission to drink a beer from every country was still on track.

We arrived at the hot springs and look how super exciting and Indiana Jonesy it looked as we walked on the way through to our dedicated rock pools!!!!!

The next photo was taken by my mate Dave from tour one who was now on a different tour going to the same places three days behind me. He also enjoyed a particularly ace camera on his phone. But I’m using it here to convey that certain areas of the hot springs were off limits because they were boiling hot springs that would strip the flesh from your bones like something out of a horror movie. 90 degrees. That’s more than you have to sit through at a graduation ceremony at uni!

After my time through Cuba, I was bulletproof with straight rum. When it’s good rum, I don’t like it diluted with a mixer. Plus I really don’t like juice. It’s just too super sweet. So let’s say the open bar with the Honduran rum might not have seen much juice in my glass. I was playing bartender for everybody else too, serving them directly in the pool while they sat in the spring. Remember my feelings about water? I’m just not that keen on it. Granted, I’m better at sitting there than swimming but I get bored very easily and am generally rubbish at relaxation. So I was pretty happy making everybody else drinks and handing them out for a while. One for them heavy on the juice, one for me not so heavy on the juice because I’m a tough little unit right? After a while, I did get in the spring and sit there. It wasn’t super hot. I’ve run the bath hotter than that by accident. Clearly the 90 degrees was upstream a fair bit.

Then a brown muddy substance – probably mud! – was passed around for us to rub all over our bodies like partially melted Cadbury dairy milk exfoliant.

There are no more pictures because I don’t remember much else. The curse of the Honduran rum hit with full impact. This part of the blog is a bit like my favourite explorer, John Lloyd Stephens writing his account of travelling through the Mayan world in the 1840s whilst being delirious on malaria. I can remember little grabs of it but require accounts from other people to piece it all together. I remember shaslicks. I am reliably informed that I ate so much food that it was remarked upon (and thank God I did too – no regrets there!). I had a nap in the front seat of the bus on the way home where I was assisted into my room by Rupert, the oldest person on our tour and one of the loveliest. I don’t know how this could be but I was hungry again and started downloading the Uber Eats app, not quite considering how anything in the main square was going to be in the Uber Eats Honduran pantheon of restaurants, how the delivery guy would get through the hotel gates or how the account would handle the purchase of anything in limpies. But turns out I faceplanted into my phone in a wet bikini before I had to worry about any of those considerations.

And with that, our HockTale comes to a classy end.

Next time, our adventures take us to our final Mayan ruin where I am haunted by the physical manifestation of my nightmares in the Curse of Copan!