As a first step in our trip, we targeted the Mayan site of Copan, right across the border in Honduras.
The journey started with a heavy 7 hours trip from Antigua, leaving at 4 am with a shuttle bus extremely uncomfortable. We arrived there at around 12 pm and managed to visit the mayan ruins of Copan.
The big difference between these ruins and the others is that there are up to 5 different temples still underground the top temple to be discovered as each Mayan king used to build his temple over the previous one. So there is still a lot of work for the archeologist to discover it all.
Here is an overview of the whole vallee of Copan, this shows you that the concrete archeological site shows only the center of the area but far from all the uncovered other ruins spreaded all around.
A close view on the Copan ruins site.
At the entrance, a couple of very nice parrots can be seen, better welcome is hardly possible. Their colors are just magical!
Visiting the ruins with a guide was very helpful we could have access to the tunnels which were very interesting as underneath the ground up to 5 temples are still covered.
Those big trees Ceiba is the national tree of Guatemala and could reach an impressive size.
Here below the representation of the “underworld” from the mayan perspective. With representation of death.
One of the nice plants growing on trees.
Here is the overview of the main place, I am pretty much where the King would sit when a special event will occur.
Here is a representation of how it was back when the mayan were on site.
An agouti, a big rodent.
View on the “main plaza”.
On the way back to “Copan ruinas” which is actually the name of the town, we discovered the local transport…. pretty full.
And the main plaza. Copan Ruinas is surely one of the most secure place in Honduras given the tourist attraction it represents.
We initialy thought to aim for a longer trip in Honduras, but given the extreme violent country and the little time allowed for part of our friends, we skipped the rest of the country to focus more on Guatemala.
