Once again travel in Honduras proved to be quite the expedition. I left Utila by the 6:20am ferry and didn’t get into Copan Ruinas until around 6pm. This included a 1 hour hold up between La Ceiba and San Pedro Sula supposedly because of a teacher’s strike. With no breakfast and not much for a lunch, I must admit that my first priority upon arriving in Copan was to look for food.
This proved to be a very successful mission. Two blocks from our hostel there were a number of street-side food stalls serving baleadas. Baleadas are one of Honduras’ most original and popular foods. It’s a wheat flour tortilla, folded in half and filled with mashed fried beans and various other ingredients, such as crumbled cheese, cream, eggs, avocado, chicken, pork, tomato, hot sauce, etc. They are probably one of the messiest things to eat, but incredibly delicious and dirt cheap. Three baleadas later I was stuffed and perfectly content. And it all cost me a whole $3 as opposed to $8 or so for a standard chicken meal in one of the many touristy restaurants.
The goal for the following day was to explore the Mayan ruins of Copan. Copan was occupied for more than two thousand years, from the Early Preclassic period right through the Postclassics and was a capital city between the 5th to 9th centuries AD. The city developed a distinctive sculptural style within the Mayan tradition and is known for a series of portrait stelae as well as the Hieroglyphic Stairway. This stairway has a total of 62 steps and derives its name from the 2200 glyphs that together form the longest known Maya hieroglyphic text. This text, a history of Copan, is still a bit of a puzzle, as it was scrambled by the collapse of the glyphic blocks when the façade of the temple fell.
Located a mere 700 meters from the town, the ruins are easily accessible by foot and offer a very pleasant strolling ground for a morning or afternoon. I headed there shortly after breakfast and simply spent a few hours meandering between the stelae, temples and ruins. It was simply nice to just take it all in; to sit down under a tree, watch the various tour groups hurry by; watch the clouds roll slowly roll in and then disappear illuminating all the ancient stone with bright sunshine. I was in no hurry as I had a day at my disposal and the town of Copan was essentially 4 or 5 cross cobbled cross streets, a bunch of restaurants, a couple souvenir shops and your usual spattering of churches.
Upon my return to town I planted myself on the central plaza with a book and my big lens. There I alternated between reading and people hunting while waiting for my food stalls to set up so that I could have my next and likely last, serving of baleadas.
PS: Not sure if I've mentioned this before and if I did, my appologies for the repetition. In El Salvador guns on every corner were a common sight. In Honduras, although security is still present, the most common sighting are men in cowboy hats, boots, belts with big buckles and machetes on their sides. The Honduran highlands are true cowboy country and it is so weird seeing this descendants of the Mayas sitting around in colonial plazas in these western outfits.
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