Outside the ruins is a macaw sanctuary, very large, loud and colourful birds that hopped around without any ties to the aviary, they just must like it there that much!
It is a short walk from the main administrative building to the ruins which fill the area. One of the most famous in the park is below, representing king 18 Rabbits who was responsible for much of the buildings and development in Copán.
It was interesting that some of the actual ruins in the park have been replaced by replicas for the protection of the original carvings - I believe the above could be a replica with the original in a museum. One of the most amazing structures in the park is a sculpted and carved staircase, now protected by a canopy that is replaced from time to time. Note the detail in the stairs - absolutely amazing. The symbols make up a story in the Mayan language, thousands of characters long.
Steph and I were both pretty tired given our big night out in Antigua as well as long bus ride, however the ruins were not crowded at all and very peaceful, so it was a great place to recover and get prepared for another long journey the next day.
We returned to our hotel, had fantastic king size burritoes for dinner at Café ViaVia and had an early night in order to be up at 4:30am for a 5:15am Hedman Alas bus to the coast.
We woke up bright and early in the morning and almost walked right over the night watchman who was asleep in the middle of the hallway. Bleary-eyed, he unlocked the heavily bolted metal bars and let us loose into the early morning darkness of Copán. Not a tuk tuk, taxi or rickshaw to be seen, meant that we had to half-jog the kilometre or so across town in the early morning mistiness - an interesting adventure in itself!
We got to the bus station without incident and were delighted to see that our seats could fully recline and the bus was fairly new with all the mod-cons! Fantastic! We had a beautiful snooze, short wait in San Pedro and arrived in La Ceiba around 1:00pm. We caught a taxi to the airport and bought tickets on the next flight out to Roatán at 3:20pm. Having nothing to do for a couple of hours, we bought a couple of empanadas and tacos and read our books until we could commence boarding.
As we were walking across the tarmac, Steph started saying that she was feeling nauseous. I didn't pay much attention as I thought it was maybe a little fear factor of the tin can with wings and props that we were heading out to board, however as we sat crammed into the tiny plane with a dozen other people on board, I looked over to see a very pale and sweating Steph, looking at me with wide eyes that said only one thing - "I am going to vomit....NOW!!"
The plane was accelerating up the runway as we frantically searched in the seat pockets in front of us to discover only a life jacket and nothing else - what kind of tin can prop plane doesn't have yak sacks? Steph ripped open a life jacket and, using the bag that it was contained in, proceeded to hurl up the two-week old (we supposed) taco and empanada combination that we had recently consumed in the airport, all the while apologising to the lady across the aisle between heaves. The lady kindly smiled, said nothing and gave Steph a plastic shopping bag to replace the overflowing lifejacket bag as the tin can we were all seated in leapt into the air.
And then after all was said and done, Steph felt perfectly OK with nothing but a bag of vomit and a couple of drops on her pants as evidence that anything had happened at all! We learnt our first Honduras lesson: "Beware of dodgy airport tacos in Honduras".
After about 20 minutes, we landed in Roatán safely and bargained down a cab to take us out to the West End, looking forward to a week and half of great diving!
