Sunday April 11, 2010

First, I want to let you know that I saw my first snake here in Honduras earlier this week—and it was one crazy snake. Now there are two snakes that are very similar—the Coral snake, which is very poisonous, and the King snake, which is not poisonous. Both have the same color markings but the markings themselves are in a different order on each. While walking home from school on Monday Rachel spotted something moving on the side of the road under some brush. We walked over and there was the orange, black and yellow coloring of either a Coral or King snake. Neither of us could remember how to tell the two apart (there is a rhyme that distinguishes the two because the order of the colors are different on each snake) so we watched it for a minute or two slither through the brush, memorized the order of the colors and walked home to look up what we just saw, either the King or Coral snake.



We arrived home and after checking several sites we confirmed what I originally thought—we had come across the second most poisonous snake in North America (after the rattle-snake), the Coral snake. I love Honduras.

Anyway, over the next couple of days I will be posting entries about my Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacation. Now, to clarify, Semana Santa is basically a national holiday here in Honduras. This is when most schools have their spring break and most businesses shut down on Wednesday or Thursday for the rest of the week. In fact, on Good Friday the entire country shuts down. We found this out the hard way when we were planning on taking a bus back to Gracias and there were no buses running because it was Good Friday. Anyway, on to my trip.

Friday after school Laura Beth, Rachel and I took the school bus with the kids to town and hopped on a bus to Santa Rosa where I was meeting my friend Steve and Rachel was meeting her two friends Amy and Mandi. The three of them had flown to Honduras earlier in the day and we had given them directions on how to get on a bus to Santa Rosa. The three of us reached Santa Rosa around 5 o’clock and our friends were waiting for us at the meeting place we had picked. It was crazy that Steve was all the way down here, and when we met up with Mike shortly after the three of us began our epic vacation in Honduras, with two of us actually LIVING in Honduras.



We spent the night in Santa Rosa at a pretty nice hotel. The 7 of us went out and ate some good pizza (the beginning of my American food craze over vacation) and went back to the hotel and just hung out. It was a pretty relaxing start to vacation. The next morning we got up early to hop on the bus to Copan where we were going to spend the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday.

COPAN
Now Copan is in the Northwestern corner of Honduras near the Guatemalan border. It is known for being more of a tourist town because of the ancient Mayan ruins that are found just outside of town. We had quite the itinerary for our two days in Copan and we were very successful in accomplishing it.



We arrived right around lunch time and took a mototaxi from the bus station up to our hostel, the Blue Iguana, where we stayed two nights for 120 lemps a night (6 dollars), so $12 total. We had a room with three bunk beds and one cot so we all had to get to know each other pretty quickly. My friend Mike ended up not making it to Copan for the first night because he had some work he had to finish in Santa Rosa. He was hoping to make it but he missed the last bus to Copan. So the 6 of us made our way to Macaw Mountain.



Macaw Mountain is a natural preserve that runs off of donations and the entrance fee ($15). The main attractions are the hundreds of birds, mostly parrots, which they take care of. They have collected many of the birds through adoption and recuperation. We first took a tour of the park with a guide who talked about each of the different species. At the end of the tour we came to an open area where they had one of almost every species at the park hanging out. Here the guides would pick the birds up and place them on you. I took a picture of a blue macaw, a red macaw and a green parrot hanging out on my shoulders and arms (see the picture). In fact the blue macaw bit my shirt and put a hole in it. This was a lot of fun and to be so close to these “exotic” yet native birds of Honduras was pretty awesome.



After Macaw Mountain we went back to the hostel and relaxed. We were pretty tired from traveling and walking around. We ended up going out to dinner at a really good pupusa restaurant (a pupusa is basically two tortillas that have cheese and meat in the middle, basically a tortilla sandwich). From here we went out and enjoyed the nightlife in Copan. We ended up going to a restaurant/bar called “Club Fun” and I had a Honduras try and teach me to dance…unsuccessfully. But it was a lot of fun and we ventured our way home after a successful and tiring day.

Sunday morning we woke up and got ready to make our way to the Maya ruins. We first decided to get some breakfast and I was really feeling a banana. So while the rest of the group went to Espresso Americano to get coffee I made my way to the open-air market to find some bananas. I found a nice stand and asked the woman “Puedo tener tres banana’s por favor” (May I have three banana’s, please) and she grabbed three “bananas” and put them in the bag, I paid my 20 lemps ($1) and made my way back to the group. Well when I arrived I took one “banana” out of the bag and something wasn’t right. I looked at it, and then the group looked at it, and in unison we declared that I had been given plantanos (plantains) and not bananas. Bummer. Now for those of you who don’t know platanos are like a banana but not as sweet. They need to be cooked in order to be eaten because they are too hard raw. Therefore it was impossible for me to eat what I just bought.

After my disappointing breakfast (I ended up just buying a bag of mango from a street vendor) we made our way towards the ruins. As a history major/teacher I was really excited about checking these out. Other then it being scorching hot it was incredible. We ended up not spending the extra money for a tour guided and just wondered around the ruins ourselves. My friend Steve had taken a Mayan civilization class in college (my Mayan history is spotty because it wasn’t one of the areas I studied in college) so he was able to explain some different things to the group. To think about how this was a thriving civilization 1300 years ago and that these are the remains of that civilization is crazy for me to think about. Then again that’s probably why I am a history nut and a total geek. Here are some pictures.






After the ruins we hopped in a taxi and went back up to Macaw Mountain. The tickets we bought were two-day tickets and they had a pool that they said we could come back and use. So after walking around the ruins for a couple of hours in the hot sun we were all eager to jump into the pool and relax. Well, I was a little too eager in fact. I quickly set my stuff down by the pool, took my shirt off and jumped in—forgetting that I had my wallet and cell phone in my pockets. My money and wallet dried out, but I was without a phone for the rest of the week. Bummer. After swimming for about an hour we decided to go get some lunch and I had an excellent club sandwich.



After swimming we had to quickly make out way back to the hostel. On Saturday we had decided that we wanted to go horseback riding and had made reservations for all us to go at 3. We made our way to the meeting place and I met my new best friend for the next three hours—Mariposa, or in English, Butterfly (For the record Steve’s horses’ name was Princesa—Princess. This was an awesome three hours and probably the highlight of our time in Copan. It took an hour to ride up this trail to the top of this mountain where there was a native Mayan community centered around a school. We walked around this village for about an hour and then rode back down the mountain. The ride down was awesome—we were able to “open” the horses up and I stayed in a solid trot and a couple of times a decent gallop (for an inexperienced horse rider like myself this was a blast). We eventually made our way back to where we started (not before my friend Mike’s horse almost threw him off when his horse and Steve’s horse had an argument).




Overall Sunday was a busy day and we were all drained from the day’s activities. I will end this post here and include a second post sometime in the next couple of days about the second half of the week in Tela and San Pedro. Along with the pictures I inserted in this post I am working on sorting through others to post in a Picasa album. I’ll let you know when those are uploaded.