Honduran Highlands - the Chicken-Bus Run!

After a couple of weeks on "island time", I was ready to keep moving south, and keen to cover a few kilometers. After my first taste of La Ceiba, I wasn't keen for a repeat visit. Not that it was that awful or dangerous, it just wasn't somewhere I wanted to linger. With that in mind I actually managed to drag myself out of bed and made it just in time for the 6:20am ferry.

Although I was leaving Utila, I still didn't have a clear plan of where I was going. The options were to either get down to the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, or to catch a succession of buses to the ruins at Copan, which was very close to the border with Guatemala, so sort of back-tracking.

In the end I'm not sure what I based my decision on, but I ended up on a series of chicken buses with Copan Ruinas as the day's final destination.

Copan Ruinas

Copan is both the name of a small colonial town, and a complex of Mayan ruins nearby. I'm sure part of the reason I went was that I hadn't up to that point been to any Mayan Ruins, and part of me still felt that I was being neglectful by not going to Tikal in Guatemala or Palanque in Mexico. I can always go back sometime I guess. In any event I made it to both the town, and got up early to explore the nearby ruins.

After traveling for a while, its easy to get bored looking at archaeological wonders. Copan has some amazing stone carvings and some quite large pyramids, but compared to many other sites like the ever-popular all inclusive Egypt, for the most part it takes a little bit more imagination to be impressed. Although the site was once no-doubt quite glorious, the intervening 1000 years have belonged mostly to the jungle, and many of the pyramids and structures now more closely resemble big piles of dirt.

Its probably for this reason that visitor numbers are much lower than other ruins, with many travelers choosing to bypass the site and its US$25 entrance fee, even when in Copan en route either north or South. I enjoyed my morning of photography, the jungle setting and the proliferation of wildlife that I'd previously only seen in a zoo in Singapore, but frankly couldn't blame them.

Gracias

After a morning of exploring ruins, I was still keen to move, so instead of staying another night in Copan, decided to head for the nearby highland town of Gracias. Seeing as it was in the right general direction, and listed as one of the highlights of Honduras by lonely planet.

After spending far too much time in Guatemala on shuttle buses, it was actually nice to get away from the hordes of travelers. The first bus of the day was a pretty modern mini-bus, just packed full of locals. I ended up having to catch that to La Entrada, change to another bus there for Santa Rosa de Copan, then catch a third bus to Gracias. As far as bus rides went, the first leg of the trip was pretty smooth - nothing too far out of the ordinary. I was lucky enough to get a decent view along the scenic route thanks to getting the front seat next to the driver. About half way along the road a man in a cowboy hat got in and sat next to me, resting his machete on the dashboard of the bus for safe keeping. He looked friendly enough though, and by this time I was well used to spending time around men with machetes and guns.

One of the things that is almost universally true traveling though Honduras is that people are very helpful when it comes to directing you to connecting buses. While the thought of catching 3 local buses in a day sounds daunting, in practice it all happens pretty smoothly - even if the trip as a whole is painstakingly slow. Arriving in Santa Rosa de Copan was no exception to this. I managed to change buses easily and didn't really have time from when one arrived to when the next departed.