Spretnak The Blog: Copan Ruins: the Reason I'm Here

Temple 16 in the Copan Ruins

I like visiting Mayan ruins.

Today's agenda was the primary reason for this mini-vacation: to visit the Copan Ruins in Honduras. These ruins are just over the border from Guatemala and are not really visitable from the major cities in Honduras (which aren't that visitable themselves). But the Copan Ruins are visitable as a day trip -- a long day trip -- either from Guatemala City or San Salvador, I've been to Guatemala City. And it's slightly longer, even though it involves crossing only one international frontier. So I opted to visit from a place I had not yet been to, but which I thought would be interesting.

So I booked a tour -- ended up being a private tour with only me and my driver/guide -- and off we went on a road trip to the Copan Ruins.

Welcome to the Copan archaeological site, the best Mayan ruins in Honduras and the farthest east and south of the major Mayan sites,

By the way, Honduras is now in the books as my 41st country visited. Years ago, I set my sights on 50 countries visited as a realistic goal. I started internationally-traveling too late in life to get to a number much higher than that. Fifty will be a bit of a stretch, so topping 40 has me happy with that achievement. It took 50 years on the planet to get 10. Then another five to get 20, four to get to 30, them, because of the covidiocy (that's a real word, look it up), it took five to get to 40. That puts 50 in range for my late 60s. Do-able. But there are too many places I've been I want to go back to, so going to countries just to check off names on a list is getting less appealing.

But coming to Country #41 just for the Copan Ruins was really appealing.

Very green. It is the wet season.

That is not a hill in the picture below.

It is an as-yet still-unearthed pyramid structure from the Copan glory days. Those were around 200 A.D. to about 900 A.D., although things peaked around 700 A.D. and went into a decline after that.

You can tell this is a pyramid and not a hill because there are carved faces on some of the rocks tumbling down the hillside.

That's not natural.

This is my guide for inside the park: Juan Carlos.

He's a local guide. The driver who drove from San Salvador -- about a five-hour drive -- was resting a well-deserved rest back in the car. She'd been to Copan before, so it was cool.

This is what some Copan maps call "The Grand Plaza."

Some maps don't, so make sure which side of that divide the person with whom you are speaking is on, before you call this "The Grand Plaza."

One way to tell if a decorative feature is a restored original and not a re-creation (RE-CRE-a-tion, not REC-re-A-tion) is that the restored originals have a protective awning, while the re-creations are exposed to the elements because why not.

My guide is pointing out some Mayan numbering with pointed pointing stick. Again, for those of you new to the channel, in the first millennia A.D., the Mayans were one of only two civilizations on the planet with a zero in their numbering system. The other was India. Weirdly enough, the Mayan counting system was not base-10, like most of the cultures on this planet. It was base-20. Meaning: the Maya used their fingers and their toes both to count, not just the fingers.

Because it was a Saturday, there was something of a crowd here. But it was not "crowded." But it was not like my team in the pre-eminent Mayan ruins site -- Tikal in Guatemala -- during the Year of Our COVID 2021 -- when everything in the world still was closed. And I visited one of the few countries on the planet at that time -- Guatemala -- and when I got to some of the most impressive ancient ruins I've ever seen anywhere -- in the midst of this massive archaeological site -- there was only my guide and me. This was a little more crowded than that.

Stela!

Please read that in a Marlon Brando voice. (A "stela" is an upright stone memorial marker. A "stella" is the wife of a drunk guy played by a young Marlon Brando. Just so you know the difference.")

This is an altar honoring the line of kings who ruled over Copan:

It ends with the final king flanked by his father to his left, and the first king of Copan to his right.

These were the royal residences.

The king and the nobles lived right next to the temples and pyramids. The working class had to commute in from the mountain next door.

This is my guide pointing out an important detail with his feather-tipped pointer.

We're now maneuvering ourselves to walk through the tunnels that go through one of the pyramids.

The tunnels were carved out for the archaeologists who were exploring the interior of one of the pyramids after the Copan River suddenly changed course in the 1920s after a major earthquake. The result of the river changing course is that three pyramids were quickly destroyed -- they were not designed to withstand being in a river bed -- and other pyramids were threatened. Archaeologists from the Carnegie Institute -- which apparently was in Washington, D.C., and not Pittsburgh -- were called in to save the pyramids.

The walk to the tunnels reveals more ruinization.

And, again, you know this stela is the real deal and not a recreation because why? The tell-tale awning.

Time to enter the time tunnel.

That's a face.

The tunnels were narrow but not too claustrophobic.

For people prone to that sort of thing. Oh no not me. I love tight narrow confined spaces where you feel trapped as if you can't breathe. I live for that sort of thing.

Lots to see from the tunnel-eyed viewed.

It was a $15 U.S. add-on to the price of admission to get to take the tunnel tour. It was short, and I am a cheapskate, but I say this: if you are going to travel all the way to Copan to see the glorious ruins, you would be an idiot not to spring for the extra few bucks and take a tunnel tour. I wholly endorse the tunnel tour.

Impressive Mayan arch visible here:

Next, to the ball court:

The Mayans -- all Meso-American civilizations for that matter -- all people on planet earth even today in 2024 -- love their ball games. And the Maya of Copan were no exception.

There ball game was a little more reasonable than the variations played in Mexico around this time (which would have not only been pre-hispanic, but pre-Aztec). This was a variation of hacky-sack, only played with a heavy rubber ball. Using your shoulders, hips and thighs, the players had to keep the ball airborne. If the ball hit the ground, you lost a point. If you hit one of the six animal heads on either side of the ball court, you got points. Scoring would have been much easier here than in the Mexico variant, which required hitting a ball through a single small stone hope, raised high off the ground, that was barely larger than the circumference of the rubber ball.

You can see in this photo three of the six animal heads you're supposed to hit to win the kewpie doll.

Stela!

This was a stela honoring the deceased father of the Copan King who built this ball court. In other words, the father got a premier seat in the endzone.

This is the famous Hieroglyphic Stairs:

The hieroglyphics in this stairs functioned as a history book, telling the tale of the history of Copan. Are you having trouble reading them? That's because when the temple was rebuilt after a major earthquake, the stairs were arranged improperly. It's like reading a history text and the binding fell apart and you put the pages together randomly, so suddenly Abe Lincoln was in World War I and George Washington failed to have a plan to right the economy after the Stock Market Crash. But Grover Cleveland was a founding father and hero of the Revolutionary War.

Here's some numbers. Mayan numbers.