You say goodbye, I say hello
We’ve noticed so far in Honduras (and sometimes in Guatemala, too) that it’s much more common as a one-word greeting to use “Adios!” rather than “Hola!” At first, I was a bit unsure as to whether it was supposed to be somewhat disparaging, as if to say “Scram!”, but now, after having tried it myself and getting an friendly “Adios!” in return, I’m pretty sure it’s just a common greeting.
The first thing that we did in Honduras was to visit Macaw Mountain near Copan Ruinas. Macaw Mountain is a sactuary for birds formerly kept as pets. Here they have huge full flight cages, though some no longer fly as a result of being kept in people’s homes for too long. They were all pretty tame and some of the parrots had been taught to sing, talk or laugh. As a grand finale, our tour guide took some out of their cages so we could get a hands-on experience.
The main reason for visiting the town of Copan Ruinas, of course, is to visit the ruins of the Mayan city, Copan. While Copan’s buildings weren’t as impressive as some of the other sites that we have seen, its artistry was amazing. The site is renowned for its sculptures in the form of stelae, altars, building facades and the heiroglyphic stairway, which has the longest inscribed text of the Mayan world. The stairway is now covered by a tarp to protect it from erosion, which takes away from the majesty of it, but it’s still pretty amazing.
As far as riding goes, we are back into the heat. Our first two days of riding, we thought we were getting a fairly early start, on the road by 8am. Unfortunately, the day starts getting pretty hot around 9am. The first day, riding from Copan to La Entrada, we managed to make it to our destination, thanks in large part to a nice downhill at the end. The second day we weren’t as lucky. The hills were a formidable opponent, especially as we tire much faster in the heat. As we were walking our bikes up a particularly steep section in the noon sun, a man in a pickup truck stopped along side us, shouting “it’s too hot and there is too much uphill, I will give you a ride to the top”. Since we were pretty much wiped out, we loaded the bikes in the back and hopped in. He drove us uphill for about 10 km, saying “in the morning you could do this, but now its too hot! it is not possible,” then let us out to ride the last 5 km into the town of Santa Rosa de Copan, mostly downhill. We rested for a day, hoping to adjust to the heat and ward off a cold.
We were up with the sun to take advantage of the cool morning weather for the much more pleasant ride to Gracias. From Gracias, we visited the Celaque National Park. The guidebook told us that a high clearance vehicle is necessary to reach it in the rain, but people in town told us that we could take one of the moto-taxis up to the visitor center. Moto-taxis are little 3-wheeled carts with room for 2 or 3 small people in the back and only the driver in front. They are most definitely not high clearance. We did find a driver willing to take us up to the park, but it was quite a jarring ride, uphill on a broken up dirt road. The hike was beautiful, through dense cloud forest.
From Gracias, our goal for the day was the town of San Juan, which our guidebook said is 52 km from Gracias. Another early start and we were on our way. On the first big climb of the day, we were joined by 10-year old Rodrigo who was riding an adult sized bike. He could barely reach the pedals standing up. He was very sweet, stopping to rest when we did and working hard to keep up with us on the steep parts where the size of his bike made it even more difficult. He left us at the top of the hill, where he was delivering lunch to his dad where he was working along the side of the highway.
Our guidebook said that the road to San Juan was slowly improving. We could have guessed that this meant lots of construction, though we didn’t expect to be riding on a dirt/gravel road for 10-15 km. At around 46 km, we reached a fork in the road and in figuring out where we were, we discovered that we had already passed San Juan- about 14 km earlier! Our guidebook was a full 20 km off in distance. We had gone too far past the town to want to ride back. My knee was starting to bug me on the hills and we were pretty hot, so we didn’t want to bike all the way to our next destination, La Esperanza, about 35 km further down the road. Unfortunately, we were told that there were no hotels or places to stay until La Esperanza. Since we had stopped near a bus stop, we decided to try to get a bus. We soon found out that there weren’t any more busses to La Esperanza and that we should try to get a ride on a pickup truck. We had little success at convincing the pickups to take us and our bikes all that way, so when we were offered a ride on the back of a flat-bed semi, we were happy to go. We were able to use our bungie cords to strap our bikes and bags on near the cab, then found some somewhat secure places to sit and hold on. The road from San Miguelito, where we had caught the ride, to La Esperanza was a mostly one-lane broken up dirt and gravel road that was also extremely hilly. We most certainly would have been miserable if we had tried to ride it that afternoon. The terrain meant that the truck wasn’t able to go very fast, so the ride was fairly uneventful. Even on the back of the truck, we still attracted a lot of attention, though I think it was because we were both still wearing our helmets and holding on to the truck as though it were necessary.
We were still a day behind our schedule, even after making up an extra day on the way to La Esperanza, so we decided to bus further to Siguatepeque. We missed out on a very nice road with a shoulder, but now we are all caught up. I think we are adjusting to the heat as well. Our first aid book says that it takes about 10 days, but its hard to tell if we are adjusted or if we are just in a somewhat cooler area. The altitude of this area is higher, but it is still pretty hot. We are only a couple days away from the capital city, Tegucigalpa, then we are headed down to almost sea-level (read really hot!) to cross into Nicaragua.