Unexpectedly Enchanted!

I (Holly) have wanted to visit Mayan ruins for years. We booked a cruise for our first anniversary that included a trip ruins in Mexico. Then the bathroom in our apartment flooded and it quasi-ruined our summer. (It's amazing how something so seemingly small can consume you. Our apartment was COVERED in mold, which did not agree with TJ's asthmatic lungs.) We were so fed up with landlord living that we toyed with the idea of buying a house, and putting our cruise $$ towards the down payment. In the end, our wise friend & sometimes financial advisor, Steve Speake, pointed out that perhaps homeownership & overseas living did not go hand in hand. In the end, no house, no cruise, no Mayan ruins. Though we did spend an autumn week in Gatlinburg, which was lovely, except we're pretty sure a week is about 4 days too long to spend in Gatlinburg.

So... On, this, our 2nd-to-last weekend in Guatemala, TJ wanted to make my dream of seeing Mayan ruins come true. We, along with 6 of our friends from school, bought tickets on a shuttle bound for the ruins of Copan in Honduras. The shuttle was scheduled to arrive at 4:30am Saturday morning. We woke up at 3:45, expecting it to arrive by 4:30. After an hour and a half, we were pretty sure the shuttle wasn't going to come. At 6:00am - two hours past scheduled arrival time - I got the number off our ticket and tried calling to bus company. Nobody answered (or maybe I was using the Guatemalan phone incorrectly?), and we went back to bed, making the best of things & looking forward to a relaxing weekend in Antigua. At 6:15, a horn BLARES down our street. We jump out of bed, get dressed, and the driver starts talking/yelling that the first driver was drunk so he's our driver instead. He sort of shoves us in the shuttle & off we go to pick up our 6 friends.

One house later, while our casa is still in sight, he asks us for our ticket. Oops. I left it by the phone in our TWO hours of waiting for the shuttle.

-- He says we have to pay double since we don't have our ticket.

-- We say we're not going to pay, we can back to our house - still in sight - and get the ticket.

-- He says that's not possible.

-- We say the bus was two hours late, we had to call, and that's why we don't have the ticket. We're not going to pay.

At which point, he tells me that 2 hours was plenty of time for me to find my ticket. And thus begins my first heated Latin argument in Spanish. I won in the end, he said we could just bring the ticket to the agency when we returned. But I'm not going to lie, it got pretty ugly. At one point I snapped at him (actually used my fingers and snapped at him) and told him to listen to me. This I am not proud of, but you live & learn.

So we pick up the rest of our friends & proceed to get so lost that we turn around at least 100 times. Not exaggerating. This driver had NOT driven to Honduras before. We are carsick. Our friend is throwing up out the window. We are weaving in and out of traffic. A four hour trip stretches into an 8 hour trip.

Highly un-amused TJ & the back of Holly's head on the way to Copan.

When we arrive in Copan 4 hours late; sanos y salvos, Gracias a Dios, our expectations are not high. But we all 8 agree, the weekend was positively enchanting. And relaxing. A vacation from a vaction, if you will. (Except that our "vacation" in Antigua is full of studying & tests.)

Back to Copan. The town was lovely and the Mayan ruins were OLD. And intricate. Though these aren't the largest Mayan ruins, they are the most artistic. We were the only people there, and it was easy to imagine the ancient city swarming with people, going to the market, taking in a ball game, just living life, thousands of years ago.





And now I've got to tell you about the food. The food was hands down the best we've had in a LONG time. It was wow by USA standards, not to mention Central American standards! An open-air Honduran churrascaria for lunch - it's like a Brazilian steakhouse in a America, but at 1/100th of the price. Great meat, too. And dinner. Wow. Dinner. Twisted Tanya's. It was something else. A gourmet British-run restaurant in the middle of Honduras. Mahi Mahi with lorocco sause, talipia with salsa hondurena, seafood pasta, chicken curry, filet mignon... And I can't even write about dessert - it pains me to think I'll probably never taste that chocolate delight again. 4 courses for $15. We could afford to splurge since our charming hostel - literally, it was charming - was $4 a night.

Dinner at Twisted Tanya's.

We left Copan at noon on Sunday, all wishing we could stay an extra day... Suffice it to say, the trip home was 75% as hellish as the trip there. It took 8 hours again, this time in pouring rain. But I must say, Copan Ruinas was worth it. Those Mayans... They were/are something else.

And thus concludes the longest blog ever. I hereby promise to never give TJ a hard time about writing long blogs again.