Guatemala
People's Guide Tours

Our last drive with Max from Santa Rosa to Copan takes us through a sub-tropical Switzerland, some of the most mountainous vistas of our trip. As we near our destination, the road begins to widen into a valley and the open space beckons like a magnet, pulling us toward the enchanted ruins.

The ancient Maya city of Copan stretches over 27 square miles. It thrived between 200 BC and 800 AD, when it fell to the neighboring city of Quiriqua, and was subsequently mysteriously abandoned. The city's remains include almost 5000 mounds, great temples, tall intricately carved stelae (stone monuments), a grand plaza, ball court, and an acropolis in the process of meticulous reconstruction. Areas like nearby mountain caves reachable by horseback remain relatively unexplored.

In addition, we are lucky that the anthropological museum finally opened in l996 and to rave reviews; the entrance itself an experience. We step through a doorway that's a large opened snake's mouth and walk a serpentine path that mirrors an archeological tunnel.

I have to push myself to go on, almost frightened by the cool darkness of this passageway to the unknown. In a way, it connects the new world, where we come from, to the old, where we are going; the world of the living to that of the dead, of our ancestors. With a glint of light at the final curve of the corridor, I am relieved, the cycle of death and rebirth complete, especially by what I see next. The tunnel opens onto an exquisite four-story high bright red temple, completely rebuilt. A replica of the Maya temple Rosalila, it was the first complete structure discovered at Copan, found inside another temple in the heart of the Acropolis.

Nothing compares, however, with walking through the abandoned city itself, past the plain of ornately sculpted stelae and first spying the steep, hieroglyphic stairway several stories high which, our guide informs us, was the longest written text at the time in the New World.

After climbing up and around the ball court and across the acropolis, I sit for a moment on one of the long narrow steps away from the others, listening to the wind whistle past. It's as if it carries stories of the people who built these structures centuries ago and who sat on these very stones having no idea the mystery their works would pose thousands of years later to a people they had no idea existed.

Our awe deepens as the concept behind each form and structure begins to reveal the great civilization that once thrived here. Everything in their daily life, from the clothes they wove to the fires they built to the structure of their archways, had meaning. It is even more haunting therefore that this great city, not unlike New York or Paris or Athens in its time, was completely abandoned.

Leaving Max at Copan

Continue with Part 5 of Discovering the Roots of Enchantment in Guatemala and Honduras