"Copan, The ancient Mayan Empire" a Copán Travel Page by Mailo

The rain forest is covering like a celing my way by car to this magnificent place, and as I get closer to the small town of Copan Ruins I can see and feel the beauty of the tropical weather and the amazing tropical forrest or rain-forest. I Travel from my home city Tegucigalpa by car, it is a seven hours trip, but this time I will do it in 12 hours, that's becouse I wan to to enjoy the view througth the different types of sigthseeing that I have to go througth.
Tegucigalpa is located at a thuosand meters above the sea level, sorrounden by mountains, El Picacho is one of the higgest with 1600 meter above the ocean. Pine trees is my view here, and I need to travel thougth a paved road, it's seven o'ckock in the morning. It's a sunny day, tempeture is 17 degrees (Celsius), nice weather. I hit the road with my good friend Miguel, and there we go up to the mountains, heading north, we push the gas of our 4X4 Nissan and there we go, 45 minutes later we are in Zambrano, more pine trees and some clouds, yes, we are getting inside the clouds, this is nice. Continuing on this road we still have to go up the hills a little more and then we start to go to lower lands heading to Comayagua, from up there on the mountains the view is fantastic, only mountains as far as the eye can see, a fertile valley is about 50 km away down the hill, it demands at least 45 more minutes to get there. Once you get there you feel the tempeture changing, it is a hot place, at both sides of the road you can see plantations of diferent king of vegetables, fruits, and people at the side of the road selling their products. Then you face 10 km of a straigth road, no curves at all, crossing part of the valley. The city of Comayagua is in the middle of the valley, (see my Departamento de Comauagua tips). We pass this place and continue to the next city Siguatepeque, we want to get there and have breakfast, it is almost nine o'clock in the morning and we need a cup of Honduran Coffe (probably the best coffe on earth). We can have breakfast in Granja D'elia (a restourant that belongs to and italian inmigrant) or we can stop at Bongos, this time we went to Granja D'Elia. Great food and not to expensive (Miguel paid for the breakfast and it was only about seven dollar for both of our brekfast.

Taking the road again, 45 minutes later We get to the biggest lake of Honduras, Lago de Yojoa, and turn left leaving the main road and we go througth more beautifull tropical forrest, this other road has almost no cars, is a paved road too, you can see small cities like Santa Barbara, San José de Colinas, San Nicolás, and some other, we decided to stop an see this places, we spend some time there taking a good look of the cities. Women in Colinas are extremely beautifull.. not common people.
We still have four more hours of driving, but you feel free to drive when there are so few vehicles on the road.
We entered the Copan Ruins at 6:00 pm.. and was a wonderfull trip, now we need to take a good dinner and maybe .. just maybe.. have a good beer.

This replica is located at the museum in Copan Ruins at the park inside the ruins area, It is a replica of a temple that is underground and it was discovered recently by an archaeologys from Honduras, his name is Agurcia. This is how a temple looked in ancient times.