Hiking in Copan

The Stela Group
Originally uploaded by zassink

I recently realized that with less than a month left in Copan I really need to take advantage of the time that I have here on the weekends without school. Last weekend some teachers were hiking up to a waterfall and invited me along. We first went to the waterfall, then to the ancient Mayan stela "nearby." I heard it was nearby, it was another hour or so of strenuous hiking. Never-the-less...we made it! Then we read the sign and one part jumped out at us quickly, "nearby caves." So we made a plan (as we were all out of water almost), come back next week with lots of water and food to find the caves.
This morning we left the central park at 7am in search of the caves and a far away peak to conquer. We quickly got passed the stela on a short cut we had discovered and then plotted on towards where we thought the caves might be....the side of a big cliff. We ran into one person that pointed us up the hill so up we went. After scrambling up the loose rocks and dirt to the top we were still no closer to the caves. We asked some more farmers we ran into and they pointed us in a direction even further away from Copan. We'd now been hiking almost 3 hours and had climbed more than 1400 feet of elevation! We were tired but saw the village of Cabañas on the far side (which has bus service to Copan). It was never our intention to hike there, but we started talking about it in a semi-serious manner. After running into a third person that "pointed us" in the direction of the caves we set out confidently. Soon we were staring at the side of a cliff where obviously a cave should be but there was no cave in sight. We searched all over and eventually realized the caves were a mystery to us. We kept walking on our way to Cabañas and looking for the caves but never ended up finding them. In total it was a five hour hike covering over 6 miles climbing from 2000 ft up to 3400 ft then back down to 2200ft. We were disappointed to not conquer the caves, but we did conquer a big rock hill and many barbed wire fences that we hopped over. All in all...this was a successful day.:)