Remember Us?

 Unfortunately I got out of the habit of blogging as we got somewhat buried in the clinic and simultaneously we were trying to learn how to speak, and even harder, hear Spanish.. We have gotten better, but realize that it will take a long time to get good language skills. It is time to get back to recording the happenings of our mission.

A while back we took a trip to Copan, Honduras with many of our fellow Senior missionaries. As Kacie said, "Isn't that nice. They are letting the Seniors go on a field trip." And  what a field trip it was. Because of the risks of the road we had to hire a police escort to get us to the border. Copan is not very far over the border and it is the location of one of the larger Mayan Ruins. We drove most of the day to get there and stayed in a local hotel which was quaint and "local".

Here is the group with Sergio, our guide, on the left.

This a "tuk tuk " outside our hotel.

That night Sergio, who was our guide, gave us a fireside on the ruins in general and the Central American Theory of  Book of Mormon location. It was extremely interesting and really set the tone for our trip to the ruins the next morning. For all of you Book of Mormon readers, you know that the directions given for all of the city locations, mountain orientations to the wilderness and the flow of the River Sidon can be challenging. Sergio made a very good case for Central America being the setting for the historical events of the Book of Mormon.

With all of that being said, I'll show you some of the ruins.

This is excavation of some of the water works.

This is a tiered wall about 75 ft high which was buried by ash and debris as seen on the right.

Walking where Mayans walked.

This is an estela that chronicles a former leader's life. The carving at the top that looks like a hamburger is seen on many such estelas and it has been interpreted as " It came to pass."

Here is looking over the edge of a very sharp drop off. Can you imagine Lamanites trying to scale this wall?

This is some sort of large plaza with surround seating.

This is some kind of ball court where scoring occurred  by hitting the three markers at the top of the sloped area. Conveniently, the ball would always return to the "center court area".

Artists' conception of how it looked on the day of the big game. Rumor has it that the captain of the winning or the losing team ( not sure which) would loose his head over the outcome.Perspective- this head is about 5 ft high.

This is a typical Mayan Arch as we are looking up at it.

Baptismal Font? It is at ground level and could hold water, and there are stairs going down into it.

Here is a reconstruction of a temple found underneath another  temple. This was a common practice of building the buildings of the conquering people on top of the buildings of the conquered. 

This shows a parrot with talons. These are common in some of the construction. Naturally, there were such birds in the woods surrounding the ruins, but they didn't look this fierce!

Well, that does it for this edition. We will try to write more often.