August is clearly the wrong month to take a three-hour horseback ride. On the hillside trails there wasn't much to see besides dense foliage, and, other than the beautiful wide, dark eyes of some children we passed, what lodges foremost in my memory is the four of us sitting on our scrawny mounts, swatting mosquitoes. We trotted along the brown Copan River, where naked children splashed at the shore, finally reaching the ruins. Before entering, we stopped for sodas at an outdoor stand. The vendor opened the bottles, put a straw in each and handed them to us.
Bottles stay here.
Understanding that we wanted to sip slowly while walking through the park, he pulled out some sandwich-size plastic bags and dumped each beverage into them, tying the bag deftly around the straw. There I overheard an American man explaining some of the history of the ruins to an elderly couple from Oregon, and I asked whether we could tag along. So we joined Don Meinders, a Florida biologist who has lived in Honduras for 10 years teaching farmers about crop rotation and seed propagation. Like Angelenos who are always on Disneyland duty, Meinders, who lives an hour away, makes the obligatory tour to the ruins several times a year to escort visiting friends and relatives. Spanish explorer Don Diego Garcia de Palacio found the ruins in 1570s, but the Spanish ignored them.