Utterly ruined

Ball game court at Copan

2012, the last year in the current Mayan calendar and therefore supposedly the end of the world, may not be a bad time to visit some of the civilisation's best ruins... After all, they might not exist next year...

Probably the best of the New World's three pre-Columbus civilisations - the other two being the Aztecs and our old friends the Incas - the Mayan world once stretched from the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, where we are now, to Honduras, Belize and El Salvador, which are quite far away. Our first experience of it was in Honduras, right on the border with Guatemala, at the Copan ruins.

I first heard about these ruins reading Brave New World author Aldous Huxley's 1934 travelogue Beyond The Mexique Bay, in which he describes taking a tiny light aircraft to the ruins from Guatemala, and at that time the idea of a tourist visiting the site was virtually unheard of. It was the province of archaeologists and historians only, and critical work was very much still underway. Huxley depicts the site as still being very jungly and overgrown in parts, and describes large amounts of intricately carved stonework 'strewn' about the place.

I'd guess some of this stonework was from the amazing central staircase, a vast piece of work comprising 2,200 elaborately carved blocks telling the history of the site and representing the longest hieroglyphic engraving in Mesoamerica. The staircase is 62 steps high but only the first 12 levels were found in their right place and order. Hence the strewn stonework back in the 30s.

At any rate, the wild and romantic tumbledown ruins of Huxley's time are gone, replaced by well-manicured lawn, pickers of fallen leaves and varying degrees of success of restoration. The smooth turf, however, highlights the magnificence of the site: huge, sharply cut stone pyramids vault out of the green flatness, and the beautifully embellished standing stones dotted around look magnificent. In parts, some of the original colours on these stones are still there, which is one of those things that makes the hairs on your arms stand up, like when you see the brush marks on a masterpiece. At that moment you can imagine the place at the height of the Mayan empire.

At the site there is also a scarlet macaw breeding centre, which is very cool. It's the national bird of Honduras, and it is huge. When we left, they'd all come down to the visitor path area and were swooping round our heads, bright red and yellow and blue. Magic.

Up in the Chiapas state in Mexico, I visited the 7th-century Palenque ruins - Chris had to work :( - in a very jungly setting. The night before we'd been woken up, woken up!, by the cacophonhy of noise made by howler monkey groups apparently roaring in the trees around our hostel. The noise was like nothing else I've ever heard, incredible! This video (not by us) gives you an idea of the sound. Pretty scary to wake up to in a hammock, outside! A moment to remind yourself they eat fruit. And in one quiet pocket of the site I saw about five over my head. We've seen them before, on the volcanic Isla Ometepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, but it was still special.

Palenque is a very beautiful site, especially the half of it that is under jungle cover and set around pools, streams and waterfalls. There are many more complete, vast buildings and pyramids here ... palaces, temples, and the most celebrated burial site in Mesoamerica no less! A personal favourite was the temple which a certain, certainly crazy, 'Count van Waldeck' decided he was going to live in for a few years in the late 1800s. But most of the other buildings also look like they've had window frames put in, a very odd effect, but the frames support netting to keep the monkeys from, er, monkeying around inside.

The sad thing about Palenque is that, although unlike Machu Picchu it is amazing without costing a fortune to enter, it is actually more touristy because vendors are allowed inside. They line the main paths through the site with earrings, fridge magnets and assorted other crap laid out on blankets. I appreciate they have to make a living but it ruins the ambience of the place even more than the 1,000 tourists. Kind of a shame.

Anyhow, in summary, Mayan ruins are super cool. See 'em now, before the world ends!

SARAH

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