COPAN - ONLY LARAE WOULD GET SICK HERE!

Our very first P-day was spent with President and Sister Veirs and their visiting friends to go see the ruins of Copan.  These ruins date back to 400 AD and were some of the best preserved ruins in the world.  Each succeeding ruler would build another temple on top of the previous one.  So in some cases there are four ruins on top of one another that they know of. 


























    It's a three hour drive over winding, mountainous roads to get here.  They are aware of hundreds of additional ruins that have yet to be excavated.  This civilization consisted of eleven different rulers until they just all of a sudden disappeared.  They say that they think the people simply ate themselves out of house and home and had polluted the water so badly that they couldn't live there anymore.
 

Below is the ball court. This picture
is taken from the vantage point of
the king. 






















There were these carved heads everywhere.  In our opinion these are aliens!  We couldn't believe how well preserved the carvings were.  However the best carvings of all were found inside of one of the ruins.  Only 18 years ago they found a passage way that led to the center of one of the ruins.. Inside they found near perfect carvings of all kinds of things.  They were all inside of a temple that was inside of the temple.  Because of the fragile state of the actual temple they have left it undisturbed but recreated it inside of their museum.  Some of the actual carvings are in the museum while others remain inside of the temple.  The original temple was found paint intact.  Amazing!

Can you tell what these carvings are?  They told us that the bat was sacred to these people and the other carving is of a man's head with a bird on top of his head with a fish in its mouth.  So incredibly perserved!!

     Well, amidst all of this beauty what else did we see?  We saw LaRae sitting with her head in her hands. She was so sick all the night before and became so dehydrated in the heat that she was weak at the knees.  But a quick bottle of cold water and she was back on her feet!!!