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And we thought getting up at 6.00 was a problem. How about 5:00? And this is vacation?
A couple of people decided to forgo the trip and stayed. They made beautiful
mouse stuffed animals, read stories with the little ones and had a great dinner at some
fancy restaurant.
Anyways, Copans is a very long drive through a couple of shanty towns. One of those
towns was Isabella, where we stopped at a coffee processor. We got the full tour,
from seeing the coffee trees, the bagging process, the peeling, the weighing,
sorting, cleaning, drying, peeling again, sorting again, the optional roasting and
grinding and the bagging - almost all done by manual machines or just plain by hand.
This plant had 800 - 250X250 parcels with trees. I forget how many total trees (sticks)
but it was quite a lot. It also seems like more and more is cut down to plant more
and more trees. This plant processes about 1 million
pounds of coffee per year.
The pickers are contract workers, while the cleaners
and sorters are permanent. But since the permanent workers are paid about $2/day, I'm not sure who is better off.
Anyways, The ruins were incredible. To see such huge buildings and no one around
anymore. To think that they were all just abandoned and left. To think that such a
great civilization just died. We brought some of the younger kids on the trip. It was
hot, hot, and did I say hot?. However, the kids were wonderful.
We stopped in the very touristy city of Copans (1 mile from the ruins) for shopping
and dinner. The restaurant was OK, except that the power went out as soon as we got our drinks. It seems
like it happens once a day there. He had gas for cooking, but that was it. |
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