Team Equipt's "Central America Expedition"

[benedmonson]

Did anyone get a good photo of Ben in the mud working the recovery?

I hope they did as I was muddy from head to toe many times! It wasn't easy working the camera covered in mud while sweating and fighting off lots of bugs......

[Viggen]

The winch pulls were very long and most required an extension rope because there were no trees of any size along the track.

No Pull Pal?

got his first body damage after 10 years driving his cruiser, ouch!

Thats how you know youre having fun. The first one is always the hardest and then its Meh from then on.

[benedmonson]

We made it to Honduras finally after waiting quite a few hours for 10 minutes worth of paper work! Honduras should think about getting a copy machine in their own country instead of making you walk back to Guatemala every time you need more. Overall a very good experience at the border it just took forever! We stayed in the town of Copan Ruins and took a tuktuk ride to the ruins. The carvings here and being able to do the archeological tunnels underneath are really worth the drive down here. There are actually over 4KM of tunnels that they have dug to study earlier stages of Copan civilization.


The ball court is the second largest to be found in central america. It also has carved heads on the top of it on both sides like I've never seen at any ruins before.


The Stellas and carving here are incredibly detailed.


Alternate view.


The Hieroglyphic Stairway is the most famous of Copan's monuments. It has 63 steps and several thousand glyphs tell the history of the royal house of Copan and is the longest known text of ancient mayan civilization.


The steps are not in the original order so they cannot be totally deciphered.


An overview of one of the courtyards that leads to the jaguar tunnel.


There are 4KM's of tunnels under the ruins that show how ancient civilizations here at Copan built right on top of one another.


Paul May is a little too tall for most of the tunnels, but made it O.K.


Another image from down inside the tunnels.


Once again the details all over this site are out of a sic-fi novel.

[benedmonson]

I wish that I could give more information about these beautiful ruins at Copan, but just don't have the HP to do so right now. So I will leave you with a photo journal of our time spent there!




Team Equipt had the entire museum almost all to ourselves, there was nobody here.....


There were walls and walls of artifacts and we tried to read every single plaque of information.


I got tired of looking at masks after a while as they were everywhere.


They even carved statues of their bats or at least what they would look like in the Mayan underworld.


I can never get tired of looking at or photographing these artifacts!


the earlier civilizations seemed to use more color and really liked "Equipt Red!"


The town of Copan Ruins had one of the coolest ambulance's we've seen so far!

[1leglance]

great pics and write up guys...
amazing that you have the energy to do the reporting while traveling, thanks very much for keeping us hungry to go places.
Also nice to see you give the gear such a solid testing, people will have no doubt you guys are speaking from experience when you recommend a bit of gear.

[Driver-Navigator]

Love it! Very cool stuff.

[medicfernando]

Awesome pics and great write up guys! Its been fun to follow your adventure. Fernando

[Pedro]

The town of Copan Ruins had one of the coolest ambulance's we've seen so far!

That's the Honduran Red Cross.

[defrag4]

so in!

[benedmonson]

We are now in Xcalak, Mexico which is on the border of Belize and doing a little relaxing. It has been a very busy 5 weeks and we decided that it was time to lay on the beach for a few days before we start to explore southern Mexico and it's Mayan Ruins. This town only has an average internet speed of 8/KB's per second so I only got one image uploaded from the past weeks photos. Once we get a better connection I have lots more to show!


Here is a boondocking spot that we found on Corozal Bay in Belize. This is no photoshop and all in camera. I did a very long exposure for the star trail and then used our Snowpeak Hozuki lights to paint the truck, beach and trees to look like daylight. I hope to do more of these throughout the trip when I have the chance. We also shared the coordinates of this great camp with our friends at "Home on the Highway" and they reported back that they had a great time there!