it was an inauspicious beginning…I overslept and the guard at the gate did likewise…I think the shuttle was on time….3:45 or so but I burnt my fingers/Bic lighting up the padlock with the bundle of keys in the dark…fine…0500 and thru the streets of Guatemalo, headed for Honduras and Copan…my big camera misfired and was left behind..
Copan? nicer, prettier and cleaner than I remembered(it’d been 3 years) and the women were superb…if Hillbilly Tom had been on this run, he’d woulda been shouting ‘Mamacita!’ over and over again…Twisted Tanya’s for dinner…superb…this usual crew was a bit short: Jackson bailed at the last minute and his replacement, Hogan, fit in nicely…or has he’s became to be called, Hogan Von Daniken…per his memories of seeing elephants and space men amongst the carvings…the ‘elephants’ turned out to be stylized versions of jaguars and the ‘space men?’…probably flashbacks…but that’s Hogan…
the ruins/museum was superb…we skipped the tunnels…seen one,you’ve seen ’em all…the currency conversion nightmare of dollars vs. lempira vs quetzales confounded the ‘perfesser’ and me for 3 days…Hogan is some kinda mathematical prodigy aka an idiot savant…he ‘got it’..we didnt’…aka laydowns/pushovers for the local merchants and they’re dying…Copan runs on overflow from Antigua and as we know, there isn’t much overflow…we did manage a ‘blind taste test’ of 7 yr old Flor de Cana vs. 12 yr old…Hogan insisted…yep, my fave 7r old version won!…we killed the bottle of 12 yr old…’blind taste test’ indeed.
this week? Office Depot in Antigua!…Wed, 3rd calle/7th avenida…Laurel and Rory’s new Irish pub, the Snug’, opens Thursday, as par to Travel Menu…they kinda got bounced after the cleaning house of the Sunday afternoon slugfest-punchout at Reilly’s La Esquina a few weeks ago.
and my never ending search for proficiency in espanol continues..bought a great CD called ‘Country en Espanol..’…photo below…the Art Show at Finca Azotea?…lotta people,some old, some new, one babe and Mike Chrisman’s new book on sale..”Little Stories’….great/great poetry…the first book of poetry I’ve ever bought…go out and find it…fabulous Bloody Mary’s…good crowd, xlnt location, which spooked me, because I’d done/shot an article on indigo there, 4 years ago..and a Steve Wintershaw watercolor that I want…if I’d had the $$ but after Copan/currency/cha cha…I told him I’ll buy it after the First…of January, of course.. and then, there was the dumb ass German tourist who screwed us up crossing back into Guatemala, cost us time getting thru the City last night…
Our Man in Antigua 
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