So can you count having been to a country if you spend less than 24 hours in it? Of course you can if you've passed through immigration and seen the country’s most important site. The ancient Mayan ruins of Copan are situated in the westernmost part of the country less than ten miles from the Guatemalan border. The country’s other main sites, the Bay Islands in the Caribbean, are quite a distance away, and most of the country has currently has a highly unsavory reputation for drug and gang violence and one of the world’s highest murder rates.

I had planned to spend two days in the Copan area, going to a nearby coffee finca that does guest tours and stays for horseback riding, fancy meals, and hot springs on my second day in the area . The problem I faced was that there are so few tourists visiting Honduras nowadays that there was a shuttle van to El Salvador scheduled for the day after my arrival but not enough bookings for another one until three days later. The alternative would be to take public buses of the chicken bus variety that would take an entire day and involve at least two transfers. So I decided to skip the day at the coffee finca.

Copan Ruinas is quite a small town that mostly serves the now much diminished tourist traffic to the most visited sight in the country, the ruins of the Mayan city of Copan. The archaeological park is only about a mile’s walk from town on a nice trail along the road. There are several options beyond just admission to the archaeological site, including admission to the tunnels excavated into the temple mounds, a museum of sculptures from the site, and a small archaeological museum in town. I decided to go for the whole shebang, which set me back a considerable $40 in total . If I came all this way I might as well see all there is too see, right?

Copan is one of the many Mayan city states that reached its high point during what’s considered the civilization’s Classic period between 400 and 800 A.D. during which the Copan Valley may have had a population of around 30,000. The state’s decline is attributed to deforestation and soil depletion and possibly change in the local micro-climate. While the ruins of some of the other Mayan cities like Tikal and Palenque are much grander than those at Copan, Copan is considered to have the finest and most extensive examples of stone sculpture of any of the Mayan sites.

I pretty much had the place to myself for my visit which took up most of the afternoon, such is the degree tourists are staying away from Honduras lately because of its violent reputation. That’s not a bad thing, though. I’ll take having one of the world’s great archaeological sites virtually to myself over fighting the selfie-taking masses at a place like Chichen Itza any day . I found the ruins and stelae sculptures to be very impressive and the Museo de Esculturas, which houses many of the original sculptures found in the area, to be really good. The two tunnels on the site underneath the shells of the pyramids which snake around the inner temples were somewhat disappointing, though, and hardly worth the $15 fee to visit them.

Most developing countries are quite lax about border security and generally treat borders as a way to collect some revenue from foreigners in the form of visas of exit fees. So I was very surprised that when entering or leaving Honduras everyone is fingerprinted and subject to a biometric eye scan. The passport stamp is also done by feeding the passport page into a machine reader that stamps a unique identifier rather than just a date and border post like most. I think that’s similar to what the U.S. now requires of foreigners entering the country. El Salvador was a different story, though. They require you to show your passport but don’t even stamp it. I guess that means you can stay indefinitely in the country if you’d want.

I’ll probably be back to Honduras some day when I take in the Caribbean side of northern Central America, including Roatan and northern Honduras along with Belize, the Yucatan, and Tikal in Guatemala. I also have no choice but to cross part of Honduras again in a few days when I travel from El Salvador to Nicaragua.