While Away...

Friendly cats and kittens We left San Salvador at 5am on a bus. After multiple changes and crossing into and out of Honduras, we arrived at the Nicaragua border. For some reason, this turned out to be the most annoying border crossing so far. According to the official at the border, we should have informed Nicaragua we were entering a week in advance. After finally establishing that we didn’t have to, we were let through the border. We hopped on a bus for 5 minutes to our destination: a homestay/hostel near Somoto Canyon. Somoto Canyon is a reasonably well-known attraction in northern Nicaragua. Although most people join tours to access the canyon, we opted to do the canyon ourselves as we are confident swimmers and the route is easy to follow. We set off at 8.30 in the morning and walked along the road for about 30 minutes. We arrived at the river near the small village of La Playa, and set off up the river. In hindsight, we probably should have taken a track just before the r...

Despite being a nice place to visit for a couple of days, there was not much to do in El Zonte except surfing. Although we previously decided to avoid the big cities due to their extremely high crime and murder rate, we decided to spend a couple of nights in San Salvador as our Lonely Planet guide book has a large section on San Salvador and transport links for further destinations are easier. We left our hostel in El Zonte and walked up to the main road to catch the bus. We resigned ourselves to a long wait and settled down on a bench. About five minutes later a guy in a flashy pickup stopped to offer us a lift. He turned out to be on his way back to San Salvador from a weekend surfing and gave us a lift all the way to our hostel. Greg and I outside the Belgium church which is made completely out of sheets of metal On our drive to the city, he told us horror stories about San Salvador and explained that his pickup was bulletproof, with inch thick glass. Just before droppin...