While Away...

Apologies once again for the long time between blogs, but Bryony and my time has been mostly spent in the jungles of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, away from internet. Alas, this experience is for a future blog. For now we must continue to report on our time in Nicaragua and the first parts of our Costa Rican adventures. In the last blog we had just finished at the Carpe Diem project and headed back to civilisation, also known as Leon. The first port of call was a couple of days dealing with the fact my phone was not coming back to life. After a stop at a phone repair place in the town we found out that the screen had failed. The cost of repair was greater and not as guaranteed as buying a new phone, effectively making the decision for us. Searching for a phone in Leon was an interesting experience. Nicaragua, like many of the Central American country is becoming a new market for the big phone companies. However, the price of most phones built for the US or UK markets are still pr...

Nicaragua part 2: Sorry Just realised we never uploaded this blog! The next day we ate some breakfast, then headed off to the bus stop to get to our Workaway. We originally intended to take a taxi, but someone tried to charge us $2 each so we decided 2km wasn’t all that far after all. We jumped on the bus to Poneloya and were surprised to find many other tourists on the bus heading to popular beach of Las Penitas which is adjacent to Poneloya. After getting off the bus, it was a quick walk to a bar where we had been told to get a boat across to the island. Isla Los Brasiles is a small peninsula, mostly made up of sand and mangroves that is separated from the mainland by a small river estuary. The boat ride took about 5 minutes with an approximately 40-minute walk through mangrove forest to reach Carpe Diem. Arriving as sweaty tired messes with unwieldy backpacks we were struck by the beautiful palapa made of wood and palm fronds, cob cabañas and the amazing beachscape less than 10 ...

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...

Easy instructions to reach Santa Ana. Unfortunately we didn't find R-276 so had to take 3+ more buses!   So our original plan was to visit the Ruta de las Flores (Route of Flowers) after finishing our workaway. As Suchitoto was on the way (sort of), the journey to Santa Ana and the Ruta de las Flores should have been simple. Needless to say, the first bus was 45 minutes late and the supposedly final bus probably wasn’t running. This resulted in taking three more buses, making it a 5 bus day. One of the reasons for stopping in Santa Ana on our way to the Ruta was to stay in the hostel voted best in El Salvador for the last 5 years. This hostel has everything required by a traveller: single beds with personal fan, box to put smelly shoes and socks in, power shower, fully equipped kitchen, swimming pool and more. The next day we visited the Santa Ana Volcano with some other people from the hostel. After purchasing some pupusas for breakfast and bananas for lunch, we hop...

It seems every time I sit down to write our blog I am apologising for the length of time between writing. Well, it has been another long break before getting you folks up to date with our adventures. Last time we left you we had just finished our time in Copan Ruinas in Honduras. Our next destination was the country of El Salvador where we had a WorkAway arranged with a tourist cooperative called Nubes del (Clouds of) Pital. For the uninitiated, Workaway is a website which connects volunteers with hosts who offer accommodation and food for help on projects such as organic farms, hostels and many more. Back to the story. We left Copan at what we thought was the reasonable time of 9am in the morning, which later you will see came back to bite us. We had many bus changes from there. The journey was longer and more tedious than expected even with the beautiful countryside. Suffice to say after 4 long bus journeys we got to the border a lot later than expected and thou...

One of the greatest aspects of travelling with few plans is making spontaneous decisions. A few months ago, before leaving the UK, I watched an episode of Ben Fogle: New lives in the Wild, which was filmed in Guatemala. After a bit of internet research, I found the location: Semuc Champey, one of the most popular tourist destinations in Guatemala. Fast forward a couple of months to Huehuetenango, trying to decide on where to go next, I stumbled across a link to Ch'i Bocól on a forum. After linking the program and the hostel together, we immediately changed our plans to fit in this destination. Our last blog post left us in Nebaj, about to head off to Lanquin, the town closest to Semuc Champey and Ch'i Bocól. We left Nebaj on the 5am bus with reggaeton music blaring and arrived in Coban at around lunchtime. After another 2 hour microbus journey, we arrived in the small town of Lanquin. Having just spent the last few weeks in highlands, Lanquin was sweltering hot so we quickl...