Today is my last day in Latin America; tomorrow I will be boarding a Delta flight to Atlanta to connect for a flight to Manchester and home. It has been a fantastic year, with its fair share of ups and downs and more injuries and illness than I have ever suffered in my life, but overall unforgettable. I have been to so many places its hard to remember them all, although I can with a little thought. Many of them I hope I will have the chance to go back to and a couple I will make sure I do, Mexico [View Full Entry]

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Creel, in the state of Chihuahua, is a town that seems to exist purely as a base for tourists who come to explore the surrounding country, which is full of canyons and mountains, valleys and settlements of indigenous people. The town is strung out along one street, with its plaza at one end with ever-present church, and otherwise consisting almost entirely of accomodation for tourists, restaurants and souvenir shops which mostly sell tacky rubbish. For all that it is a pleasant place with a laid back atmosphere and a wild west feel, most of the tourists are Mexicans so the place [View Full Entry]

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Bit of a gap form my last entry and in that time I have covered 3000km (very roughly, distances are not my strong point) across Mexico, from the white sands and all-inclusives of Playa del Carmen, through the steaming jungle heat of Palenque, the culture and beautiful historical buildings of Oaxaca and the cool airs and charming colonial towns of the Bajia region up in the Sierras of Mexico´s heartlands. My favourite places so far- hard to say! Apart from being robbed on the overnight bus from Merida to Palenque when it was goodbye credit cards and mobile phone, and the [View Full Entry]

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Belize was not to be! From the minute we entered the country until we arrived in Belize City on the Caribbean, it rained. Our plan was to head out to teh Cayes and do some diving but with continual rain which the locals told us was the norm as this was hurricane season, and the TV issuing a warning to small crafts due to light storm conditions, we changed the plan. Visibility underwater would have suffered from the rain and as I couldn't afford much diving I would have been bored sitting round in the rain on land. So we headed [View Full Entry]

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Grrr just wrote this entry and then lost it as the session spontaneously closed- that's what you get for not saving often enough!!! Anyway here in Flores to visit Tikal, probably one of Latin America's most famous archaeological sites and rightly so. My second Maya site after Copan and with a very different flavour, Tikal is fabulous not just for the ruins themselves but for its stunning location amidst a dense rainforest. A couple of the well preserved pyramids top 40m and although you can't scarmble all over everything as in Copan there are sympathetically installed wooden stairways which [View Full Entry]

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Antigua is a lovely colonial city and a great place to hang out and chill for a while as well as a good base for visiting the nearby villages and Lago Atitlan. We got here last Saturday and have enjoyed a mixture of good food, footie, shopping and an overnight trip to the Lake and famous market of Chichicastenango. Impressions of Guatemala so far are that the people are very friendly and the landscape is beautiful- green and hilly. The actual capital, Guatemala City is not a particularly nice place and tourists are not advised to visit it, pretty much everyone [View Full Entry]

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Copan Ruinas, which is confusingly the name of the town rather than the ruins themselves, which are simply Copan, is a small, attractive town which pretty much owes its survival to the tourist attraction on its doorstep- the ruins of theMaya city of Copan. Its pretty hot with a regular late afternoon downpour, in fact the rain here has been some of the heaviest I have experienced- bouncing with spectacular thunder and lightening. We found a really nice little hostel, the Iguana Azul. It is very well preserved and basically a pleasant place to hangout for a couple of days particularly [View Full Entry]

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The journey from Granada took us through Managua, Nicaragua's capital which seemed pretty unremarkable except that is was very hot and apparently lacking in any kind of centre, having been subjected to several earthquakes in the course of its recent history. The bus ride north to Tegucigalpa the capital of Honduras too us through beautiful landscapes- definately more to explore in Nicaragua. Tegucigalpa, where we had decided to spend a night, did not do it for me at all. Its a run down, dirty city and I found nothing to attract me at all. The main square had a bit of [View Full Entry]

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I didn’t really have any preconceptions about Nicaragua except having a vague idea that there had been a lot of ‘problems’ and ‘fighting’. It is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the most under-developed. Crossing the border from Costa Rica was no problem; we walked across as the bus dropped us on the Costa Rican side. As usual we had to pay to enter- $7 on this occasion, and as usual no-one was able to tell me what it was for. More annoyingly as we left the border zone we were approached by a man telling us we [View Full Entry]

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We have moved pretty quickly through Costa Rica but still hae seen a good cross section of this, the Switzerland of Latin Ameica, so called because of its long-time political stability, democracy and neutrality- all rare in a region with a history littered with wars, dicatorships and revolutions! Costa Rica is beautiful, safe and therefore popular with tourists. Prices are accordingly elevated especially in the tourist honeypots. We entered by bus along the Caribean coast along one of the worst roads I think I have experienced so far- seriously more potholes than road. The border crossin [View Full Entry]

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