Barton
Ryan Barton Joined: April 4th 2008
Logged in: August 27th 2008
Logged in: August 27th 2008
Travel Blog Posts
Panama is a good place. They are on the U.S. dollar so you don't have to deal with changing figures in your head when buying things like mangos. You hand them a quarter and they give you a big bag of slices. Another reason this is a great place is because you have the potential to get many different places in the world and in style too. Almost materializing my dream to make it to the South Pacific, I met some guys who found a sailboat willing to take a few select brave individuals to Tahiti via the Galapagos. It is very possible that this three month trip is down the road in my future, but for now plane to Cartagena, Colombia. The original plan was to sail but I lacked the sobriety to organize ... read more
After meeting up with a hairy Iranian and a small brunette girl who I've been told slightly resembles my good-looking self in the overly tourist saturated Costa Rican town of Tamarindo, we continued our journey to the Costa Rican capital of San Jose. After checking into a place that slightly resembled the dorms of a large D-1 university Johnny and Brown went to the casino. Then they went to another, and another. It seems these people love to play the slots and most are yet to discover any sort of cardgames. I think it is for the free A/C. I went for the free beer. Although I wasn't playing they had no problems bringing me drinks...one of the perks of being a gringo I think. Brown, with pockets swollen from an under-the-table Subaru sale and ... read more
There had been much drinking since the 20 km walk to the beach and it was time to do something active. This involved a hike up the 1,400 meter (4,575 ft) Maderas Volcano. It had rained the night before and was extremely muddy. The Asics running shoes were muddy and my feet were wet. The terrain goes from shrubs to cloud forests making the hike spectacular and really giving one's self the feeling of moving somewhere. According to Wikipedia it is one of the few places cloud forest grown on the pacific side of Nicaragua. At the top is a lake within a large crater making for an awesome photo. The place we were staying at was recommended by a guy we met on the boat en route to the island. It turned out to ... read more
Although not currently in Granada right now, I will use this time to reminisce about the Nicaraguan past-time of cockfighting. We woke up that morning with no intentions of watching two potential carriers of Avian Flu fight to the death with razors strapped to their feet. Around noon after walking around the colonial city of Granada and dodging horse-drawn carriages, a sort of Disneyland town within the middle of third world Nicaragua, one of the Canadian tree-planters asked if we had ever been to a cockfight. Realizing it was Sunday and the local Granadans liked to sit around and drink on their days of Sabbath we had high hopes with some limited spanish and a little luck we could find good cock-on-cock fight. After asking a few people and being told not to go down ... read more
Leon is hot. Today is the 4th day in the city and I´m combatting a hangover as Browntown listens to the White Sox on Nicaraguan internet. A quality bottle of rum, aged 5 years, will set you back 100 córdobas or 5 bucks US. If you´re feeling especially thrifty you can get one for 30 córdobas but at that point you got a whole other set of problems. After mistaking it for cheap vodka that would have idealy been used in a morning bloodymary I can vouce for the fact it tastes like something used to tortures prisinors in Abu Ghraib. One of the exciting things about traveling is that it lets you do some sort of unique activity in a unique place during the day and later allows you to get drunk in just ... read more
