We have spent around 5 months of travelling with boats, cars and busses to get from Colombia to El Salvador. Now it took us a just few hours by plane, plus a night at Panama airport, to get back from San Salvador to Bogotá, to get back from Central America to South America. Arriving in Bogotá made us realise how much we had adapted to the Central American way and standard of living and transportation. We currently experience some kind of split personality within ourselves. There is one part that so much loves the most basic life, wearing flip flops and mostly the same clothes everyday, being able to just go for a swim and eat fresh local produce whether this is fruit, vegetables or the fresh fish pulled from the ocean during the past night. ... read more

We walked through the Comuna 13 area in Medellín and captured some of the street art, formerly a dangerous epicentre of crime and drug trade, now still quite an over-populated and low socio-economic zone but with a little help of the government the residents have completely upgraded their neighbourhood with a mega positive impact on their own lives.... read more

From Leon we travelled to the Northern highlands of Nicaragua. This whole region is off the beaten track, far from the backpackers super highway through Central America. This is where most of the coffee in Nicaragua grows. The highlands are the most rural in the country, and people live a simple life in the most basic conditions we can imagine. The boys herding the cows wear boots and cowboy hats, the women use traditional firewood heated kitchens to prepare meals based on tortillas and roast there small batches of coffee. We spend one day climbing, jumping off cliffs and swimming the Somoto canyon. Because of the rainy season the water level is nicely high and pretty wild at places. We climb across steep parts high above the water to go around the whirlpools, we jump from ... read more

It’s been a while, so expect some reading ….. ;-) or just browse through some pics. We’ve now migrated our blog to travelblog.org as you apparently have found out, so if you want to follow you can do so by clicking on 'Subscribe' or ‘Follow' at www.mytb.org/JudithMerijn After two beautiful weeks at the Corn Islands the local ferry trip to Bluefields was an easy ride, followed by a fast boat for a few hours over the super flat Rio Escondido to El Rama. We spent a night at El Rama and got ourselves onto a so called chicken bus to the capital Managua and there another one to Granada. Granada is beautiful, with a lot of colourful colonial buildings and cathedrals in very good condition. Although parts of town are a bit touristy, most of the ... read more

We decided to travel down de San Juan river, straight through a pristine bio reserve, all the way to the caribbean coast of Nicaragua. After stamping out of Costa Rica, walking across the border and stamping in to Nicaragua we got to the small but busy river town San Carlos. We emptied the only cash machine in this whole region, had a very nice diner overlooking the river and lake and next day shipped ourselves into a ‘bote’, a long but narrow riverboat. We got out in the middle of ... read more