Kez and Nick

Playa del Carmen was our first stop when we arrived at the Yucatan on Monday 4 July by bus from Belize. It’s by far the most touristy place we went on our trip, full of American tourists, American chains and americanised restaurants, although it does have a really nice beach where we spent a very relaxing Tuesday. We had a great time, eating amazing fish, watching a brilliant fire show at the Blue Parrot and we were unpleasantly surprised to find that Americans actually dance in real life like they’re on MTV. It’s quite um…graphic. Our next stop was the island of Cozumel, to meet up with Kerry’s best friend Linda and go diving on the famous reefs there. We hadn’t seen Linds for a year so it was very exciting to see her. She ... read more

Our Mexican adventure started with a bit of a panic! On Monday 14th May, we arrived at the Tecun Uman border crossing at 6pm, having travelled by bus from Xela in Guatemala. Our guidebook reliably informed us it was open 24 hours. It was shut. It was open until 7pm, so the Guatemalan side was open, but since Mexico is on daylight savings time, it had shut 5 minutes before. So we raced to the 24 hour border crossing at Talisman by bicycle taxi, foot, 2 combi van collectivos and a taxi, which makes it sounds a bit hectic, which it was, but luckily in Latin America people actually use public transport, so there’s loads of it and it only took about 1 hour. Kez’s hard earned mexican visa got her in without too many ... read more

On Sunday 29h April we started our long journey to La Ceiba on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, right the other side of the country. We caught a bus to a town nearby to Leon and then another bus to El Guasale, the border town. From there we got bicycle taxis to take us the 3km to the actual border post where we spent 45 minutes arguing with the money changing sharks and still didn’t get a very good deal. Luckily we didn't need to change a lot. Then very conveniently a bus was leaving in 20 minutes to Tegucigalpa, the capital. We got that bus to drop us off at the airport so we could check out times and prices of flights to La Ceiba the next day. And we totally spawned it, because ... read more

The Costa Ricans, or Ticos as they call themselves, have a saying, Pura Vida, meaning Pure Life that you hear constantly as a greeting or to say something is cool and it’s a very worthy description of the country in general. It is a very vibrant place with so much to offer that you could easily spend many weeks here and not be bored. It’s also extremely easy to travel around because it’s a small country with a well developed tourist infrastructure and almost everyone speaks English - not so good for practicing our Spanish! It’s also not called Costa Rica or the Rich Coast for nothing, anything to do with tourists is very expensive, probably because they get sooooooo many American tourists who just pay. A lot of restaurants only have dollar prices on ... read more

Our base for organising our trip to the rainforest was Manaus. It’s a big city, packed with tour agencies offering all sorts of Amazon adventures. We had already pretty much decided to go to a sustainable reserve called Mamiraua so we could avoid the pesky tour agents and spend our days doing all the admin we needed to do like book boat tickets, pay our deposit for Mamiraua, buy long sleeve shirts to survive the mozzies, visit the Colombian embassy etc. All tasks were successful except the Colombian embassy because they wanted so much detailed information to give Kez a visa and most of it was impossible to get - like a bus ticket from Venezuela to Colombia, which is of course impossible to buy in brazil. Also our plan was to get a yacht ... read more