Costa Rica We took a very long (18 hour) but comfortable bus ride from San Salvador to San José, Costa Rica, crossing the El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua borders. We didn't stay too long in Costa Rica, just exploring the town center [which there are about 20 banks in a several block radius, and only ONE can change Nicaraguan money but only if it's in perfect condition, and it can't be an old printing or a new edition of the money]. We spent a few nights in Cahuita, which is a surfer/tourist paradise in the north of Costa Rica. We [View Full Entry]

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Guatemala We left the turtle project in the small fishing village of El Rosario (Guatemala) and rode to Monterrico with a bus full of kids heading to school. Monterrico is a small touristy beach town where foreigners are hounded by tour guides and children trying to give you directions to hotels for a few dollars, even though there are signs everywhere and accommodations are easy to find. The next morning, we took a lancha (small boat) full of people to a small town and took a series of buses making connections heading to the Guatemala/El Salvador border. We had to cr [View Full Entry]

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We arrived to the turtle project in Hawaii (in Guatemala, not in US!) on the 31st and stayed there two nights for ¨training¨. It is Olive Ridley turtle season but they also get some Leatherbacks during their season. The first night there, there was a nest of turtle hatchlings in the hatchery which we had to measure their lengths, record and then release the turtles on the beach by the ocean. They were so small, they fit in the palm of your hand, and surprisingly quite strong flippers. Typically once they hatch, they have a day or two to start eating [View Full Entry]

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Having left ARCAS wildlife rescue centre after three weeks of volunteering, we took a lancha (a small and skinny wooden boat) to Flores where we unfortunately had to stay another night but left early morning to take a chicken bus to Rio Dulce, a quiet little town near Lake Izabal. The people were very friendly, the town quite small being centered on one main street and ¨the longest bridge in Central America¨spanning across the lake. We took a day trip to El Estor, also along the lake side, to a castle ¨Castillo de San Felipe¨ which had to have been build [View Full Entry]

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Waking up before sunrise to animal noises, working all day cleaning up poop and dodging the monkeys peeing on you from above, eating tasteless horrible food, covered in bug bites, mopping up toilet and rain water from the bedroom floor daily, and at night checking each other´s hair for lice while the girls seperated by paper thin walls in the room nextdoor have dance parties listening to horrible music... Ah, the life of being an ARCAS volunteer. At 5:30 am every morning we get to awaken to the noisy squawks of rescued scarlet red macaws. Occasionally we hear the loud hooting, [View Full Entry]

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Flores, Guatemala. A touristy island many stop at on the way to Tikal or Belize. It’s very quiet and nice view with a lake surrounding, but very expensive and catering to tourists. On one street is all of the souvenir vendors who sell the same items (shirts, postcards, handbags, small crafts or Central America memorabilia) for comparably the same prices, though a few shops you can get them to barter the price down a bit. To get here, we took a ‘luxury’ bus across the border, just needing a stamp and passport check to cross, easy enough. Then we took a [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Nicaragua, we got a bus to the Honduran border which was easy to cross. We had to walk to the other side of the border, crossing military men holding guns. There we waited for a mini-bus to take us to a bus station in Honduras where we could travel the PanAmerican Highway to the El Salvador border. We had to take rickshaws (looks like a red 3-wheeled golf cart) to our next destination where we were stopped a few times to have our passports checked. We arrived to Santa Rosa de Lima, El [View Full Entry]

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On one of the ‘chicken buses’ headed from Matagalpa, I awoke to see several men outside of the bus leaning into our windows yelling in Spanish. At first I was very startled thinking the bus was under attack by people climbing in through windows and doors, but then looking around I saw we were stopped in a market area and the men were hanging in the window with bags of vegetables to sell. Some quickly got on the bus by the doors and others clung on to the windows from the outside, shoving their products inside the bus to sell. After [View Full Entry]

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Aside from the intensely painful sunburn covering large portions of my body, the heat rash taking over both my legs and bum, the itchy bug bites occupying my legs and feet, and the diarrhea i’ve picked up along the way, i am really liking Central America. Currently we are in Matagalpa, Nicaragua for the next few days before heading to El Salvador via Honduras. We are planning to bypass Honduras due to the whole military over throw and all. Hopefully without incident... The landscape here is utterly amazing, forested hillsides, winding roads among small valleys and large patches o [View Full Entry]

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A giant frog looking up from the toilet bowl, several frogs on the ledge overhead watching you pee, the other stall full of moths and when you flush the toilet a mass swarm of 20 moths quickly flutter from under their hiding spots of the toilet bowl and scatter to the walls. That was our bathroom in La Cruz, Costa Rica where we met our other traveling companions. In the morning, we took a bus to Nicaragua where we are pretty sure we got conned out of money where we didn’t have to pay. The man working stamped half of us [View Full Entry]

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