NickiG
Nicki Goh Joined: October 28th 2007
Logged in: May 14th 2009
Logged in: May 14th 2009
This travel blog will contain short diary entries and as many photos as possible over the 7 months that I am travelling. I will be starting off in Mont Tremblant and Montreal in Canada where I will be improving my skiing and learning some funny Quebecois French. In February I head off to South America to do a whistlestop tour of 6 countries before venturing North to Cuba, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. I will be back sometime in June but don't even want to think about booking the return flight for the time being!
Sorry if the blog is quite boring - i can't be bothered to write too much and I always think photos are much better anyway!
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Travel Blog Posts
Granada is the second biggest town in Nicaragua and a pretty colonial town with a very European main square and pedstrianised streets. The hostel was a pleasant surprise - clean (!!) dorms with decent warm showers and even a pool! The hostel in San Juan had not only caused my backpack to get soaked during the rain storm despite being in my room but had also had people removing cockroaches from their faces during the night and also having to witness the odd sexual experience in a huge dorm room of 14 when everyone else was trying to sleep. Some people!! Granada has a lot of nice restaurants and bars which we explored en masse in a group of about 10 of us who had randomly met up at various points along the way. I had ... read more
I arrived in San Juan Del Sur after a long bus journey from Monteverde via a hot a rather scummy town called Rivas. I had left at 6am and then spent 8am til 11:30am sat on the side of the motorway waiting for my bus to the Nicaraguan border. I had various amusing conversations with locals while I was waiting which helped to pass the time! Most of them looked at me funny as I was in the middle of nowhere alone with huge bags waiting for 3 hours for a bus - i suppose I would have done the same at home. When it finally turned up I got on and found my seat next to a rather large lady from Nicaragua. She kindly decided to use her own seat and share my seat with ... read more
The rainy season!
I got an early bus from Puerto Viejo to Monteverde, towards the North West of Costa Rica. Monteverde and Santa Elena are two towns in between two huge cloud forest reserves. Monteverde is a quaker settlement founded by 4 American families who moved to Costa Rica after being imprisoned for refusing to fight in the Korean War because it was against their Quaker beliefs. They started dairy farming in Costa Rica and also vowed to preserve the local forest land. The bus had to go through San Jose on the way and I ended up traveling with a Swedish girl called Elin who was also heading to Monteverde from Puerto Viejo. After 12 hours of traveling on a lot of bumpy roads to the middle of nowhere we arrived to what would turn out to be ... read more
Rude!
I arrived in Puerto Viejo after staying just one night in San Jose. To be honest I didn't see much of the capital as I was tired from our last night of partying in Havana and so just wanted to catch up on sleep. My hostel was quite strange and they put me in a dorm room with 3 men over 40. One of which would laugh out loud in his sleep and scare the s**t out of me and the others were quite amusing conversation... I'm pretty sure they were alcoholics and not really the sharpest tools in the toolbox. During one conversation they assured me that Uruguay was in fact an island off Brazil and when I protested otherwise they got rather annoyed and assured me that, as Americans, they knew about that kind ... read more
Trinidad Town hall
Trinidad is about 4 hrs drive from Havana on the South Coast of the Island, about half way across. We decided that as we didn't have that much time in Cuba, we'd divide the time up half-half between Havana and Trinidad rather than trying to rush around like I have been doing everywhere else on this trip. We got to Trinidad on Saturday afternoon and checked into another casa. On Saturday we had some dinner in the casa and then headed out to some bars in town. Trinidad is a small colonial town with cobbled streets and, as with the rest of Cuba, has many bars with live bands and opportunities to dance. One bar is totally outside on some steps leading up from the main square and every night they had live bands and other ... read more
IMGP3175
**Unfortunately some of the photos have uploaded very badly and i tried a few times and can't seem to resolve this :( Shame cos I really like the photos but you're all welcome to a full slide show when I get back ;).... I arrived in Havana after a terrible journey in which we'd been stalled at the end of Lima runway with a 'technical fault' and then I ended up missing my connecting flight as a result. Anyway I arrived and attempted to check into the hotel (/tapas bar with rooms that is described as being for those who 'need a room nearby for when they drink too much at the tapas bar') but due to some problem with the room they marched me around town trying to find me a casa particular instead. In ... read more
Day 1
This entry will be very hard to write because it is such a mixture of amazingly good stuff that we did (mostly involving scenery and time spent without our guide) and amazingly awful stuff we did on the way to Machu Picchu (usually involving the name Felix). If you haven't read the previous entry about pre-trek panic then it might help you to understand the following... We left at 4am on Sunday morning trying our best to give Felix the guide another chance and got picked up slightly late in a taxi with a broken door that didn't shut and one headlight. After a two hour bus journey to Mollepata we met with the other 'staff' who would be making up our group for the 5 days - a cook named Victoriano and a horseman named ... read more
Photo 13
On Thursday we got up early to go up to Machu Picchu before sunrise. Once the hotel staff had managed to wake Felix (aided by some quite strong banging on the door) we set off and got up there by 6am. The whole thing was covered in cloud and we couldn't yet see the whole thing together but we walked up to the guardhouse looking over the city to begin our tour. On entering the place I asked Felix if we could then have the long-awaited guided tour and information about Inca Culture and when he again refused I started to make it very obvious that I intended to listen to other guides instead as they had more interesting things to say! Machu Picchu is incredible to see however many photos of it you seen before. ... read more
Let's just say that our first impressions of Peru didn't exactly get much better anytime soon. Straight from the bus, we checked into a hotel called the Niños Hotel - a very pretty (and quite expensive in Peruvian terms) hotel run by a Dutch girl who uses the profits to provide street children and orphans with food, school supplies, sports lessons and healthcare. The woman has already adopted about 25 children and we thought it was a good cause so in the end it was money well-spent and a good place to have a nice sleep before supposedly setting off on the trek on Sunday morning. Two representatives from the trekking agency arrived at 7pm South American time (ie 7:45pm) and we sat down to go through the route, what we needed to bring and to ... read more
We left early on Saturday to catch the bus up to Cusco where we had a trek briefing at 7pm. We'd been promised a very nice looking bus which would take 6 hours to make the journey in complete comfort and through beautiful scenery... After an hour we stopped at a place called Juliaca to find more passengers for the trip and ended up waiting there for an hour with passengers shouting at the driver that they wanted to leave and complaining that we were going to be late. Juliaca is described in our guide book as a 'seedy place full of contraband'. And it turned out to be true. Around 20 people got on at this stop and we soon had enough passengers for the driver to decide that we could leave. Little did we ... read more
Where i'm going 
Where's next? 
Where I am now 
Where I've been 
Where I'm from 
