LEON It seemed liked I´d changed worlds completely when I left the tranquil beauty of La Moskitia outlined in my last blog and, after spending more than a day and a half on buses, arrived in the groovy Spanish colonial city of Leon, the 2nd largest city in Nicaragua. It wasn´t just that I´d gone from primary rainforest to a decent sized city, but when I was out in Moskitia there were hardly any other travellers to see; Leon, however, is one of the main cities on "The Gringo Trail" through Central America, somewhere that almost everybody backpacking through these parts [View Full Entry]

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La Moskitia (or The Mosquito Coast) in Honduras is the most sparsely populated region of any of the countries I´ll visit on this trip. There´s hardly anybody out here, and the small number of indigenous Miskito, Pech and Tawhaka people that do live out here commute between villages in dugout canoes (usually fashioned from a single tree trunk) along the many waterways out here - there simply are no roads. Instead of people and roads, La Moskitia is home to the largest tract of primary rainforest in all of the Americas north of the Amazon, which means the trekking and nature [View Full Entry]

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Being a long narrow isthmus of land, Central America has two long coastlines, one of which has the Caribbean Sea lapping at its shores, backed up by the second longest reef system in the world (second only to Australia´s Great Barrier). Honduras boasts 700km of Caribbean coastline, which combined with its posession of a few palm-fringed, white-sand islands, means that there is quite a lot of fun to be had in and around Honduras´north coast. CHAUCHAUATE - CAYOS COCHINOS The highlight of my last couple of weeks has been a trip out to a completely undeveloped, postcard-picture white-sand island of Chauchauate. [View Full Entry]

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I was a little dubious at first when a group of Honduran bus drivers milling under a shady tree (smoking cigarettes, drinking cola and not looking like they were about to do any bus-driving anytime soon) told me to go to the edge of the city and hitch a ride instead of catching a bus. I'd arrived in the Honduran border town of Marcala after my last blog had me leaving El Salvador, and was hoping to get a bus west across the country, only to find out that the last one left 10 minutes ago and the next one wasn't [View Full Entry]

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When people go travelling by themselves, there's usually no shortage of opportunity to meet other travellers. But I've found that travelling in the eastern half of El Salvador, travelling by myself really means travelling by myself, I've gone entire days without seeing another gringo even so much as on the other side of the street. My last blog mainly covered the western half of El Salvador which seems to be more popularly backpacked, but in the eastern, less-travelled half it has felt like its really just been El Salvador and me. I mentioned last time that there'd be a major reduction [View Full Entry]

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As well as being the most "off-the-beaten-track" destination in Central America (95% less backpackers here than in Guatemala, for example) El Salvador also has to go down as quite possibly the friendliest country I've ever visited. Almost from the moment I arrived (when I asked the bus driver where a certain hotel was, and he told me to stay on the bus and he´d drive the bus there for me once the other passengers had gotten off), I´ve been treated more like I´ve been a visitor in someone else´s home rather than just a traveller passing through. Sure, most people in [View Full Entry]

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The Guatemalan antics have kept rolling on since my last blog. My next stop was to Antigua for Semana Santa (or Holy Week) celeberations. Semana Santa is the week that runs from the Sunday before Easter until Easter Sunday, and all throughout Latin America its a time for big celebrations, street fiestas, carnivals and so on - i had to make a reservation to be in Antigua over Semana Sanata quite a while back, as everyone knows that the festivities are on a grander scale in Antigua than anywhere else in Central America. There were heaps of processions through the city, [View Full Entry]

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Its a bit of a cliche to harp on about the diversities of a country, but over the last couple of weeks I´ve been steadily amazed at just how many differences Guatemala packs in to one little country- I´ve been in some pretty diverse places, where the language, culture, nature and vibe of one place sometimes having almost nothing in common with the last place I was at. My first stop since my last blog was at Finca Tatin . Pretty much in the middle of nowhere up a river from the Caribbean coastal town of Livingston, in the heart of [View Full Entry]

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Sometimes its not so easy coming up with a "top 5" of all the things that I´ve done in my travels over the last few years. A lot of things have been cool, but for something to be rated as truly in the top 5 means that it needs to have been in a special class of its own. Shortly before I left London to start my travels, my mate Paul who´d been in Belize a few months earlier recommended that I get on the Ragamuffin 3 day/2 night island- hopping tour on a sail boat, cruising around Belize´s many uninhabited [View Full Entry]

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There's something about getting up ridiculously early in the morning that adds to the atmosphere of a day's outing. So I resisted the urge to break my alarm clock when it went off at 3.15am, telling me it was time to get downstairs and wait for the bus for the "sunrise tour" of Tikal, one of the greatest sets of Mayan ruins set in dense Guatemalan jungle. An hour's bus ride and a half hour walk through the ruins later, I was sitting atop one of the tallest and western most of the temples, facing due east as the sun rose [View Full Entry]

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