David here... We had a 06:00am bus to catch that would take us from Honduras to Guatemala, a place we had only recently decided to visit. We left the hotel room to find the kittens outside our window, so we said goodbye to them and jumped into the shuttle minibus. There were only 5 of us in there so it was not too much of a squeeze. We got to the Guatemala border in about 30 minutes and paid $3 to leave the country and $2 to enter Guatemala. We then had to endure over 7 hours in the (hot) van as we got stuck in traffic a couple of times. We finally arrived in Antigua at around 14:00 and found our hotel, Casa Cristina, with no problems at all. The room was clean and comfortable ... read more

David here... As we are a bit behind with the blog, this is going to be a very quick run through of the remaining areas of Nicaragua we visited. We left Ometepe, using bus, shared taxi, ferry, taxi, bus and finally a bus to Masaya. The bus dropped us off in the middle of a huge market area, and we promptly got lost. We finally found our way to the main square after asking so many people. As we've said before in this blog, as the roads have no names it is difficult to get your bearings. Even people who live in the town do not know where they are on a map. The best option is to just jump into a taxi when you arrive, but we're too stubborn for that. We found a hotel ... read more

David here... We left Quepos on the 09:30 bus back to San Jose. The journey was 3 hours and was hot and humid as the bus was full. We arrived back at the Coca Cola terminal at midday and made our way to the Northern terminal round the corner where the bus to Santa Elena left from. We got there and waited for the ticket office to open at 13:30 ready for the 14:30 bus. Suzanne found a little Soda near the bus station and bought us a Cheese and Ham sandwich which was so good, I went back and got us another one. We bought our tickets and jumped on the bus, that left promptly. The journey to Santa Elena takes over 4 hours so we would be arriving in the dark, with nothing booked ... read more

David here... We arrived mid afternoon in L.A after a long 11 hour flight, without the benefit of watching many films as they started them all before they turned the screens on and Air Pacific only show the same films on a loop, though I did manage to see the bulk of Tangled. To make up for not being able to really watch films we drank a copious amount of white wine, making sure that we asked the gentleman serving as his measures were bigger. We jumped into a Super Shuttle (Blue Vans at LAX) who took us directly to our hostel in West Hollywood for only $16 each. We had decided to stay at the Banana Bungalow on Fairfax as: a) it was cheap, and b) it was only a 40 minute walk from the ... read more

David here... After a night of heavy rain we awoke in Opotiki to glourious sunshine, great camping weather. We made our way north, through Tauranga and onto a lovely DOC campsite called Dickey Flat. This was a massive campsite by a fast flowing river near the stunning Karangahoke Gorge. We walked through this on a 12km round trip the next day, which included going into some of the old gold mining tunnels and seeing glow worms again. The walk was beautiful and actually very interesting to see the old pictures of how the area looked while being mined. After 2 nights at Dickey Flat we moved further North onto the Coromandel Peninsula, passing through the towns of Whangamata and Tairua and stopping off at Hot Water beach for a picnic lunch, where you can dig your ... read more