They see me rollin they hatin

Central America Caribbean » Panama
January 8th 2012

Published: January 8th 2012

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chipsandgravy

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Happy New Year Comrades

O…M…G I am like so travel (holiday) fatigued right now. I am looking forward to going back to work for a bit of a break. I’m going to totally like rest up in this hostel for a few days just to get my breath back and get me undies washed an that cos I’ve been turning them inside out for a few days now and I can’t remember which way up they are supposed to be. I’m not holiday fatigued really but I do need to wash me duds. Why am I telling you about my grundies you ask? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your local MP or whatever.

We’re in Boquete, Panama. Judith’s bricking it, thinking we’re going to end up in that prison of Prison Break season 2. I’ve tried to reassure her that there is no chance we will end up in a fictional prison. Plus they’d have to catch us first!

We’ve just had our tea (jacket spud and chilli) and are now having a little sit down in the lounge bit of the hostel with a nice cup of tea. Judith’s

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curled up on the sofa next to me reading a delightfully stained guide book we borrowed from the hostel (glad she’s had her jabs). Some people are in the kitchen cooking something which smells a bit like a burnt tyre and there is some lass on her phone trying to talk over the radio which is pumping out some banging Latino reggaeton beats. How relaxing. Just the type of environment I need to write a new entry.

We’ve just got back from Cuba and before that we were in Costa Rica and before that Nicaragua where I think I last wrote about things. So as Craig David and the Artful Dodger say “why is no one buying our records anymore?”, sorry I mean let’s “re-e-wind………………………”

Granada was really nice. It reminded us of Antigua in Guatemala which is one of our favourite towns. I mentioned last time that we were about to send a parcel back home from Granada from a post office which looked like one of those make shift offices they set up on The Real Hustle. Guess what, it got there in a week. One week Nicaragua to Leeds. Take note

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Royal Mail. We took in the sights in Granada and one day we saw this man who looked like David Bellamy and I was like “is that David Bellamy” and Judith was like “I’m not sure” and I was like “he’s looking at a tree” and Judith was like “oh yes well it must be him.” We didn’t ask him if he was him though. We were respectful and just stood pointing at him and taking photos. Papped him good. They seemed to like fireworks in Granada. Big massive ones that make you feel sick. Problem is now we’re becoming immune to the noise. I used to jump like a small cat at the slightest bang and now I don’t even hear a mega death bomb demolition rocket being launched right next to my head.

One day I was having a chat with a local bloke about calling people ‘gordo’ (nice word for fatties) and he said “in Nicaragua we have names for all people which are not meant as offensive. If he’s pale skinned we’ll call them ‘Blanco’, if they are Chinese we call them ‘Chino’ if they have big ears we call them ‘Jumbo’.” Really,

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Jumbo is not offensive? So that was Nicaragua. We really liked it and may come back one time. Nicaraguans like Phil Collins, beans, machetes, X Factor and drinking home made rum on Sunday mornings and then laying in a ditch by lunch time. Oh and they are very nice people too.

We left David Bellamy and his bottle rockets and headed south east to a town called San Juan del Sur. I haven’t got anything against Americans but it was full of Americans so I hated it. As I said I’ve got nothing against Americans but if Americans flock somewhere then I have to pay for everything at a premium, like some kind of Yank Tax. It was our 6 year anniversary since Judith and I met and our 4 month anniversary since we started travelling (holiday) so I took Judith out to a little square and we had some barbequed meat cooked by a woman on the side of the street. It was really romantic especially when this stray dog kept coming up to us and then this old woman would run out of the shop with a massive stick and chase it down the street.

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Plus some kids were wanging fireworks about which added to the romantic atmos. For some reason the sticks on these rockets came back down to earth at about 200mph on fire like something from a battle scene from Lord of the Rings.

We went to San Juan specifically for the turtle watching and we were just in time as the season was due to finish that week. The night of our anniversary, we took a guided turtle tour to La Flor with a complete dribbling idiot who had about as much knowledge of turtles as I do about literary figures of 14^th century. That’s not a lot by the way. He also had 50%!v(MISSING)ision in one eye and 75%!i(MISSING)n the other. I’m not having a go at the poor lad for having bad eye sight but surely decent vision is the one thing you need when your job is spotting turtles at night in the dark. I’d have thought given his bad eyesight he’d have made up for it by at least reading one book about turtles other than a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle annual he got for Christmas in 1991. He told us that

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we had to be really quiet as to not scare off the turtles. So we all did as we were told and then his mobile went off playing that tune that goes “they see me rollin they hatin patrolling they tryin to catch me riding dirty….” Brilliant. The sand on the beach was crazy. It lit up when you walked on it. Judith said to this nice American couple we were with (see I do like Americans) that it was like ‘Stars In Their Eyes’. I don’t know what a depressed postman from Wigan who dresses up like Leo Sayer on a weekend has to do with emission of light by bioluminescent plankton, but anyway. A bit later on another group came onto the beach and he told them that he’d seen some turtles up the other end of the beach even though we hadn’t, just so they didn’t spoil our turtle watching. We hadn’t seen any by this point and I was keen to go off with the other group. It was funny a bit later though when the leader of the other group totally bollocked him in front of everyone for spinning her a yarn. Chamillionaire came through

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in the end and he found us some turtles. They were laying eggs and it was so beautiful. Plus some little baby ones started hatching out of the sand which had been laid a few months prior and we helped them to the sea. It was so cool. Don’t think I’m going to be able to top that anniversary. Peaked too soon I think.

We left Nicaragua and headed across the border to Costa Rica. Costa Rica wasn’t part of our original travel plan, we were just going to pass through it. But we thought what the heck we’re just two crazy kids having the time of our lives, nothing in our way, no retreat no surrender, I feel like chicken tonight. The border crossing was a bit mental but we battled our way through it and jumped on a bus to Monteverde. We had to change buses at a junction at the side of the road. Unfortunately we had missed the last connecting bus of the day and were on the verge of spending the night in a bus shelter in the middle of nowhere when a taxi came and chased after the bus for us.

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We stayed in a hostel called Sloth Backpackers and guess what we saw a sloth, outside our bedroom window. Probably the weirdest animal I’ve ever seen and I’ve been out in Wakie on a Saturday night. The hostel was run by two sisters who also ran a nail studio in the hostel. I love the smell of nail adhesive in the morning.

Judith’s just told me that Panama hats cost between $25 and $200. She’s been wanting to buy one all trip so I will treat her. I think I’ve got a spare $25 dollars somewhere.

Costa Rica is beautiful however the Yank tax is incredible. You can’t even go for a walk without having to pay for it so it made budget travel quite difficult. One day we tried to have a free day out. We walked out of the town and up a hill and found a nice hotel and snuck into their gardens for a walk round and a picnic. Then we went to an art shop and pretended we were in an art gallery and we finished it off with a trip to the church in the town. Cheap as

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chips apart from the fact that in amongst all the free fun I lost my £70 body warmer (gilet if your from Leeds) which was nice.

We left Monteverde because we couldn’t afford to do anything and I was cold so we headed to La Fortuna to see the Arenal Volcano, the worlds 3^rd most active volcano. We arrived to find out that the volcano was about as active as me on a Sunday morning. No it wasn’t sitting around in its pants watching Something for the Weekend, it has just been dormant for 9 months. Bit of a bummer considering it had been spurting out lava since an eruption in 1968. So now it just looked like a hill. We took a bus then a boat then a bus to La Fortuna. Considering Costa Rica is the richest country in Central America the roads are shocking. We shared this delightful trip with two French people who (and I’m not being racist here) really smelt of garlic. There were two kiwi children’s tv presenters (or at least they could’ve been) who irritated me the entire trip. They asked a 6 year old Costa Rican kid if he

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spoke English then when he looked at them blankly they proceeded to talk at him in English. Idiots. Then there was a Costa Rican bloke and his two kids (including the afore mentioned 6 year old). The dad had clearly got new mobile phone and would not stop taking photos. He also kept showing everyone on the bus photos of Kate Winslet and Leonardo de Caprio which he had taken off the telly. The entire boat leg of the trip he sang the Titanic theme tune and kept getting his son to lean out the front of the boat like that famous scene. I nearly reinacted a famous scene from Terminator where Arnie punches through that guys chest and pulls out his still beating heart.

We stayed at a hostel which was run by this guy who we called Stinky Pete and he sounded just like that evil purple bear from Toy Story 3 “welcome to sunnyside folks.” Judith wasn’t keen on the hostel. She said it was like sleeping in the market section of the Merrion Centre in Leeds and you know what she was absolutely right. Yet again we couldn’t afford to even take a

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stroll out to the volcano (hill) so we only stopped for one night and headed off to a place call Allejuella near San Jose for a couple of nights before picking up our flight to Cuba. The other thing that must be expensive in Costa Rica is clothing. You must pay more for bigger sizes of clothes as all the women wear outfits which are about 3 sizes too small. Imagine Jabba the Hutt squeezing into that gold bikini that Princess Leia wore on Return of the Jedi. Yes it was a bit grim. The night before we headed to Cuba we went out to try some famous Costa Rican coffee. The evening was going perfectly until I got annoyed with the French press thing and pushed it too hard covering Judith head to toe in coffee. Luckily the café was absolutely packed and everyone saw everything. Sorry about that love.

We headed off to Cuba bright and early. The flight took us via San Salvador, El Salvador which was cool as this was the only country we hadn’t been to in Central America. We arrived in Havana about mid day and was greeted by a lad

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who looked like Scarface and his mate who looked like Ralph Little. They took us to the place we were staying at in Vedado, Havana. There are no hostels in Cuba so you can either stay in Hotels or Casa Particulars which are basically people’s houses so we opted for the Casas. Our first Casa lady was out so we waited with a neighbour downstairs. She was about 80 and was walking around in a pair of massive skin tone knee length pants which came up to her armpits with a built in leather back brace and a string vest. Nice.

When we eventually got into our Casa it was very nice. The Casa lady only ever talked to me though even though I can’t really speak Spanish that well. It was a bit weird. There were rooms in the house which we weren’t allowed in and this one night a painting fell on our head when we were asleep. I reckoned it was haunted. Judith just said I was being stupid. Havana was weird. It was like stepping into a timewarp. So I did a jump to the left and then a little step to the

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riiiiiiiiiggghhhttt. No mobiles, no internet, no advertising, no woman, no cry. Not having all that was quite nice for a while but then I missed being able to go on that popular social networking website, you know the Halifax Courier website. Our friend Aunty E from the Mariposa Spanish School in Nicaragua came out to join us and travelled the whole 2 weeks with us. We went out one day to Revolution Square which looks a bit like a big car park with some buildings which look like Bradford Ice Rink round it. There is a big tower which looks like something Darth Vader would commission. Strangely enough you can buy Coca-cola in Revolution Square. I bet Che Guevara is spinning in his grave. We went up the weird tower in the lift to get a good view of the city. There were 4 floors on the lift buttons but we were only allowed to go on the ground and top floors. There was something suspicious on the middle two floors as there were a lot of people in uniforms everywhere and loads of creepy looking vultures flying round the outside of the building. What was also weird was that

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in the ground floor of the tower there was an X Factor style singing competition with a panel and everything. Apart from unlike X Factor the people could sing and had personalities. We did all the other tourist stuff like going to the old town, drinking mojitos and generally spent a lot of time saying “no gracias” to a lot to people who were trying to sell us stuff.

We kept hearing that song that goes “the club can’t even handle me right now.” Why can’t they handle him? Does David Guetta have special dietary requirements? Does he have ADHD? I’m sure if he’d have talked it through with the management of the club they’d have sorted something out for him.

Everyone kept telling us before we went to Cuba how bad the food is. I thought it was good. Granted we went out for a meal one night where I ordered chicken and a lemonade and I got pork and a coke but other than that it was good. Every night I had meat, fish, shrimps and even flippin lobster one night. They do tend to pile the salt on a bit though.

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Salt on salad - what is the point? I only eat salad to make some kind of an effort on healthy eating so if you put salt on it there’s no point in eating it. One morning I had to ask for some egg with my salt it was that bad.

Christmas was a bit weird. We forgot that the communists didn’t really celebrate Christmas but we had a big dinner with the family in our casa on Christmas Eve to sort of celebrate it anyway. They just kept piling food on my plate and giving me loads of booze. My Spanish is amazing when I’ve had a couple of pints.

We left Havana and headed to a place called Vinales in the west for a few nights. We stopped at a service station and I ended up in an argument with a massive skinhead about an off apple I’d just bought from him. It was like I’d insulted the whole communist regime for asking for a replacement apple. We got to Vinales and it was very picturesque. We hired some massively overpriced and knackered bikes for a couple of days to explore the

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area. We went in some rubbish caves and then to some other caves which took ages to get to then they were closed. One of the other attractions in the area was a giant prehistoric painting on the side of a cliff. I thought it looked suspiciously brightly painted so we didn’t go. Turns out it was commissioned by Fidel Castro in the 60’s and was painted by a Mexican so not very prehistoric. There were lots of flies in Vinales and not any birds. Ever heard a pig getting killed. Yeah. It’s pretty grim. They know when they’re going to get killed apparently and go nuts for ages before the chop. Maybe they were killing pigs in the scary tower in revolution square?

We left Vinales and headed to Trinidad for a few more nights. We stayed in a casa which was like something from a porn film. It was so over the top. The lady owner of the casa had a tash bigger than Tom Selleck. Her daughter who looked like Ram Man from He Man was definitely heading the same way as her mum in the tash department. I couldn’t look at them before,

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during or after eating. Apart from the hello my friend, cigar my friend, nice restaurant my friend every two seconds, Trinidad was a really picturesque town. On New Years we took a trip to the beach and went out for a nice meal in the evening. Very classy.

We said bye to Aunty E and headed back to Havana for one night. We went to see Super 8 at the flicks and it cost 16p for the two of us. Happy days. We headed back to San Jose, Costa Rica on probably the worst flight I’ve ever been on. I reckon the pilot was hammered as he couldn’t even drive the plane in a straight line up the runway. Plus there was a girl on the aisle opposite who was crying her eyes out all the way which made me feel nervous as I thought she knew something I didn’t. Why do people always stand up as soon as the seatbelt light goes off and then stand for 10 minutes before they’re allowed off? Winds me up. People also stand for 10 minutes in front of their seats with their head cricked to one side because it

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doesn’t fit under the overhead baggage compartments. Idiots. Everyone still ends up waiting in the baggage area anyway whilst the porters sift through everyones cases before throwing them on the baggage carousel.

Cuba could be quite stressful at times, difficult to get around and quite frustrating but equally was extremely beautiful, nostalgic and the most fascinating place we’ve been so far. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next few years. Anyone thinking of going should go now.

We stayed one night in San Jose before heading to Panama on the bus. The bus was really hot and there were a few babies on board crying and messing themselves which in 35 degree heat is not pleasant. Talking of babies everyone at home is popping them out left right and centre. By the time we get back we’ll have 9 new little humans to meet and that may increase if you people can’t keep your pants on.

It’s chloriquine day tomorrow. If you are not familiar with them they are anti-malaria tablets that we take once a week and they taste like battery acid. Only 6 more