DavidJGrinter

We came to Xela (officially Quetzaltenango - pronounced Ket-zal-ten-an-go) primarily to have Spanish lessons and do some volunteer work. It's a small town (a city) in the Highlands of Guatemala (2300m elevation) and is reknowned for it's language schools and temperate climate. So this was to be our home for 5 weeks and the school started at 8am. It was wierd being back at school, meeting new people, having a routine and generally trying to avoid detention. I really enjoyed the classes and found that from the first week that I was able to have conversations with the locals. I'd acquired a rather large lexicon over the previous 6 months, but actually being able to form a coherent stream of words was not so easy and by the end I was able to have full conversations ... read more

Nicaragua was a country that I knew very little about before embarking upon this trip. It probably gets overlooked because it doesn't have a famous canal, a reputation for eco-tourism and hasn't had a civil war for a while, well relatively speaking (read Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras). It turns out it's a beautiful country, with the cliched friendly people, but it's not without it's problems, namely poverty (I'd read a statistic that Nica is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Bolivia). The guidebooks make a big deal about the town of Granada on the banks of Lago Nicaragua. Now, it's a quaint place with some rather neat, picturesque colonial buildings, I don't think it really warrants it's reputation of a "lovely little colonial town" or the next Antigua (not that I've been to ... read more

From Bogota we made it to the Caribbean coast. Santa Marta was our first port of call and that's about all I can say about this town. There's little wrong with Santa Marta, but then there's very little worth going there for. There's the obligatory street vendors which do some good food and it's chilled enough for you to wander the streets supping a cool, refreshing beer. But the beach is not particularly clean and it's next to the busy port. There's a couple of decent restaurants, Lulo did great lunches and we had amazing coconunt lemonades at Tierra Negra (probaby the best non-alcoholic drink ever invented). We just used it as a base for doing the things we really wanted to do. THe first stop was Tirona National Park. It is amazing here as the ... read more

A new year, a new country. We spent the best part of a day travelling into southern Ecuador from Piura. The ride was particularly scenic, with the landscape crumpled up like the front end of a Renault Laguna after a ram raid, there were plenty of valleys to navigate. It's all very green, some greens look a little surreal, like, they'd been added by a special effects team at a Hollywood studio. The whole place reminded me of Wales or Lake District, except on steroids and scaled up to gargantuan proportions. And there was't anyone called Dai with an abundance of sheep following him. And with sunshine and 25C heat. The border crossing was no problem which I'd not expected, and we got chatting to an Argentine priest who pointed us in the right direction at ... read more

As is becoming a recurring theme in Peru, the woman in the ticket office at Ayacucho, hadn't listened to us. Peruvian's want to be helpful, but often they just seem to decide upon what you've said and then hear that, not what you actually asked! It's pretty frustrating. Because of this, we expected to be in Cusco by 5pm, we ended up in Andahuaylas at this time, after on of the most breathtaking journies ever it must be added, and still had a further 8 hours to come on our journey. We eventually arrived in to Cusco at 4am (we left at 8pm or so), the ticket woman told us the time for the wrong city! Estupido. But anyway, we got here, the Incan capital, tucked away in a lush (not in a Gavin and Stacy ... read more