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Published: June 21st 2008
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Guatemala
The boarder crossing This is quite a short blog. It covers about three weeks. We spent most of it in Antigua, Guatemala doing a Spanish course. The rest was rushing through central America getting to Panama to fly over to South America. So there isn't too many exciting photos.
Anyway...
As soon as we crossed over into Guatemala from Mexico we noticed a difference, the landscape changed. First of all it was a lot greener. But the landscape was very volcanic, it reminded us of South Thailand. The other thing that stood out were the buses that whizzed pass with black smoke spewing out the back. They have the old American school buses here but they re paint them and decorate them with the greatest designs and styles, they are know as ‘chicken buses’. Unfortunately thinking we’d see them everywhere we didn’t take photo’s then later when we came to leave, barely saw any! Oh well, look them up on google you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.
First stop, Antigua, another colonial town it has cobbled streets, colourful buildings and is surrounded by volcanoes - some of which are still active. It is a lively place, full of
Antigua
The town square. travellers and language students. There are lots of bars and cafe’s and it is a cool place to hang out. It is also a popular place to take a Spanish course so we did a weeks crash course in the basics.
One afternoon we hiked through the jungle up to the top of Volcan Pacaya. As the volcano is still active, the image in our heads were of lava flowing past like a river, the actual thing was more like the occasional hole glowing orange, it was still pretty dangerous though, the rock was brittle like broken glass so if you tripped slightly and put your hand down to stop yourself you would end up with lacerated hands, or worse still fall through to the liquid hot magma below. The rock is also very hot and some people told us their shoes melted whilst standing on it!
The guides were amazing, they took no notice of anyone and just kept walking off sticking big sticks it to the lava until they produced a massive flame- as if they needed to prove that we were actually on a volcano?
Next we booked another bus journey, this time taking us
Volcano
This is the extent of lava flow?! all the way from Guatemala, through El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and finally ending up in Panama City. In one go the trip takes 4 days, with a couple of overnight stops. Neither of us really looking forward to it we gritted our teeth for the first stop - San Salvador. Using the Tica bus system out here makes the border crossings nice and painless so we entered El Salvador with no problems and spent the night in the equivalent of a Travelodge. Up bright and early the next day 4.30am for the next leg. Through Honduras to Nicaragua. Again pretty painless border crossing but not arriving until 4pm (yes that’s almost 12hours).
We stayed in Granada for a few days - another colonial town. It’s pretty poor there, we ate at a restaurant which has been set up by an American lady who trains street kids to cook and wait tables and she gives them a job on the condition that they stay in school and stay off drugs. The food as pretty much the best thing we’d eaten in a long while, we both had mash potatoes - genius!
The next day we went to
Granada
Although it looks peaceful there was lot's of begging from kids on the street! Isla de Omepete - a small island formed from two volcanoes in the middle of a huge lake. Believe it or not there are actually bull sharks in the lake! The water was really hot, almost bath temperature which made it a bit weird going in to.
The weather started to change pretty much a day after we arrived on the Island. This time of year is usually the beginning of the rainy season. Although it should come earlier the rain started one evening and didn’t stop. Really heavy downpours with the occasional electricity blackout. After a few days of playing cards and drinking rum and basically doing nothing we jumped back on a bus and headed down to Panama. This was the longest bus journey so far a massive 17 hours! We arrived in Panama City the next day at 4am, where we then raced around the city with a taxi driver and managed to get a room in a pretty crummy hotel as all the decent hostels were fully booked!
Panama City was quit nice, built up it is known as the Miami of Central America. We walked around taking in the views went to a shopping mall
Ometepe
You can see one of the volcanoes.
(seems like ages since we’ve shopped?!) and took a trip to the Panama Canal. We saw a couple of massive cargo ships go through the locks at Miraflores, one of them was paying a massive $70 000 just to go through! The only alternative though is an expensive and more dangerous 2 week detour round the bottom of South America.
So we went out a few times - even tried the local English pub - which was surprisingly authentic, it even had rubbish red wallpaper!
Then we booked our flight from Panama city to Columbia.
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Dave
non-member comment
wicked
Wow guys pics are wicked, Keep it up, Dave and ann