Heading back up north

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As strangely normal as it was to have the parents with us it felt equally so to have them leave. The two weeks had worked out well. The travelling comfort that Costa Rica offers gave us the ideal relaxed and well managed setting to have the parents looked after and provided a good blend of entertainment options. An impressive wildlife tally realised, suntans achieved (bit crispy in places) and some good laughs had. A very nice way to spend a couple of weeks.

From here we continued our journey north and back to Nicaragua. The thing that will really make our timeout and travelling a total success is a new plan for return to home soil. So it was back to our Christmas stop in San Juan del Sur to haul up for a week and continue to crack on with the progress of getting that aim realised. Staying with our new found hostel running Canadian friends in San Juan offered the perfect setting with just shy of two months left before we need to be in Mexico City.

Some tricky decisions have to be taken about where and where not to go on our route north. With our previous thoughts on the Nicaraguan tourist scene only reinforced after returning following a month away it meant that the decision for us post San Juan to head directly to Honduras was easily taken. Succumbing to the Ticabus, the gringo special, after religiously sticking to the local buses made us feel a bit of a failure to true travelling but we were anxious to leave Nicaragua behind us and quickly clear the apparently attraction-less south of Honduras. A rather fortuitous meeting on one of our last nights in San Juan with Paul a Kiwi who had volunteered with us at Grupo Fenix cemented our choice of next step. A hostel / micro-brewery with good bird watching next to a lake in northern Honduras sounded too intriguing to resist.

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