Blogs from Central America Caribbean - page 1728

This is meant to be the blog where I take a long while to bitch and moan about how incredibly awful and simply incorrect the Lonely Planet Guide book is. But I don´t have the ganas to go into it all anymore, except to say that I had let several inconsistancies slide because I thought they must be random, isolated instances, but I have now realized they are not and have written Lonely Planet and told them just a few of their flaws and explained why I would never be using their guide again, back to Rough Guide it is. So, after lovely El Valle I went, having read all about it in the guide, to Las Tables and Pedasi on the peninsula. I was hoping to be by the ocean and relax for a ... read more

After the easiest border crossing so far (no forms no questions no hassle) from Belize we entered Guatemala, taking an interesting bus ride with locals from the border to Santa Elna and Flores twin towns 50m apart which are very different. Santa Elna sits next to the lake and is dirty and dusty, whilst Flores is a pretty little town full of cobbled streets and quite little buildings, the two sides to Guatemala couldn't be clearer in this small town. After spending our first day exploring the local area we prepared for an early start (3.30am!) to visit the ruins of the Mayan city of Tikal. Tikal is famous for being one of the major ruins of Central America and is used on all postcards/pictures of Guatemala. The reason for the early start was so ... read more

Our car arrived in the morning, a good looking Nissan saloon, with fantastic air conditioning and absolutely NO petrol! Mission 1: to find one of the 8 petrol stations on the island and fill up. This was fairly easy as 6 of all 8 petrol stations were within easy reach of the resort. We then looked at the map (possibly the most useless map ever!) and decided to do a round trip of the island. Tobago is a very small island (42km long 10km wide) however none of the roads were straight, and no of them ran very level - the island has lots and lots of steep hills (the highest point is 550m). This meant that our journey around the island took us 5 hours. We stopped at lots of beautiful view points, and ... read more

So...here it goes. I missed the ferry over to Utila. Decided it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to head back into town, spend the night, and leave early the next morning. Little did I know that it was the local Carnaval. The biggest party in Central America. And I happened to be there for the last weekend of this huge festival. That meant that there were absolutely no open hotel rooms. I went around to about 7 of them, was near tears, frustrated, and couldn't believe my bad timing. I finally found this crappy hotel that would sell me a double room for close to 40 dollars (they usually cost about 4 dollars). I held back tears, and figured I had to do it. They needed cash straight up...so I had to ... read more

I haven't written for a while, mainly due to the fact that I've been rather busy, but here's some of the things that have been going on in the slowest week of my life. My roommate left a couple of days ago. This was no small bummer because he was a thoroughly good bloke and was getting me savvy with ship life. Basically, he found out that the company were paying him less because he came from India where it seems the company believes the cost of living is less. He was 2 levels above me and actually was making $100 less than me! can you believe it! Well, he was shipped off at St Maarten because had he waited till Fort Lauderdale (in the USA) he would have been arrested and detained for not finishing ... read more