Aug 2008

After leaving Sun Juan del Sur we travelled to Costa Rica. We spent a night in a town called Puntarenas before getting an early bus the next morning to Santa Elena, a small village in the Monteverde area which is surrounded by cloudforest.
We did a Bridges Tour through the cloudforest which involved walking along swing bridges through the forest. The guide we had for this was very good and we saw a giant rodent, sloths, a tarantula, owls and a millipede. At the end of the tour we saw a strangular tree (a tree with vines surrounding it which eventually kill the host tree after a number of years making the inside hollow). We climbed up the inside of this tree to get up to the last swinging bridge which was 8m high.

After the bridges tour we went on a canopy tour with the same company. This was a series of zip lines through the cloudforest with varying lengths and speeds. There was also rappelling, which was a 7m free fall on a vertical rope, and a tarzan swing, a huge rope swing you are attached to on a harness.

The Monteverde village was actually created in early 1950's by a number of American Quaker families. Many still make the living from producing cheese in a factory they set up when they first settled there. We went on a tour of this factory. It was just the 2 of us and the guide. We saw the whole cheese making process right from the milk being delivered to the cheese being sold in the shop. The tour finished with some cheese tasting which was a welcome treat as all other cheese we have had on this trip have been pretty poor!

We also went on a few walks around the area, including the Bajo del Tigre trails around lowland parts of the cloudforest.

After Monteverde we spent a night in San Jose where Mike celebrated his birthday. San Jose isn't a particularly nice place but we picked a hostel with a bar and a good atmosphere. We bought a big chocolate cake which we shared with the others at the hostel. Later on in the evening a few of us went to a casino and lost some money playing poker. It was a good night!

After leaving Utila we spent a couple of days travelling to Granada in Nicaragua. We had to stay a night in Tegucigalpa (capital of Honduras) and pass through Managua (capital of Nicaragua) which, like most Central American capital cities, are not places that you would choose to spend much time.
Granada is a small colonial city on the edge of Lago de Nicaragua which is the 10th largest lake in the world. We spent 3 nights there in a hotel with a grand entrance hall with marble floors and strangely, lots of rocking chairs. There was also a pool at the back with mosaic tiles and lots of sun loungers. We were the only guests in the hotel so we took advantage of this by spending a lot of time by the pool. The rest of our time in Granada we spent walking around the town and market and eating food from street stalls.

After Granada, we got a boat to Isla de Ometepe in the middle of the lake. It is a large island with a population of about 35,000. Apart from two towns that don´t have much to offer the majority of the island is fairly remote; it is surrounded by jungle and connected by roads that are muddy tracks making getting around the island much harder than it should be.

Our first night on the island was spent having dinner and playing a drinking game with some people we had met on the ferry; Ramon from Holland, and Lisa and Kirstin from the states. As part of the game Mike had to do a rain run in the middle of a downpour and Ellie had to eat an insect (a very tiny one!).

Most of the activities on Ometepe involve exploring the island in one way or another. On our first full day we hired bikes but didn't get very far because of the state of the roads and standard of the bikes. We then all moved to a hostel on a different part of the island that had a bit more life than the first one and arranged to climb a volcano the next day. This involved seven hours of difficult trekking, and we didn't even make it to the top. We found out later that there was an easier route from the other side.

The following day we went on another trek, this time to a waterfall. Again, the terrain was difficult at points as it was steep and we had to scramble up lots of rocks. This time we did make it all the way and were rewarded by getting to cool down under the waterfall.

On the Saturday night there was a beach party a few hundred metres from our hostel that a group of us went to. They had a pretty loud sound system and played a random mix of western electronic music (mostly from early 90s), latin pop songs and slow songs (that all the locals paired off to in the manner of a school disco). It was a good drunken night though fuelled in part by this ridiculously cheap, and lethally strong, home made alcohol that we picked up at a local bar.

We left Ometepe and had an easy day of travel to San Juan del Sur which is a small beach town on the Pacific coast. The beach in San Juan is a nice strip of sand but the water isn't the cleanest so it is better to go to other beaches for swimming that are a half hour drive away.

This is what we did on our first day here with the others that we were with. We walked a little further along the coast than where we were dropped off and found a nice secluded beach to spend some time. This was going well until it started to rain and we had to retreat to a nearby bar. This turned out quite well as a drunk American woman bought everyone in the bar two beers each!

Most of the days here we have spent relaxing on the beach in San Jose and one day Mike played football on the beach with some locals. In the evenings we have been enjoying the seafood and having nights out at the bars with various people.

We also had a day of surf lessons which was really fun. Our instructor was good and had us both standing up quite quickly, although we were only surfing small waves. Ellie managed to bash her nose on her board after falling over causing it to swell (typical of her!).

After our mission up from El Salvador we spent a week on the island of Utila which is one of the Bay Islands in Honduras. It is known to be the cheapest place in the world to go scuba diving and there are dozens of dive schools offering various deals.

We ended up signing up to do the advanced open water course (we both already had open water) which involved 5 adventure dives and 4 free fun dives as well as accommodation through the dive school.

The dives that we did for our course included: a deep dive that took us down to 30m in order to see a ship wreck; a peak performance buoyancy dive that involved swimming though hoops at different levels under water, a game of frisbee that was funny because everything was in slow motion and matrix style fighting (without flippers); a naturalist dive to learn about identifying different types of fish, reef etc; a navigation dive to improve compass skills underwater; and a night dive.

On the dives we saw lots of different types of fish, eels, turtles, shrimp and octopus.

The accommodation provided was an apartment on the seafront with a swimming area. We shared this with various people throughout the week, max of 8.

There was a really beautiful, picture postcard beach area 5 mins walk from the apartment with clear, still, turquoise water and golden sand - it had a small charge to keep it clean and stop it getting overcrowded.

The nightlife on the island was good as there are lots of bus that are open late and a couple of clubs. We spent most evenings drinking rum on our balcony with the others before going out, sometimes having to get up to dive at 6a the following morning.