Miss Maps Goes Solo

What a lovely couple of days, this place is great.

On Tuesday I headed down to the lake and took a boat trip around Las Isletas. 10,000 years ago, Volcan Mombacha erupted and plopped 365 islands into Lago de Nicaragua. Some of them are just a few rocks, some of them with bars, restaurants and museums. A lot of them are privately owned by rich Texans, believe me, I saw the flags everywhere!

There’s been plenty of other sight seeing, cathedrals and the like but the strangest was the bell tower (check out the photos link). Myself and a couple of German girls from the hostel heard you could climb up the bell tower of the local church and get a great view of the town with the lake and volcanoes in the background. This isn’t really a touristy thing and getting up there was a bit of a mission. Really small, crumbling spiral staircases up to a tiny bell tower too small to stand up in. We were happily snapping away at the gorgeous views of the city when the bell chimed 10am! Oh my gosh, we all fell to the floor clutching our ears, it was so loud and such a shock I couldn’t stop shaking afterwards. I can just imagine the little man who’d let us go up there, chuckling at the thought of us all with burst eardrums.

Tuesday night I met a girl who I’d hung out with in Antigua, this backpacker trail is so strange, we all go in the same direction. Debbie is a psychologist from Oxford and is really keen on salsa too. We’re travelling together for a week or two now, probably until I fly out of Costa Rica, it’ll be great to have someone to travel with again, no more scary moments!

Yesterday I braved the local market. It’s sensory overload, I spent most of my time holding my breath as I dashed past tables of chopped up chicken and beef (or something red) and piles of cheese, all unchilled of course.

I may have then got a bit carried away and spent $200 on two paintings! Couldn’t help it, I really loved them and the type of artwork is specific to Nicaragua. I justify it by thinking that they’ll be with me forever and when I’m 70 they’ll be hanging on my wall with the artists signature and ‘Nicaragua 2005′, what a great thing to have. There’s a picture under the photos link of a similar painting, it’s not a very clear shot though. Now just got to clutch them all the way to Costa Rica and spend another fortune shipping them home.

Last night Debbie and I used our last night as an excuse to hit the town. We went to a great local bar with live salsa music and stupidly cheap rum (we bought a bottle, oops). Mucho dancing and generally acting stupid. It’s weird to be out with the locals when all the girls are glammed up and you’re there in your flip flops and khaki trousers.

Today we’re off to Isla de Ometepe, a figure of 8 shaped island further down the lake which was formed by two volcanoes joined in the middle by their lava thousands of years ago. After that we’re off to the coast near the border of Costa Rica then further south. I’m thinking I might do a canopy tour in Costa Rica. That’s when you swing through the jungle on zip lines like tarzan, how cool!

Oh, met a fantastic photographer here, a guy called Moran from Israel. His pictures of Central America make my holiday snapshots of cathedrals look really boring. The link is on the right.

Lots of love to you all

Just realised how that title sounds so before I go on, I`m absolutely fine and happy in Granada, thank god.

Friday night, my bags were packed and I was all hyped up for the long journey ahead. Later that evening I got a phone call to say the bus wouldn`t be going until Sunday, bugger. Still, some friends and I went out to this fantastically dingy locals place, drank stupidly cheap rum and chatted to the locals. I`m sure Jenny and I were practically fluent, at one point we were all singing the Labamba at the tops of our voices, Jenny and I squealing with delight at actually understanding what the hell that song is about!

So Saturday I nursed my hangover, wandered around Antigua and watched a little girl getting her confirmation in one of the churches.

The journey from Guatemala City to Managua, Nicaragua, took 17 hours. Actually being on the bus for so long was fine. Meals, films and regular border crossings provided enough distrations. We had to cross into El Salvador, then Honduras and finally Nicaragua. I started to get the fear when I realised I was the only gringa on the bus, infact the only English speaker. At one point I heard some people making a joke about ´La Turista`, not a nice feeling. I then discovered that the bus wouldn`t reach the scary capital of Managua until 11pm, shit. I expected it to get in around 8 or 9 and so didn`t book a hotel in advance.

Outside the bus station a bunch of unsavoury characters watched us from behind bars as we unloaded our bags. As I stepped through the prison cell-esque barrier, a number of them came over to offer taxis and hotels. I chose the most trustworthy looking driver and asked him to take me to the place I`d looked up in the Lonely Planet.

Sorry, this gets a bit dodgy.

So we drive to this hostel through some seriously dodgy looking streets and my driver points out the ladrones (robbers) who stand on the street corners with guns and sticks, I´ve never seen anywhere so menacing and I`m totally at the mercy of my taxi driver. The hostel is of course full, brilliant, so we try another place down the road, full again. At this point I tell him that if the next one is full he has to take me to the Intercontinental, sod the money, I want to be safe. Anyway, we found a place for $20 per night (rather than the $3.50 I was going to spend). My 3 weeks of Spanish entirely let me down and I couldn´t understand anything the security guard at the hotel (who also had a gun), or my taxi driver, were saying. I didn`t care, I had a room!

I locked the door behind me, put a chair up against it, fell on the bed and had a bit of a cry.

The room was lovely, two double beds, TV, air-con. I can`t even tell you how comforting the BBC World channel was at that point. I slept badly of course, waking up at the slightest noise, and was incredibly glad when the sun came up.

This morning my taxi driver came back to take me to the bus station. Problem was I had about $3 left so I had to hit the cashpoint before getting on the bus. Of course the cashpoints are nowhere near the bus station so I had to get the driver to wait for me while I used the cashpoint, so dodgy! Thank god he was decent. Well, he ripped me off for the taxi fare but it could`ve been worse.

1 hour later and I arrived in the lovely Granada, I´ve never been so happy to see gringos! I´ve spent the last few hours wandering around the town. It`s great, Colonial like Antigua but much more dirty and smelly (horses and carts are a major mode of transport here and the roads are covered in horse poo) with lots of character in a more real setting. My hostel is great too, I`ve already met a few great people.

Sorry if this update has worried any of you, I was debating whether or not to be honest about last night and decided it`s all part of the experience.

Believe me, I will NEVER EVER AGAIN arrive in a capital city after dark.

Off to do a tour of the islands on the lake tomorrow so hopefully the next update will be much happier with lots of pretty pictures!

….and I beat my Spanish teacher at scrabble, although I´m sure she was being kind and letting me win.

It´s been great and I´ve learnt loads and I´m pretty proud of myself but… please let me out of Antigua!

The bus collects me from my hostel at 4.30 in the morning so I´m doing the only sensible thing tonight and heading out with some girly backpacker mates to sink a few cuba libras. The journey to Managua, Nicaragua is about 15 hours I think so I´ll get there late and head on to Granada the next day. After 3 weeks I can´t wait to be travelling again every few days and doing lots of different things so I may not update this again in a few days but I should have lots to say.

That´s it really, just wanted to share my exam result with the world, oh and there are more photos under the link to the right.

Lots of love

Adios

After another full on week at school I was busting to get out of Antigua so I signed up for the trip to Rio Dulce and Livingston along with 7 other students: 2 Swiss, 3 Americans, 1 Canadian and 1 Fin, ranging in age from 20 to about 50. Rio Dulce is about 6 hours from Antigua and a further hour up the river is Livingston, right on the Carribean coast.

Guatemala has a pitiful amount of Carribean coast and they want more from Belize. In fact, Guatemala doesn´t seem able to come to terms with the fact that Belize isn´t theirs, some maps kind of blur the border!

We arrived at Rio Dulce after dark and the setting was perfect. A hostel right on the edge of the river with a great bar and disco (sorry, that´s the word they use out here and I can´t think of anything cooler that fits) on a jetty sticking right out over the water.

The highlight of the trip was easily the boat ride up to the coast. Imagine bombing it up this enormous, totally calm river with jungle on either side, locals fishing in carved out boats, brilliant. I grinned the whole way and waved at everyone we passed. I wanted to let out a loud “I´m the king of the world” but I´m not sure my travel companions would´ve appreciated it. Sometimes on this trip I feel like I want to transmit what my eyes are seeing and what an experience feels like back to everyone at home, this was one of those times. Photos (I have some, but won´t upload them yet) just don´t get it across.

We stopped off at a couple of places along the way, a project where they help the local kids who are either orphans or living in extreme poverty. This was proper kids in rags type stuff, very difficult to see and even more difficult was the feeling of showing up at this place, in a speedboat, accompanied by 7 other tourists, all snapping away or videoing the whole affair, bit wrong but what can you do? I bought some stuff in the shop, is that me doing my bit?

Livingston, like Belize, feels like a Carribean island. The Garifuna people (Creole speakers, descended from Nigerian slaves) are here too and we were treated to some Punta rock during a lunch of fish straight out of the sea and on to the grill.

That night the disco was pumping and there were more locals than gringos, amazing! I danced a bit of salsa and merengue with some locals and even managed to hold a short conversation in Español with one of them.

So this was my first ever guided tour and as much as I enjoyed it, I´ve canned the idea I had of doing a month or so on a guided tour in South America. It´s great but you can´t please yourself and I´m just too god damn selfish and impatient for that. If you´re not waiting for someone to finish bartering for a souvenier you´re waiting for someone else who´s trying to find the bathroom. Travelling on your own is the way forward.

This week is all about the Spanish again, I have an exam on Friday so there´ll be no slacking off. Then Saturday I´m off to Nicaragua. Today I booked my flight from Costa Rica to Ecuador, they book up a while in advance so I had to vaguely suss out when I might want to do that and now I actually have a deadline, how exciting. I leave Costa Rica on 7 December, exactly 2 months after I arrived in Central America. So I have 2 weeks to do Nicaragua and Costa Rica before the Central American part of this adventure draws to a close.

By the way, I have so many emails to send to so many of you, but I have to do a couple at a time otherwise I´d spend all my time and money in internet cafes! Promise I´m not ignoring any of you, I love hearing from you all and will reply as soon as I can.

It’s the little things

Getting your washing back from the laundry is the biggest treat. At home you have maybe 20 outfits, you wash a few bits when you’ve got enough to make it worthwhile. When travelling, you have say 9 items of clothing and you wash the lot when all your outer clothing is visibly dirty and you’re on the verge of going commando. I got my washing back today and marvelled at the whiteness of my socks!

A Minority Within a Minority

There’s an albino indigenous lady in Antigua. Imagine being an albino when you come from a race of entirely dark skinned and black haired people!

I Miss:

Now this list is obviously not for the big stuff. The stuff that makes me really sad: James, family, friends, my work (sad but true).

OK, so I miss:

Cheese that tastes of something. There’s a lot of cheese in Central American food only it’s all processed crap! If anyone fancies sending me a jiffy bag full of stilton I’d be most grateful.

Going to gigs. Infact music generally. Although I love dancing salsa the music drives me insane and the Guatemalan variety even more so. I plug into my MP3 player regularly but I don’t like to be in my hotel room alone without being able to hear my surroundings so 1 ear is always wonky to ensure I still have some normal hearing capacity. It’s not possible to sing at the top of my voice in these communal buildings and I can’t mosh like I do in my bedroom at home because wearing my headphones I’ll look like an I-pod advert, only not as cool.

I miss the adrenalin of music; listening to, dancing to and watching. You get adrenalin travelling but it’s not the goose bump kind.

I miss the CRO BAR!! Of course.

Hmm, can’t think of any more little things that I miss, that’s a good sign.

ATMs

Your bra holds more than just the usual when travelling.

Money in bra at all times ladies!!

During bank opening hours ATMs tend to be guarded by armed security men. Now I’m not saying that none of them are bad but on the whole these guys are my friends. They’re good people to ask if you’re lost or to stealthily stand near while you glare at your Lonely Planet like the vulnerable gringa that you are.

Most ATMs are cleverly located in little 1-man cubicles giving the privacy needed for the bra shuffle. If not, the security guard unwittingly becomes my human shield.

Between the ATM and your hotel is when you’re carrying the most dosh, do it carefully and in daylight.

Guatemala

On Saturday my teaher and I talked about all sorts of profound things.

This may be a little depressing.

In Guatemala 60% of the population is indigenous. If an indigenous lady goes for a job however she has to change her clothes due to discrimination. Having said that there is an indigenous lady in parliament, yay! There are over 20 indigenous languages spoken here.

The main religion is catholocism although they’ve mixed it with their own Mayan beliefs. Abortion is illegal and I’ve driven past many walls painted with pro-life slogans. Like other countries abortion is now underground and dangerous.

Child abuse is rife. A boy of no more than 7 shines shoes in the central park of Antigua. He can’t go home until he’s earnt 15 quetzales (about 1GBP) because his father beats him.

Life for most in Guatemala is to live with parents until married, then be either a housewife or, for the man, the breadwinner. Families are huge (well done catholocism), my teacher has 80 cousins.

Some people (not sure if it’s the government) want to change the name from Guatemala to Guatemaya. The reason being that in Spanish ‘mala’ means bad so there are apparently lots of jokes in other Central American countries about Guate’mala’ (Guata bad) and Guata’peor’ (Guata worse).

I’ve never seen a country with such an amazing landscape or such interesting, diverse people but poverty, domestic abuse, violence and corruption are rife. It actually doesn’t affect tourists all that much so people shouldn’t be scared off.

I hope it improves for the Guatemaltecas.

And…. here’s a picture of a volcano, more pics under the my photos link.

Adios

The stats:

36 hours of Spanish done
84 hours to go
25 sides of A5 of new vocab learnt
1 entire pack of flashcards written out with grammatical rules

I’m starting to think in Spanish.

Seriously, the classes are great. I changed my sweet but incompetent afternoon teacher and now have an excellent professional teacher in the morning and a lovely girl who tells me about her love life in the afternoon (oh, and she’s also a good teacher!)

But being in this quaint town is faintly depressing. I think going from my 9 to 5 type London lifestyle to 3 weeks of hardcore travelling and adventure, to a 9 to 5 lifestyle in a small, easy, gringo filled town is a bit of a shock to the system. I actually want to wear my backpack!

Antigua is beautiful (albeit freezing) and I’m living extremely nicely here but I’m busting for a long bus journey, not eating for 24 hours and wandering the streets for whatever dodgy hostel is listed in the Lonely Planet, who would’ve thought!

My day usually starts with a typical Guatemalan breakfast of black beans, eggs scrambled with onions and spicy tomato sauce, fried plantains, sour cream or cheese and bread or tortilla, absolutely bloody gorgeous…

Lessons start at 9 and run through until 1. Jenny (lovely Swedish girl who I signed up for the classes with) and I head to the market for some cheapo food (tortilla stuffed with cheese and topped with refried beans and guacamole) and go back to school from 2 until 4. We usually both have shed loads to study in the evening so things are pretty quiet in the week. I hang out at my hotel for a bit, watch terrible Guatemalan soap operas with the staff then head off to a nice restaurant armed with my flashcards and vocab lists.

On Friday night I went to the local Irish bar (for god’s sake) to say goodbye to a couple of people who I’d been travelling with for a while. I met a couple of lovely older Guatemalan guys who moved to Boston years ago and got chatting to them. Wonderfully, they invited me to their niece’s 15th birthday party the following evening. This was one of those situations where I had to weigh up any potential dangers against the fantastic experience that it was sure to be, I was determined to go for it. Unfortunately, all that cheapo food got the better of me and by Saturday afternoon I felt far too green around the gills to do anything but go home and feel sorry for myself. I managed to find the two guys and apologise, gutted.

By Sunday evening I’d recovered and went out for dinner with about 6 other travellers which was lovely, you meet some great people doing this. We ended up in the dreaded Irish bar but I kept running over the road to check whether the night club was playing salsa music (1 week in this bloody salsa frenzied town and I’d not moved a hip). Bingo, at 10.00 the music changed to salsa, I ran home to get my dancing shoes and met the girls in there. We had a pretty cool time although Guatemalan salsa music is bloody awful. The best part of this was the realisation that a gringa who dances salsa going into a salsa club full of Guatemalans isn’t going to get mawled to death. Seemingly I’m the wrong colour and can’t dance anything like the local girls so there were no worries there.

The only restriction on my lovely lifestyle here is that you just simply can not walk around this beautiful town on your own at night. Just running the 2 minutes back to my hotel last night I got lots of whistles and comments from the police (who have large guns). This is the biggest downside of being a solo female traveller, unless I’m out with others I have to come back to the hostel by about 8pm otherwise I’m being totally irresponsible. It’s not nice to have to rely on others.

As I only started Spanish this Tuesday I had lessons right through to Saturday so only had Sunday off. This weekend I have a whole two days free, lucky me! Hoping to make the most of it and leave this 4-volcano-enclosed town for Chichicastenango, famous market about 1 hour north of here.

After the lessons I reckon I’ll do a mammoth bus trip straight through Honduras (because compared to Guatemala Honduras sucks, if you don’t dive that is) and into Nicaragua. This is about 15 hours so there’s no avoiding the slightly dangerous night journey situation, but I’m sure I’ll have hooked up with some more lovely backpackers by then, hopefully big scary looking male ones!

Lots of love to you all

3 days into my Spanish lessons I´m exhausted, pasty skinned and spotty, brilliant.

Having said that the lessons are great and I´ve already picked up loads, it´s just incredibly intense and exhausting. 6 hours a day (plus homework), 5 days a week for 3 weeks. I sit at a little table with my teacher learning grammar, vocab, listening skills, the whole bit. It’s a shock to the system to be back in a routine, I didn´t expect to have the Monday morning blues at any point during these 6 months! It´s absolutely essential though, the lovely Petal has moved on to Lago de Atitlan and taken her fluent Spanish with her, I´d be stuffed if I tried to carry on travelling on my own without learning more. Plus I´ve missed out on so much already because of the language barrier, there´s absolutely no hope of interacting with the locals without Spanish.

Did that last paragraph sound like I was trying to convince myself? Probably!

I can´t get over how cheap Guatemala is. My hostel is 3.71GBP per night (including breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes and fruit). My lunch in the market costs between 37 pence and 74 pence. Last night I went out to a lovely restaurant and had spaghetti, apple strudel and 2 glasses of vino for 6.60GBP. So tomorrow I´m moving to another hostel and upgrading to get my own room (rather than a dorm) which knocks the price up to about 4GBP! Amazing.

The only uncomfortable thing about Antigua is that it isn´t really Guatemala. It´s gringo central and it feels pretty fake. It´s kind of like Bath in England but set in the middle of volcanoes. It feels like the real Guatemalans are kept out incase they make the place look messy. It´s beautiful but after another couple of weeks I´ll be happy to move on.

Tonight will be dedicated to studying and trying to get an early night because tomorrow is salsa! I still haven´t hit the dance floors yet, it has to be done.

I don´t have any more photos of Antigua yet as I´m waiting for the clouds and rain to go away, it´s bloody freezing. But I have tidied up the photos page and put the past 3 weeks into some kind of order.

In two days time I´ll have been travelling for an entire month. Time is a very strange thing when travelling, the first couple of weeks seemed to go so slowly but I´m now worrying about fitting it all in.

Right, off to find a quiet cafe and learn my irregular verbs.

Thankfully for me we left Semuc after 1 day and headed to Antigua, an 8 hour journey of 3 buses changing in Guatemala City, really not a nice place, I was glad to only be there for about 30 minutes.

Antigua is as beautiful as all the books say. It´s incredibly cute, colonial buildings, cobbled streets, fantastic shops and restaurants and all with a backdrop of mountains and volcanoes.

From here I will break off from the others slightly, I´ve just booked 3 weeks in one of the Spanish schools and I´m sure the other guys will only stay for a few days. That´s fine though, my hostel is great and I´ve already met some good people there, one of which is also doing 3 weeks in the same Spanish school, we both start tomorrow morning. I´m hoping to stay with a Guatemalan family while I learn but I have to put some feelers out for that first.

So for the next 3 weeks I´ll be at school for 6 hours starting at 9am, then dancing salsa at night in the clubs. I can´t wait to get into the salsa, I´ve already bought some shoes for it!

My Spanish school offers loads of other activities such as learning to make traditional Guatemalan food, trips to nearby indigenous villages etc, I think I´ll be kept busy.

Tomorrow is day of the dead here, although it´s my first day at school I think I´ll do an hour then head off on an excursion to Santiago where the locals decorate the cemeteries and hold a massive kite flying festival, apparently to stop the evil spirits from descending, this can´t be missed.

Forgive the absolute mess that is my photo page, once I get some more time I shall tidy it up into proper catagories and some kind of chronoligical order.

Right, off to a halloween party!

Eventually we got to Coban, a pretty town set in the middle of green mountains. It´s much cooler here and drizzles almost constantly. Locals call the rain chipi-chipi, it apparently helps the cardamom and coffee grow. I visited a beautiful white church perched on the top of a hill. It´s really interesting to see how they mix the roman catholic and mayan religions.

We spent a couple of days chilling out here while Chris´stomach stopped doing really wrong things which I won´t go into here. It wasn´t a bad diversion though, after the town of death (see last post) we were beside ourselves to be somewhere nice and found the most fantastic restaurant which we visited 3 times in 2 days. I had to ask Petal how to tell the waiter that the macedamia nut pie had changed my life.

Eventually we made it to Semuc, the bus journey down there was awesome, my face ached from smiling so much by the time we got there, 2 hours of bendy, bumpy roads tacked on to the side of the mountain with a sheer drop on one side. Guatemala has the most fantastic landscape, green mountains and volcanoes everywhere.

Semuc is beautiful, I went down to the waterfalls and pools and swam in the turquoise waters surrounded by green mountains. However, for me it wasn´t worth the mission to get there. This is a place to go caving and jumping into rivers from bridges and rope swings and tubing down the rapids. I can´t put my face under water and am scared of the dark!

The first night there one of the guys staying at the hostel went into the river and still hadn´t come back 3 hours later, by which time it was pitch black, his clothes left on the bank. Being in the middle of nowhere the fire brigade couldn´t get there for about 4 hours so some of the locals started a search party. At the hostel the local marimba band had shown up to do their weekly show, after a couple of songs they were sent home as no-one was in the party mood and they randomly found him coming out of the undergrowth, a way down the road.

Thank god he came back safely, he´d been dragged underneath by the current and down some rapids. He managed to get out downstream and was scrambling through the undergrowth in the dark trying to find a path.

This confirmed my lack of desire for thrill seeking!

From Flores we got a bus at 5am to take us the 1.5 hours to Tikal, some of the most stunning Mayan ruins in Central America. The guide we chose was sweet but had mi9nimal knowledge. He was more interested in learning rude English words than telling us about the ruins! The early morning was totally worth it, the site is huge and we all climbed every temple and pyramid which has been excavated. A large percentage of the site hasn´t been touched by the archeologists so amongst the re-built structures are mounds of earth covered in trees and plants. Amazing to think that yet more structures are underneath that, but the cost of excavation is too high to do it all. In a way it´s nice that some of it is left. From the top of temple 4 the view is breathtaking, I´d love to put the picture here but don´t have the software so take a look at the photos section. The wildlife was great too, Chris was determined to hold a tarantula, insane. There are photos of that too. We also saw spider monkeys and heard howler monkeys, they don´t howl at all, they sound more like lions. I felt like I was in jurassic park.

We left Flores for Semuc Champey, an area of natural beauty with a limestone bridge, waterfalls and caves. Unfortunately, due to being given the run around by Guatemalan bus drivers, and a bout of food poisoning for Chris, it took us 4 days instead of 1 day to get there. We ended up in some god forsaken place called Fray Bartolome de Las Casas. The Lonely Planet described it as a hospitable town….. WRONG! We were certainly a novelty there and provided plenty of entertainment for the locals.

These few days were a real lesson in taking chicken buses. 19 people plus a few sacks of grain and a couple of chickens are crammed into a minibus meant to seat about 9. It´s pretty good fun most of the time although the puncture in the middle of a not very safe mountainous area wasn´t so great. It worked out ok though.

Health is a much bigger issue than I expected. What with my swollen ankle, a contact lense which decided to take a trip around the back of my eyeball during a particularly bumpy bus ride, Chris´food poising, Petal´s terrible bites which could be a nasty disease (she needs a blood test) and Timmy´s ulcerated esophagus. We´ve visited doctors 3 times so far. Let´s hope we´ve all adapted to this new lifestyle now though.