Claire takes on the world….

New year 2007/08 has been a very stressful experience for us. After spending 10 days in Buenos Aires we were eager to move on, but just couldn’t decide where. We wanted to go to Uruguay but it just seemed like the most expensive place in the world. So we settled on Pinamar, a beach resort 5 hours south, which ironically turned out to be about the only place on earth more expensive than Uruguay!

So we headed to the most expensive part of Argentina on the busiest holiday of the year with no plans and no reservations. Smart people all of us really! We eventually found a place just a couple of miles outside our budget.

After being dirty, smelly travellers for months we each decided to go a little crazy in Pinamar. Entering Argentina I was the perfect little traveller (luggage wise). I had comfortable and sensible items and I packed reasonably light. On leaving Buenos Aires, I had added a few stupid items to my pack. Including high heels, a hair straightener, perfume, makeup and 2 dresses. Just what a girl needs for trekking in Patagonia. Ylva also joined me in the high heels and dress thing, and Christian went all out and got a suit.
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Ever since I left Ireland 6 months ago I’ve been planning Christmas. The only problem with my plan was that it kept changing every few days. I wanted to go to a beach, wanted to go home and wanted to stay in Nicaragua all at the same time, In the end I decided to meet up with two people I worked with in Nicaragua, Christian and Ylva.

The next problem with Christmas was agreeing what day to celebrate it, Ylva is Swedish and they celebrate on the 24th, same day as the Argentinians. Christian and I were avid campaigners for the 25th. But as we were in the area we decided to follow the locals and so signed up to a dinner with our fellow hosteliers. One of whom, Richard, I kept asking if he was excited about Christmas, and had he any plans for it. To which he always politely informed me he was Jewish. Took me about half an hour to forget and ask again.
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“Claire, this kid wants to see my bra.”

“That’s great Sarah”

Ah, it’s good to be back in Granada. After a week inter-school term break I got back to Nicaragua to start work on an activity camp organised for all the little ones who fall into the 5-12 age group. But because we’re such stupid softies that age rage was stretched from 2 to 15.

Our main job was to run fun activities for our troop in the community centre next to La Prusia school, one of the schools La Esperanza sends volunteers to. After our usual crazy bus ride we had a ten minute walk through the Nicaraguan countryside with a volcano behind us to reach our place of work.

We usually started our day with some games in the field. We kept trying to go earlier and earlier to avoid the crazy sun (which seems to be much larger and stronger here) but summer in Nicaragua is a hard thing to evade! So we worked through it, came in just before the really little ones looked like they were about to pass out.
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So I decided to give Costa Rica a second chance. First time there I got stuck in a door bus, credit card was swallowed by a machine and a hostel owner chased me to my room in the middle of the night. But this time I felt safe with the protection of Jaime and Ylva, two work buddies in Nicaragua.

After such a long time in Granada we were all a little happy to be getting out. Ylva and Jaime mostly wanted to leave because they’d said goodbye to people so many times, only to bump into them again a while later. The biggest problem Jaime and I had was finding Ylva. We sat patiently waiting for her hoping to get the 3pm bus to Costa Rica, but at 5pm we were still one Swedish girl short. Nicaraguan graduations tend to run over, she eventually came back to us later in the evening.
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November 15th – Tijs from Belgium has joined us in Martirio house. He has so far been called Tix, Tess, Thace, Theece, we´re still not quite sure how to say it. It was only when he moved in and was disgusted by the rat problem that we realised it really isn´t normal to co-habit so comfortably with a family of rats! So we set about trying to murder the little buggers. Four so far! I no longer own a medicine bag – they´ve eaten everything! Malaria tablets, pain killers, bandages they love it all. My most precious possession now is my tupperware set. They haven´t figured out how to infiltrate that yet. Came home the other night to find a rat chilling out on my bed. Weird how fast I’ve gotten used to having them around; I just shoo-ed him off like it was a cat or something. I must have frightened him or some-such-thing because he made a deposit on my sheets before running off.
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More diary entries. Blog is almost up to date!!

November 1st

Works going well. Worst part of the day is getting the bus. It’s always full but they never turn anyone away. It’s 15 minutes of
“Ow, that’s my toe!”
“I need to breathe!”
and
“Please Sir, remove that from my buttocks.”
The others seem to enjoy it but I don’t see the funny side. Just the other day two men had to take my arms and drag me through the crowd when I couldn’t shuffle my way to the door on my own.

Myself and Gemma have trained ourselves not to have to go to the bathroom during the day. It is really not a pleasant place. It’s pretty much an open sewer with a box on top which we are supposed to sit on. It’s emptied once every four years or something. How delightful!
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To get this blog finally up to date I´m fast forwarding a bit. So here are a few journal entries from my time in Nicaragua. I´ll get back to writing way too much about small events soon!

October 15th

I’ve been in Granada three days and already I’ve started Spanish school, found a job, moved into my new house and bought a phone. How very settled in I am. No one can call me an aimless wanderer now!

I’ve been on the road for 2 months, since I finished work in Peru in August, and the idea of going shopping for groceries really got me excited. Never realized how much I’d missed that! No more dorm rooms and cans of tuna for dinner now. And no more ‘Where’ve you been, where you going?’ conversations with people I’ll never see again. In South America I found it really easy to find people and go travel with. Central America seems deserted in comparison.
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I arrived in Nicaragua on the 9th of October by boat, from Los Chiles to San Carlos. This route seems to be mostly used by local people. On that day a 48 year old German guy and I were the only two ‘gringos’. He told me it was his 7th
time travelling in Nicaragua, which made me very happy. After not being too crazy about Costa Rica I needed this country to be good! Don’t want those Irish people seeing me again too soon. We had a few police checks along the way. Everybody had to jump and put on a lifejacket, and then just threw them off again when the coppers were out of sight.
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Costa Rica is a bit of a blur.Not only because this blog is so far behind, but also because I got out of there as soon as I could.

It all started when I bade farewell to my friends of five days in Panama. Everyone who I’d arranged to travel with couldn’t get out of bed early enough to make the boat. So I set off alone, had about 6 minutes of lone travel before I met four Norwegian guys who were heading to the same hostel in the same spot, in Puerto Viejo.

Puerto Viejo is a little beach town on the Carribbean side of Costa Rica. Everyone I’d met in Bocas Del Toro said I had to check it out. It’s only two hours from Bocas, if you take a boat through the swamp and taxis the rest of the way.
Just as I was starting to like this new place I bumped into the couple whose room I charged into in Panama. After some quick thinking I decided the best thing to do would be to disguise myself by getting dreadlocks. I went for a 13km cycle along what Lonely Planet called a ‘mostly paved road’. I’m guessing the LP people haven’t seen that road in quite a while.Had quite a few close calls riding over those potholes. I met a lady with a hairdresser sign outside her house. She invited me into her home and said that for a $100 she could give me hair extensions and dreadlock it all. She said she could make me look just like Bob Marley. I disappointed her by saying that although I do like his music, looks-wise, he wouldn’t be my idol. So I went with the easier and cheaper dreadlocking of the hair I had already grown myself. 3 hours and an incredible amount of pain later, I felt well disguised from the scary Spanish couple.
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There´s a sign up on the back of a Panamaian toilet door in Bocas Del Toro that reads:

You´ve been in Bocas too long when:
1. The only people who remember you arriving are the staff.
2. You think going to the laundry/internet is a productive day.
3. You stop saying you´ll leave tomorrow.

After four days I had filled all the criteria. And still I had no intention of leaving just yet. When I left that toilet door I rejoined Martini Monday in a bar whose name I could never get my tongue around. As a solo female traveller I decided to stay away from alcohol for the most part, don´t want to end up accidentally married or anything. But that evening, I was surrounded by four Irish people, two New Yorkers and three Panamanian guys, so I felt safe enough.
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