Well after Alice's rather depressing blog about the history of El Salvador I'll keep it light! From Perquin we headed to the high altitude (well for El Salvador) village of Alegria. The trip required taking a mixture of pickup trucks, buses and minivans but was surprisingly easy. All through our trip we've been rating countries against one another and up till now Uruguay has been "friendliest people" but after the sheer helpfulness of the bus drivers an...

We were sitting by the pool in Leon and suddenly we decided to go to El Salvador. Ok then, so five bus journeys through three countries in one day may not sound like the best of ideas, but off we went nonetheless. Needless to say no fun was to be had, but it was worth it to arrive in such a lovely and un-touristy (sorry, I hate that phrase but can think of no other) country. Our first stop was a small mountain village which was a guerilla stronghold during the 12...

Getting in to Nicaragua entails braving what an American expat at the crossing described as "the worst border in central america". This basically means as a 1km slug across a muddy no-mans land full of trucks and hidden pot holes (I fell in one). At each end there is also the customary hidden immigration office and bizarrely complicated system for getting your passport stamped: you have to "tip" a lady outside for an entry card before handing ...

There's an obvious but unavoidable downside to visiting a country during the rainy season: it rains. A lot. As all us English types know this isn't the worst thing in the world because it generally goes down the drains and off into the sea or something, and we like to have a bit of a moan about the weather anyway. Unfortunately this doesn't happen in Central America. In Central America it hangs about in the street turning into a big muddy mess and causing no end ...

We nipped over the border into Costa Rica to the little town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a scruffy little place on the caribbean coast. The weather was a bit overcast so we decided that it would be cool to hire a couple of bikes and cycle along the coast to visit a few different beaches. It was nice to be able to do some exercise without getting heat exhaustion within five minutes and we also managed to spot a big group of Howler monkeys hanging out in the tree...