Hello! When we were trying to leave San Pedro to arrive in Cobán we were always told that any direct transport there would have to go via Antigua. Since we had already all spent more time that we had wanted there, it was psychologically too much of a step backward to make that trip back to Antigua and so we vowed to make our own way to Cobán via the highlands. I mean, it didn't look that far on the map! 10 hours and three colectivos and a psycho chicken bus ...

Hello! I finally left Antigua and jumped on a shuttle to Lake Atitlán and a little town called San Pedro. This place had become pretty much the number one recommended place to stay at the lake, and many people had mentioned it to me. On the shuttle I was joined by two couples, Kaylin and Morgan from Canada, and Nina and Austin from the USA. We all got chatting and ended up at the same hostel and hung out together the whole time we were there. I was to carry o...

Hello! On the way to Guatemala I stopped near the border in Honduras at a place called Copán Ruinas, the siite of one of the larger Mayan ruins in Central America. It's not as grand as say Tulum in Mexico or Tikal in Guatemala, but it's still an impressive place and you can access a lot of what is there, including some tunnels that reveal some of the walls of even earlier Mayan incarnations buried underneath. It didn't take long to walk around the whole sit...

Hello! As soon as I crossed the border via bicycle rickshaw into Honduras I got a nice feeling about the people. It may be simply the contrast with Nicaraguans I was noting. Don't get me wrong, I have met lots of very friendly Nicaraguans, but there is definitely something about their aura which is unsettling for some reason, in contrast to that of their neighbours. Crossing into Costa Rica from Nicaragua, for example, is like stepping into a parallel univer...

Hello! When Sarah and I were planning our trip to Latin America I remember having to work hard to convince her to come to Central America at all; how different my life would be if we hadn't. Nicaragua, as it turned out, was a far North as I could push our starting point, and so on 10 July 2009 we flew from London to Managua to start our journey (http://www.offexploring.com/robandsarah/blog/nicaragua). We left a few weeks later not really knowing quite how we...