4 countries in 4 weeks, One highlight after the other and a lot of adrenaline- that's central america.
We started of in San Jose, Costa Rica, where we stayed less then 24h just for doing laundry and other 'City stuff'. We didn't like it at all, very busy city, people are stressed out and actually run through the city as if they were late for an appointment with the president. So we took the first bus to the coast to el Coco beach. We thought we would go to a laid back typical costa rica beach town and found an American tourist resort with lots of pizza places and sport bars. We joined the crowd for the weekend and then went directly to the isla de ometepe in Nicaragua, an island formed by two joined volcanoes that lies in the middle of the huge lake of Nicaragua ready to be the set for a Peter Pan movie or some other fantasy story with its Rain forest, dirt roads, hauwling monkies and birds in every colour. We spent four days relaxing and exploring the island by bike and scooter and hiked one of the two volcanoes which turned out to be a serious 8 hour race uphill through cloudy rain forest and a trail that turned into a dangerous ankle twisting mud slide. Anyway we made it up and down somehow without major injuries but had the most hurting legs next morning. It took us some hours to get off the Island because it was a bank holiday in Nicaragua and there were even less buses than usual. Every taxi driver tried to convince us that they were the only ones working and if we wanted to get anywhere we would have to take their taxi, of course for a special price, which still was more than 10 times the price of the bus. It was like if they had an agreement amongst each other to tell the stupid tourists that there are no buses on bank holidays, which wasn't true of course.
We spent a couple of days in Granada, a very beautiful colonial town.
We than took an international bus crossing two borders in a couple of hours to get to El Salvador. We arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador's capital, around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, just before sunset and one of our fellow travellers was so worried that we will not make it until La Liberad, our final destination, before it gets dark, that he even offered us to drive us there himself. We have heard a lot of bad stories about San Salvador but when we saw how worried the guy was, we kind of thought that a taxi would be better than the public chicken bus.
We arrived safely at the beach El Tunco, a surfer's paradise, where we took some surf lessons the next days which was really fun but also the most exhausting activity I ever did in my entire life. I also swallowed half of the pacific and couldn't move my arms for days after that. We were ready for going back to the jungle after that and headed for Guatemala.
This time the border didn't go quite as smooth as all the other borders until now. They couldn't find me in the register which meant I had no proof of having entered the country legally. But as they found Christian and we were travelling together, it was kind of obvious that it was their fault. But still they had to find a proof of my legal immigration somehow, so we had to go inside and explain where we were coming from and when we crossed which border etc. It took forever and I asked what would happen if they were not going to find me. The bus driver told me that I would have to pay a fine of 114 $ which is a lot of money in El Salvador. The border official looked at me and told me with a twisted smile on his face:" that wouldn't be too bad right? You are German, all the Germans have money, and you are travelling, so you must be rich...". I really didn't know what to tell him because he was right, I could have paid the fine easily but obviously I didn't want to because I didn't do anything wrong. It was a really weird situation because he kind of showed us that he has the power not to let us leave the country if he wanted to. In the end they found my name on the passenger's list of the bus company we went with and they let us leave without paying but still....
The adventures of this bus ride didn't stop at the border, that was only the beginning.
We also saw a volcanoe erupt, not just smoke and ash but real lava. At first I thought it was a firework but than the bus stopped so we could watch it properly. Luckily it was already night, so we could see it clearly glowing in the dark. Wow!!! It only lasted 30 seconds but it was spectacular.
To finish our adventurous bus ride, we ran out of gas a couple of kms before Antigua. By chance that happened on the very top of a hill so we could roll backwards (in the middle of the night in the middle of the road) for 1km!!! more or less. We were even more lucky that there was a gas station exactly at the bottom of the hill. We filled up and 10 min after the car had stopped we were going uphill again. That could have been so much worse, we didn't have to push even for one meter. How lucky!!!
Antigua was just another colonial town, very nice but nothing happened worth writing about. We stayed a couple of days and went to Lanquin afterwards, to see Semuc Champey, a natural parc which was supposed to be the most beautiful in Guatemala. It was the best decision ever to do that, we swam with candles in caves, jumped of bridges and 15m waterfalls and dived in natural pools! Pure adrenaline!
Guatemala is really a great country, you could easily spend months here and not get bored. There is so much more to see! Well, next time ;)!
Now we are in our way to 'Tikal' one of the most important Mayan ruins before crossing the border to Belize, where we will finally get on board of a sail boat which we wanted to do since the beginning of the trip. Caribean sea, snorkeling, reaggae music and sailing into the sunset awaits us for Christmas!