After 6hrs by bus from Nicaragua we were unceremoniously dumped on a corner in the middle of Costa Rican 'no man's land' to connect with another bus up to region of Monteverde/Santa Elena. At the border of Nicaragua/Costa Rica we bumped into a young outgoing American chap and a Belgian Dive Instructor who had clearly spent too much time together in the preceding 48hrs on their way from Honduras. The Belgian could barely even look at the American anymore and grew...

Welcome to a special ' Panama Canal' edition of the blog. We were only in Panama for 4 days (in our rush to get to Colombia) and apart from my first glass of bubbly in 4 months and a questionable haircut the canel was the highlight. Here a are a couple of canal facts:- The first boat pictured paid $100k to pass through the canal. Tarifs are calculated on weight, the lowest being 36 cents paid by a swimmer in the early 1930's- In the morning boats travel from the...

Alrightski, I am going to guide you through the Coffee/Sandinista stronghold of Matagalpa, to the tiny Corn Islands in the Caribbean signing off In San Juan Del Sur our last port of call in Nicaragua before heading to Costa Rica (country # 6) after a couple more days of surfing. We came to Matagalpa to learn more about coffee and get off the beaten traveler trail a little bit. We both really liked the vibe of the place. I don't think I was offered an ornamen...

Hiya! Well we left you in El Salvador, we have been and done Honduras and are now in Nicaragua, which leads me to believe that we're a bit slack on the old blogging front. The trouble is, we're too busy doing stuff to write about it! Hopefully a new blog and piccies will rectify the situation. We ended up staying 4 more days in El Salvador than planned because poor James was struck down with a tummy bug. Glued to the loo and a high fever meant a very...

Hannah's last entry left off on our penultimate day of Spanish School which came and went without incident or shred of emotion from our teacher Olga (this was not her first rodeo). We just managed to squeeze in the protocol for verbs in the past tense which Hannah will find particularly useful being one of life's story tellers. After two weeks we know enough to be polite, but little else. We plan to keep things going with an hour a day of practice, Rosetta sto...