After leaving Honduras we headed straight to Antigua in Guatemala. Antigua is the country's second city and probably the best known as no-one ventures in to Guatemala City if it can be avoided as it is notoriously dangerous. It is similar in many ways to Granada in Nicaragua - very colonial with beautiful buildings and a buzzy, modern feel to it. It is also surrounded by 3 huge volcanoes. We had a fun couple of days there catching up with the people we had bee...

Another great country. We have hardly been on our own for the last few weeks as Kate from Granada has been with us since then and we managed to pick up some more people too. After leaving the capital, Kate, Sarah & I took the long bus ride to Tela on the north, Atlantic coast. Here we decided to do a tour into the nearby national park where we could visit a Garifuna village & explore the mangroves and laguna. The Garifuna were originally African slaves that ...

Thank you for the birthday messages everyone. I had a great one. Nicaragua has been a mix of very quiet places and very very vibrant places. We started in the south in a sleepy fishing village before moving to the Isla de Ometepe- an island in the middle of the Lake of Nicaragua (something like the 3rd largest freshwater lake in the world). It is enormous, and in the middle is an island with 2 massive volcanoes on it. We stayed on the island for 3 nights ...

We have just arrived in Nicaragua after a couple of great weeks in Panama. We spent the first few days in Bocas del Toro, the islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama. Bocas is full of backpackers and is quite a tourist spot but good fun. It is all about sunbathing and drinking but as we had a couple of days of rain... (We are learning to allow for at least 1/1.5 days of rain for every 3/4 we spend anywhere). Actually the islands have great deserted beache...

First border crossing completed as we are now in Panama. We arrived this afternoon in Bocas del Toro which is a beautiful archipelago off the Atlantic coast of Panama, just over the border from Costa Rica. Back tracking slightly, we had one more day in the Monteverde cloudforest since I last wrote which we spent doing a giuded tour of the nature reserve with our very own Bill Oddie. He was the most excitable man and kept interrupting himself every time he he...