Welcome to our final blog of the trip, from Saint Martin in the West Indies. Although it is only a small island, just 36 square miles in size, Saint Martin has a few interesting peculiarities. First and foremost, it's half Dutch and half French with separate administration and laws. It also has two currencies, the Euro on the French side and the Netherlands Antilles Guilder on the Dutch. To make things more complicated the US$ is also used on both sides! The cra...

Hello everyone, hope everything is well at home. Welcome to the penultimate blog of our trip. We left Belize City a week ago with more than just our luggage (see below!). It was a 2 hour flight to Miami and then another 45 minutes on our connection to Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas. Named Baha Mar (shallow seas) by the Spanish who discovered them in 1492, The Bahamas are a chain of islands in the Atlantic Ocean starting just 60 miles directly east of Miami i...

Hello again, After nearly a week inland we headed back to the coast for a few more days of R&R. We went to a different island, Caye Caulker, just south of Ambergris Caye which was our first destination in Belize. We travelled across country by local bus (avoiding the chicken sandwich sellers!) and got a boat out to the island, completing the whole journey in about 6 hours from door to door. Taxi drivers has offered to take us and quoted £70 but we preferred...

Hello everybody and further greetings from Belize! We had a bit of a dilemma on how best to leave Ambergris Caye and San Pedro; both air and sea routes lead to Belize City on the mainland which has a bit of a bad reputation for violent crime in some areas so we wanted to minimise our time there. As luck, and some money, would have it there was a tour to the mainland that would get us into Belize City docks by boat, onwards by van to another Mayan site (which we ...

Our departure from Mexico was not without incident! We'd read that there is a common scam where Mexican officials ask for a departure tax as you go through passport control so while we checked in for the boat we Googled the subject and found that this happened regularly; sure enough, we were asked for an 'administration fee' which we refused to pay and also threatened to report the official. We thought this might be enough to call their bluff but we were then ma...