Rolo on Tour

3 months of travelling through Central America will be over tomorrow and the continent of South America is waiting for me next. Time for a little resumee:

On the 19th of October 2010 some travel-greenhorn, namely me, got on a plane to Mexico to see something of the world. I discovered quite quickly that Backpacking (at least around here, as that is all I can talk about right now) is really much, much easier than I thought before. It didn’t take long and I had the impression I never did anything else in my life! So what have I done so far:

I have visited 28 different locations in 6 countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama). I was swimming in Cenotes and climbed 4 volcanoes. I was attacked by 3 dogs at once. I can call myself an Open Water Diver now, I went down a volcano on a board and I was dressed as a Canadian Hockey Player at Halloween. I took part in a waiters run and was flying on a 1km-canopy-cable through the air. Many cool memories will remain of the time I spent here and of the people I met on the way.
Still, travelling it is not always exciting, but that is a thing you have to deal with. As it is at home, there are always ups and downs and sometimes the places are not what you expect of them or you don’t meet people to connect with. But there is always another day and another place to go…

Now lets come to some „travel wisdom“ I gained so far:

• As most people do, I realized soon that I got too much stuff. Here we have an example how you get everything you need in a very small bag and still got your hands free for important supplies for the bus ride:

Still some little things are quite essential and I would not go again for example without a travel towel, a bandana or flip flops. And I would bring an Ipod touch, which would help getting through all the bus rides and considering there is Wifi in every hostel around here it would come quite handy.

• It is normal to see the same people over and over again. At first I was really surprised about that, but now I have seen people I know in all locations besides the first stop in Cancun and one night in Tegucigalpa. And I can tell you that it is always funny when this happens.
• Everybody is a teacher. I don’t know why, but if I ask people what they do back home, that is by far the most common answer.
• If I ask people where they come from, London is the city named most often. Surprisingly Vancouver is named the second most.
• The amount you pay for a taxi ride is inversely proportional to your spanish skills (At least that is my theory ;-)).

Furthermore my budget planning should be OK, also considering that I can always save money by drinking less, making not as many tours and cooking instead of eating out. The last aspect will also help me improve my cooking skillz further and if that is the only thing I learn on this trip ;-).

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Escaping the rain I wound up in the second biggest city of Panama called David, where I had a nice relaxing time. At the beach next to it I had a very tasty pescado frito, which to my surprise came as a whole fish!

Birds like fish too

For new year´s eve I went to Panama City to celebrate it there. The first thing which struck me when I arrived is the skyline: After having traveled for quite some time now, where the tallest building I saw was maybe 15 metres high, this one came as a big surprise:

View of the skyline from the balcony of my hostel (Luna´s Castle)

Well at least that explains where the money earned off the canal might go to…

Quite unorthodox: The Revolution Tower in Panama City

The first night I had to sleep in the hostel´s „movie theater“, because all the regular beds were taken, nevertheless I had a surprisingly good sleep there. Besides that, the time I spent in Panama City was rather unspectacular – including the visit of the Panama canal.

Having seen enough of scyscrapers for the moment I went to the valley of Boquete, situated in the mountains. From there I climbed Panama´s only volcano – Barú (Yeah, another volcano, I know. It is really funny how you never do that back home and here you do it every other week or so..) starting at 11 pm in hope of seeing the sunrise the next morning. Also on some days you can actually see both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
But me, I was not that lucky. All I saw was clouds and all I felt was rain and wind, so it was freeeezing.

Rather disappointed near the top of Barú

Besides that Boquete is a very nice little town, where you have many options to wander around or visit some gardens. You can also do many activities there, which I did not do as I considered them quite overpriced. As well it was funny to find many brochures where Panama is trying to attract US citizens to retire here and especially go to Boquete for that.

View of Boquete

Deciding that Boquete was still not remote enough I spent some days in a hostel called Lost and Found, which is situated in the middle of nowhere in a cloud forest reserve. Unfortunately it rained again almost all of the time, which made hiking difficult and also it got a bit monotone therefore – the major distraction being the foosball tournament which is held there every night.

View from the hostel: Rainbows were quite common to see as the weather there changed so quickly.

The most difficult thing turned out to be getting back to civilization: I waited 2,5 hours on the road, where there are supposed to come busses by every half an hour. I saw 4 busses while I was waiting, but all of them were full. Finally some truck drivers picked me up, so I got my first ride ever as a hitchhiker!

Waiting for somebody to pick me up…

View of the inside…

and of the beautiful landscape outside of the truck.

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The time intervals between my posts get longer and longer, so one short update on what I did the last 2 weeks:

After having relaxed enough in Liberia I made my way to the national park of Monteverde without actually going to visit the park. Instead I went to another canopy tour and it was not quite comparable with the one I went to in Nicaragua. This one was called ‚Extremo‘ and that name was justified as they had crazy long and high cables, the last one being a 1 km long so-called superman cable, where you were basically flying over a valley, 180 metres high. Awesome!

Next I spent two nights in the capital of Costa Rica, San José. It is supposed to be a bit dangerous there, but nevertheless I was quite surprised that when I got off my bus at 7pm on the main road and only had to walk 200 metres to my hostel, everybody advised me to take a cab there. I still walked and it was fine.
San José was quite fun, in the hostel with some creative dinner and drinks and later watching a full lunar eclipse in the middle of the night and the day I left in front of it, where I met some street artists juggling for tips, so I could not help but helping them earning some money ;-).

Those guys were pros, here one of them got an indoor surfboard on his chin 😉

I also found a german book in the book exchange and it was so cool to once again understand everything you read which for me is not the case reading in english.

The days of Christmas and New Year’s I planned to stay at the caribbean coast and Puerto Viejo de Talamanca was first on the list. The hostel I was in there was quite huge, there was a countless number of tents and hammocks plus some dorm rooms. The first time during this trip I slept in a tent and it was quite comfortable.

The area, where all the tents were set up; mine is next to the bucket

Christmas was spent ruining my feet playing soccer in the woods with locals and having tacos for dinner. Quite different than normal!

Next day I had enough of Costa Rica and went to Bocas del Toro, Panama, where I met my friend Mack again. Unluckily it turned out that the day I arrived was the only one for a long time with sunshine, which prevented all beach plans and made us leave there after 3 nights.

This was as close to sunny as it got…

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Managed to cross the border (more on that below) as planned and am now in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica.

It is normal around Central America to have a central square with a cathedral/church next to it, but this one, situated in the town of Liberia, looked quite unusual:

What is different here in Costa Rica? Many things… First of all, it is more expensive (I dont know if it is for that reason called the Switzerland of Central America) and travellers complain about that all the time. But the higher prices usually have a reason as it is probably generally more safe, clean, developed etc..

You also meet different people than usual here, many of them being americans who just spend their 1 or 2 weeks of vacation around here. Of course that results in quite a different way of travelling, trying to do as much as they can in that short amount of time.

People like to speak english here. I still cannot understand how the ticket of a bus company can end up looking like that:

Keep this thicket, is your passage. Have a nive trip! 😉

Coming back to crossing the border: Having made 4 border crossings so far on this trip, I can tell that this is not always easy. Especially the last two (from Honduras to Nicaragua and from Nicaragua to Costa Rica) where a little bit adventurous.

Going from Nicaragua to Costa Rica and having passed the 10km-line of trucks waiting to pass the border, we had to walk from office to office receiving all the necessary stamps. At one of those offices you have to fill out some form to get a stamp. Well what do some clever people do? They steal all the forms in the morning and sell them on the streets to all the people wanting to cross the border. I don’t know how they are allowed to do that or if the officials even get some money for closing their eyes. Anyway, we were walking around there and rejecting the offers to buy the forms for 1 Dollar ¨“Hay mas en la oficina“ (There are more in the office). At the point that was said all the kids started to laugh at the same time, as they knew that there were just no more ;-). Later we came across some boys who offered us the forms for free, we could tip them „voluntarily“, so naturally we accepted. The voluntary contribution was then of course demanded 5 metres afterwards, but as I did not want to support this kind of business I just kept walking and amazingly enough reached the office without getting beaten up.

Going from Honduras to Nicaragua I crossed the border on the backseat of a Tuk-Tuk, getting stamps and paying all the fees at all the different kind of offices which happened to be on the way. There I paid the voluntary tip of 10 dollars, which is probably a good hourly rate for riding a bicycle, but my chauffeur was really nice and he told me that all the nice tourists give him that amount, so I wanted to be nice as well. Also you probably don´t want to upset anybody in a spot where you are the only foreigner around….

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If everything goes well tomorrow, I will reach Costa Rica and thus have spent the last 2 weeks in the country of Nicaragua. Lets sum up, what happened here during that time:

My first step was the city of León. It had many nice things to offer, including a nice stay in the hostel Via Via, some delicious street food (I could not get enough of those cheese pancakes) and good „real“ (I refuse to call toast or the stuff you put hamburgers in bread.) bread in a french bakery.

The second evening was quite eventful and started with a pictionary game, where our hostel group of Charles from France, Mary from England, Mack from Canada and me failed to win despite all efforts of Charles to draw a hippopotamus or a cockfight. Next door was time for Karaoke and after having waited for quite a long time I put on a great show in performing the song „Entre dos Tierras“, nevertheless the crowd was quite unimpressed. Maybe they did not like gringos at that place..

Entre dos Tierras estás….

Another thing worth mentioning should be Volcano boarding. Yes, it means you are going down a volcano on a board. The volcano is only 700 metres high and you are not going very fast, but it is nevertheless super exciting to do!

View from the Cerro Negro Volcano shortly before going down on a board

The track we went down: it is a little bit steeper than it looks like on this picture, but the rocks give enough resistance

The day I left I got into kind of a little competition, where we tried to place some number of coins on our elbows and catch all of them with the same hand. In the end we managed to do this with all 26 coins we had around, but I suppose you could do it possibly with maybe 40. The bigger problem may be to get that many coins as people never have change here…

Shortly before doing 26 coins…

Next place was Masaya which was supposed to be a good place to buy handcrafts. But it was different as I expected and I was a bit disappointed as there were just 2 big markets consisting of different shops where each of them sold more or less the same stuff which was possibly not even made there but in China or elsewhere…

Besides that there happened to be a funny kid dancing competition in the streets and I had the worst smoothie ever in my life. Funny thing, I discovered afterwards that exactly that smoothie in that restaurant was recommended in my guidebook. I have no clue what that person thought when he wrote that :-).

Having a break in Masaya

Granada was next on the itinerary:

A church in Granada

Lago de Nicaragua, as viewed from Granada

While being there I decided to do a Canopy (also known as Zipline) tour. There are lots of places nowadays where you can do that so I did a bit of internet research before. Doing this I came across a website which listed the (according to that author) 10 best places in the world to do canopy and the place near Granada was number 10, so I decided to do it there.

On the canopy track

And what can I say I certainly do not regret having done it there especially as the guides where very motivated. They made us do the „superman“ which was probably the most fun to do.

Doing the superman

The last stop in Nicaragua was the island of Ometepe, which is set in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. It is quite a beautiful setting here with 2 volcanoes on the island. Of course everybody wants to conquer that island, so I got into a machete fight, where luckily nobody was hurt:

The bigger one of the volcanoes, Concepcion, was then climbed on a 10,5 hours hike. After getting to the point of going up it was a 50 degrees climb for 4 hours straight and the way down was not less painful. On the way back to the hostel I felt half-dead, but the amazingly stunning crater view we got at the top was worth it:

After that day I really wanted to rest but our little travel group here dragged me on a little bike tour with bikes without brakes (which would be pretty exciting going downhill between a flock of cows), some kayaking and a „relaxing“ 6 hour walk to a waterfall around here. So it is not too bad I ran out of cash and leave the island now as they might otherwise make me ride on a horse or a motorcycle around the island ;-).

Stephen finding the gap

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