Hi all,
Hope all is well, this is the latest edition of my travels, where to start?, my last email summed up 3 weeks, this one has to be 3 months !! ... it is therefore, rather overlong and unwieldy.....sorry bout that...
Photos to go with this mail (my favourite option is slideshow).
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/mark.g.blackburn/CentralAmerica20092010Album2
Guatemala, continued...
Xmas and New Year in Xela was all about very noisy fireworks going off ALL night and most of the week. At midnight at Xmas it reached a cresendo. I saw plenty of kids firing rockets straight at each other !!. I was then (at midnight) invited into the living room of my host family and given steak (just steak !) and whiskey, I assumed this was a Guatemalan tradition but my Spanish teacher, later said, no. All 9 of the family were present (including their full (1:1) scale plastic Jesus), I was guest of honour, and tried to cummunicate in Spanish, but to no great effect (well, it was my first week).
The first weekend (in Spanish School) I climbed my first Central American Volcano, Santa Maria, close to Xela. Just as I got to the top a distant volcano (Fuego) erupted, so I was treated to a superb & surreal view. A friendly stray dog joined me for the top half of the climb, so I fed him some of my lunch (at the top) for his loyalty, but half way down he abandoned me for someone else (who was going up), who says dogs are daft ??? Second weekend (New Years), I joined a hike and we climbed Tajamulco, the highest point in Central America at 4223 metres, it was hard going and they packed us into tents like sardines (I really could not roll over...). But the view at dawn was pretty special. Later on that week, I joined another guy and we hiked to the Mirador (viewpoint) of volcano "Santi Aguito", Guatemala´s most active volcano. We sat and waited and sure enough, witnessed four erruptions, the last one was really big, large rocks were blown out. The steam vents at huge pressure, with a noise like many jet engines, I´d say it was "Awesome" but the Americans (and youngsters generally) have ruined that word (and what is there to replace it ?).
I left Xela for San Pedro, Lake Atilan. Quite a change of pace for me as it is a tourist town (unlike Xela), but also has language schools, so I enrolled again for more punishment, but with a change of scenery. On the third day we were sitting in the garden (at the school) and for 3-4 seconds the whole world "wobbled", a peculiar sensation. It was a sizeable earthquake (r 5.3), the second one in a series of two, the first one destroyed Haiti (but we did not know it at the time). It was another week of school in the mornings, kayaking on the lake in the afternoons and bars in the evening, almost a routine. A beautiful spot with almost perfect weather, like Spain in May, but all the time. I did an hour's horse riding and really enjoyed it, what a fab way to travel !. The last two days in San Pedro I teamed up with a German guy and we tackled yet another volcano (San Pedro) and another hike the day after, the "Nariz de Indian" which was even better. On the last day of school the Director (a dignified grey haired gentlemen & Mayan scholar) gathered us all together and made a long speech in Spanish, he explained that world is going to end in 2012 (end of the Mayan long cycle calendar), so there it is....
So that was the end of my formal Spanish schooling (16 days in total), and off I trogged to Antigua. Antigua is very becoming, but very touristy. The main tourist attraction is the active volcano you can stand on, Volcan Pacaya. Please refer to pictures. You climb it, then you actually stand on the thin crust (just an inch or two) of the flowing lava, with the lava still flowing underneath !, you hope your boots don´t melt ! (some peoples did, mine were OK). The blast of radiation when your close to it (< 3´) is extraordinary. Everyone was wandering around with big stupid grins on their faces. You can, of course, poke it (the lava) with a stick to see what happens (it´s a boy thing...), it feels very heavy, very viscous, then the stick disappears....
After that I headed for the Carribean coast of Guatemala, to Rio Dulce then to Livingstone, a very pleasant river trip, past many expat "yotties" living on their yachts for pretty close to FREE (i.e. Guatemalan prices). Livingstone reminded me of my West African working days, everything appeared run down to destruction. The people themselves were "Garifuna", which was a Carribbean island of African slaves that revolted in the 18th century, refusing to actually BE slaves, they were dropped off in the "wilderness" by us Brits and are still there, now (proud of their history but a little bit "chippy" about it, and I don´t blame them).
Prisoner in Puerto Barrios...
The Livingstone hotel was the worst one I´ve ever stayed in, so typically, I became horrendously ill !! I ate a "poisoned burger" on my last day there, starting an illness that lasted 7 days. D&V and a very high temperature had me trying to find a Doctor. No Doctor in Livingstone !!. I had to relocate to "Puerto Barrios", by fast boat, where I booked into a hotel and took myself to the only hospital, "The Free Hospital of Japan in Guatemala" (completely funded by the government of Japan - thanks Japan !!!). Some blood tests later, nothing turned up so I just had to wait it out. 6 days in a hot & dusty Port / Border / Banana exporting town which was probably worth 6 hours, if that. I ate nothing but bread rolls & bananas & made very good use of the cable TV, my only comfort. I was particularly frustrated because I´d met a Slovenian girl on the day of the "grande" illness and we´d agreed to travel together the next day (to Honduras), just my luck !!
Honduras
In Honduras, I did really nothing except go to the "Bay Islands" and dive there. I went to hhe small island of Utila on the North coast. I did a week of diving, and enjoyed it so much that I decided to upgrade my PADI certification to "Advanced Open Water" which I did, quite cheaply, during yet another week. So, surprisingly for me, I was there two weeks, which helped with the lurgy recuperation. It´s a laid back place (similar to Caye Caulker) and after 10 days I literally struggled to remember that the rest of the world was out there. There is a garden bar there called "Treetanic" which has been built in the style of Salvador Dali (only saner...), it´s wonderful, and defies description (and I don´t have a photo) Lonely Planet rates it the 3rd best bar in the world, it´s the best I´ve seen. Diving during the day, goin to the bar at night with a nice crowd of people. I´ll be very tempted to return sometime and do more diving courses.
To Nicaragua..
3 days of travelling south on buses led me to Nicaragua, the only thing to note about the trip was I that arrived in Tegucigalpa (capital of Honduras) in the black dark very late, the bus dropped me off nowhere, in one of the most threatening looking towns I´ve experienced. For a while I walked around in circles, no taxis, feeling very alarmed, just about to really panic and I accidentally walked straight into the hotel I was looking for. A great bit of luck and makes me wonder how often that occurs (& nature of universe etc..etc..). Next day I took the luxury "Tika" bus option which whisks you over the border (no standing in a long line) and straight to Managua, Nicaragua, with blissful A/C and terrible movies. Managua is not particularly lovely place either, I walked around the center of a city that was completely destroyed by a huge earthquake in 1972. The cathedral is still standing, just, but no-one wants to fix it (because the city is over a fault), it must have been something really special once. I find myself the only tourist, attracting unwanted attention, in this ghostly place, so I zip to Granada in the afternoon.
Lake Nicaragua and Island of Omtepe
A very different experience, Granada has plenty of attractive colonial architecture, but is very touristy (now a definite part of the "Gringo Trail") with coach loads of Americans from cruise ships. After a couple of days in Granada I took a ferry down Lake Nicaragua, heading south, to the magical island of Omtepe, which has two classicly shaped volcanoes, one at each end, and so a rather superb silohette (and we arrived at dusk). I asked where the correct place to climb the smaller volcano was, I went there, but was the only person in the hotel! rats! The next day was a tough, tough climb, I don´t think I´ve ever worked harder. Partly the path was in tropical rain forest and very, very, VERY humid. I was so drenched with sweat at one point I had to stop, wring out my clothes (I could have just been for a swim) and continue, good thing I was alone....!! After a few more days on the beach I left, on the ferry, for the Rio San Juan.
El Castillo
The ferry was an overnight one, but did not stretch to bunks (none at all), but I managed to purloin a deck chair, so I snoozed in that, most of the night. I was going to go straight to Costa Rica but I met others on the ferry who were going to take river trip down the Rio San Juan, so I joined them, and was glad that I did. We took a speedy lancha down to "El Castillo". This is an interesting spot. In the californian gold rush of the 1850´s (before the Panama canal) it was a transhipment place for prospectors going from Europe and East America to California (there are rapids in the river, at this point, which steam launches could not get up). I find it almost too hard to imagine that to get across America at that time, you would end up in the Nicaraguan jungle !! Now it´s a sleepy spot but with an excellent museum with old photos of it´s heyday and load of rusty metal. We also did a jungle trek, the highlight of which was a Black Widow spider set right across the footpath (and quite hard to see). It´s a very alien looking creature and quite poisonous (see picture).The Masonic "all seeing eye" is on the Nicaraguan national flag and I saw it in hundreds of other locations in Nicaragua, set in stone on buildings and various signs. But I don´t know why ?? one for Dan Brown....
Costa Rica
Next stop Costa Rica. I was planning to shoot through CR as I´d heard it was very touristy & expensive and would be full of young noisy "Spring Breakers" from the states. It was more touristy than the rest of CA, but the other stuff was plain wrong. I decided to visit just the one spot. I had an inauspicious start from the border of Nicaragua, it rained 3 days straight, one day of sunshine, then 3 more days of heavy rain. This caused some landslides on the highways and it took 3 days to get where I was going, following several frustrating missed connections. I missed one bus by 11 minutes and was stuck in a "nowhere town" overnight (with an American backpacker as well). I chose to go to Tortuguerro on the East coast, it´s supposed to be a "mini amazon" and it seemed to live up to this description. Thick jungle & forest surrounding creeks full of Turtles and Caimans (both of which let us kayak to within a few feet of them). Turtles were supposed to be laying eggs on the beach but none had turned up yet, for this season.
Panama
And so to Panama. I had an equally frustrating time getting there. Missed a bus again, by exactly 11 minutes (once again!) and was equally stuck once more, another forced overnight stop. I made my way straight to "Bocas del Toro" and the Island of Bastimentos, recommended by other people. It posesses one of the most beautiful and wildest beaches I´ve seen, "Wizard Beach", it´s also where I took that picture of a red frog. At this point I was forced (by expediency !!) to put everything in my pack through a washing machine, I went to breakfast wearing just my batheing shorts and hiking thermals, which earned some strange looks. It was so nice there that I stayed 3 days and just absorbed the scenery, the Panamanian governmant wants to turn this place into a big resort, so it will be probably be wrecked, fairly soon. I´m still travelling with the American guy (Jack) and we relocate to Boquete in the Panamanian highlands, for a few days trekking. We find two more compatible people at the hostel, Frank & Amandine, and we stick together for a few days, and have some good nights out. Amandine says she is Belgian but speaks with a cut-glass English public school accent, the result of an International school in Kent. We all do the "Los Quetzales" trek the first day, which was Jungly and interesting. Me and Frank do "Volcan Baru" the next day, a much tougher trek. We start at 3am !! and do the first 3 hours in the black dark, reaching the summit at 10.40 am (3450 m), a long day with blisters to show for it and not much else ! (the point of this one is to see both the Atlantuc and the Pacific from this one view point, but we can see neither !!. Panama is a change in that it has well stocked shops ! this was a surprise at the time (after 2 months of very poorly stocked shops), I suppose half the worlds cargo passes right through the middle, so some gets offloaded.
"Line Handling" on the Panama Canal
Then it's another bus ride and I'm in Panama City, which is an immediate surprise, as it now resembles Dubai, there are many very high skyscrapers under construction. The country of Panama took the canal back from the USA in 1999 (thanks to Jimmy Carter, no wonder he's unpopular in the USA !!), with 10 years of canal revenues they are building a "Donald Trump" style wonderland, i.e. horrible.... All along I was hoping to be a "Line Handler" on a yacht transiting the canal (each yacht needs a minimum of 5 line handlers (to handle lines, i.e. ropes)), they usually have to hire locals (expensively)). My contact point was the "Panama Canal Yacht Club" in Colon. I went to Colon only to find it had been bulldozed in October 2009, oh dear ! Then on returning to Panama I had a stroke of luck, the girl in the bunk below had just flown all the way from New York to help her friends transit, so I obviously asked if I could help too ! she could not tell me straight away, but found another yacht the next day and it was arranged. It was excellent, being on a tiny yacht sharing a very very big lock with (only slightly smaller) ships, is quite something, two big locks to go through, Gatun & Miraflores.
It's a very slick operation, no waiting, dropping 12 meters on each step lock, incredible to think of most of the worlds shipping passes through this one spot. Electric locomotives tow the ships through, yachts have to tie up manually. Gatun lake (the middle bit) was very scenic. The famous "Gaillard Cut" was not so scenic (any more) as Panama is expanding the canal to take bigger ships (called "PostPanamax" for the shipping nerds out there !) and they have blasted it wide open. The yacht I was on was skippered by the first Polish woman to sail non-stop around the world, single handed, her name is Joanna Pajkowska, she's famous ! in Poland...! now she is going round again, this time stopping, and with her partner. The transit takes us 26 hours (we were a bit slow) with non-stop and food wine provided. At the end I did not want to get off (partly cos I was a bit tiddly) and the Pacific looked very inviting, with hundreds of ships queuing for the canal, as far as the eye could see, from here almost everyone (on a yacht) sails to the Galapagos islands.
Cargo Boat to Columbia
I returned to Panama. On a previous day I had been given the phone number of a cargo boat skipper ("Chocuano") who did cargo "runs" down the coast from Colon to the last port before Columbia (Puerto Olbadia). There is no road (or railway or anything) on the isthmus between Panama & Columbia, it´s called the "Darien Gap", you either fly or go by boat. People have walked it in the past but I´ve read the survival rate for that is approx 70% !!, the jungle is very difficult and FARC (the Columbian revolutionary group) are still active there. I did not try to phone this guy but I asked native Spanish speakers if they would, and mostly they could not understand what he said ! Eventually (5th phone call) we (myself and two other Brits, Sarah and David) managed to get a time/date and a place, so we were kind of set.
We went to a place called "Carti" and we waited ! No-one turned up the first day, on the evening of the second day (when we were getting bored & jittery) we had our boat ! The "Niño Jenny". I have never seen a more over-loaded and unwieldy looking boat. We had no time to think (just as well), the crew wanted to get away immediately. We piled our stuff onboard (there was no space for it, or us) and we were off. Onboard we had tons of canned beer, groceries, hundreds of gas bottles and about fourteen 80 gallon drums of petrol (!), 4 freezers and 50 steel beds on the roof (which went to an army barracks) . There were no passage ways, everyone was crawling over the cargo to get anywhere. We paid $80 each, which was "fully inclusive" (!) for (as it turned out) 7 whole days (beat that Royal Carribbean !). None of the crew spoke a word of Ingles, so it was good Espanole practice for us all. On one occassion the skipper got out his automatic handgun and cleaned it (we had no idea), which was a little sobering..
The living conditions were ROUGH ! I slept on the roof (unpainted fibreglass) of the boat the first 3 nights, wrapped in a tarp, next morning we were covered in fibreglass splinters, most unpleasant. Then when it rained hard the next few nights I slept inside on a new, boxed, deep chest freezer, much better !! I think Sarah & David were a bit shocked by it, and we all had severe "loss of sense of humour" at times BUT we saw most of the San Blas archipelago and all the inhabited island villages of the Kuna Yala (the indiginous population) & the food was good (a lot of rice, and good fish at the start) and for the most part the crew were friendly. On some of the islands they were not used to tourists and the small children just stared. We also saw the "tourist" islands and the uninhabited islands, but did not stop there. The unihabited San Blas islands are probably the last, unspoilt, mostly undeveloped Carribbean islands, they are the exact tropical island cliche.
Columbia
We were pretty happy to arrive at Puerto Olbadia, it felt like Xmas ! We caught a lancha down the coast to Carpagana, a pleasant Columbian seaside resort. From there we left next morning for Turbo on the worst boat ride yet. They drove a larger that normal 400hp lancha straight through large waves at 30 knots, with only bench seats for support, it was like being stuck on a fairground ride for 3 hours !, the next day we were all covered in bruises and very sore. From Turbo we got stuck yet again, it was Semana Setanta (Easter), so no buses were running that day. We finally arrived in Cartagena, Columbia last Saturday.
And so ends my Central American odyssey. I've been here (Cartagena) for 4 days and feel the need to stay in one place for a wee bit longer.... Columbia seems pretty good so far, it's pricer than C.A. but the streets seem full of life and the Salsa bars go on late into the night (in C.A. it seemed like 9pm was bedtime for everybody !).
If you've got this far you deserve yet another, bigger, medal !
all the best !
Mark
Random Notes on C.A.
Overpopulation
The kids were very cute, and grow up very fast, but the families are enormous !! A family of 10 kids is pretty normal. In some C.A. countries the average age is less than 15, can you imagine that ? On the inhabited islands of the San Blas the two largest buildings on any of the inhabited islands were the school followed by the maternity wing of the Hospital (the rest of the Hospital was often just one room, very lopsided!). I can´t blame the Catholic church for this entirely, as large parts of C.A. are not now Catholic. In Guatemala prodestant evangelist churches (mainly, exports from the USA) are taking a big hold. In some places overpopulation is very noticable (Guatemala & San Blas) they are impoverishing themselves and the environment (in my opinion).
Dogs
I saw very few dogs tied up and I noticed they behaved quite differently !! For a start, less aggressive, less noisy and more sociable. It´s really odd to see dogs going "about their business". Several times I´ve been walking along a road and passed a dog that was completely intent upon a mission of it´s own and completely ignoring everything else. I´m sure this is how it´s supposed to be...
Cars
I passed through several places where there was no motorised traffic at all. The net result was kids playing nonstop everywhere and everyone else talking to each other with a feeling of a strong community. I´ve said it before, I´ll say it again, the social cost of the private motor car is way too high in urban areas. All my prejudices were confirmed !!
