Lauren and I are in the third country in our Central America travels (well fourth if you count starting in Costa Rica), and we are loving it, especially after Honduras, which we spent all of 5 days in. Two of those days were fully devoted to riding squished in both mini shuttle buses and "chicken buses" as they're called (Central America pimped out yellow American school buses), and the other three days were comprised of me getting over my bout with traveler's diarrhea and other ailments while Lauren took my temperature and fed me pills and crackers. But here in Leon Nicaragua, everything is good, and we're back on schedule (if we ever had one).
Honduras was a fine country but there's not a ton to do and see, and most of the tourists falling the "gringo trail" as it's called, go to the Bay Islands on the Carribean to get certified in diving. Since neither Lauren nor I really felt the need to spend $250 and a week to get certified, we decided to go to a smaller town along the Carribean coast. Tela was supposedly built up for tourists, but it was dissapointing, and sketchy at night, so we only spent 1 day there. On our way to another part of Honduras, we had to switch buses in a main city and bus hub. While sprinting to the bathroom after our 4 hour bus ride with no bathroom breaks, Lauren heard her name being called and we found Itala, one of our coworkers from this summer, standing there in the mix of bustling people. She was traveling with my good friend, Cait, working their way up Central America from Panama, and we had tried to get together with them for at least a couple days in Honduras, but it wasn't working out. So I was ecstatic to see Itala and made her take me to see Cait immediately. Although it was only a couple of hours, I'm glad I got to see Cait and talk about the things we had done and places we had stayed during our travels while we both waited for our buses. Lauren and I had only been in Honduras 3 days and we were ready to leave, but we thought we owed it to the country to give it one last shot so we headed to a small town called La Esperanza (Hope) in the highlands with a lot cooler weather and seasonal fruits like apples, pears, and peaches that we were craving from back home. That was where I was sick, so Lauren thankfully made us get a room with a private bathroom and TV. We spent most of the time there in the hotel watching Grey's Anatomy and Friends while eating fruit and peanut butter sandwiches.
Luckily, those 2 days in La Esperanza were just the ticket I needed to get over my sickness so Lauren and I decided we were ready to move on to Nicaragua. Getting here was a bit of a struggle and it took 6 buses, one taxi, and 36 hours to finally get to our destination (a distance that should have taken a smooth 6 or 8 hour car ride back in the U.S. I'm sure). When we got to the hostel, the first things we asked about was their kithen and book exchange, because during the past week of traveling and not doing much, Lauren and I had 1. eaten too much packaged and processed food/greasy food from street vendors and 2. exhausted our reading supplies and were desperate for some good literature. We got a decent kitchen and cooked a fine meal that night, and though our hostel's library had a meager selection of books, we found some decent ones at another hostel across the street. For the most part the hostel is pretty cool, tomorrow we're doing the volcano boarding tour that it offers. My friend Cait did it and raved about it. I'm picturing snow/sand boarding but on a volcano. The pictures show big orange jumpsuits and the price includes a mojito, so sign me up! We'll be doing that tomorrow in the morning. Then on Friday we might do a 3 day hike up to a volcano which has views of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Pacific Ocean. It also includes swimming in a lagoon, which is Lauren's criteria for any hike we do. Fine by me!
No comments:
Post a Comment