Got a frog in my throat...

I have been a little bit sick the last few days, so after the intensity of the rafting opted for a more relaxing day yesterday - working on my sun burn by the pool by day, and marching through the woods at night in pursuit of frogs. The whole day worked out rather well, although the evening wasn't the best for seeing frogs, mainly because it had been dry during the day (implying that good frog viewing and good sun bathing weather are somewhat mutually incompatible here, but anyway...)

At 7pm I set off into the woods next to the hostel for my private tour with the guide, and within about 5 minutes he had found our first tree frog. This rather cool green thing with red eyes and feet is the poster boy of Costa Rican tourism, although is somewhat smaller than I thought he would be. He seemed pretty happy to sit still for us and not too traumatised by being made to pose on a stick. The guide found him very quickly, I think partly through experience leading him to where the frog normally hangs out. There was then an interesting exchange of human-made croaks and frog-made responses before we managed to locate exactly where he was and get him onto my hand.

After we put the tree frog back, we (actually, the guide, I couldn't find anything), found one of the poisonous frogs. This one is even smaller than the tree frog, but again has great colours and makes for a good photography subject. These poison dart frogs got their names from the fact that native americans used the secretions from the frog`s skin to tip their darts. Some research leads me to believe that the species in Costa Rica are less poisonous than others, but that significant contact with human skin is still likely to bring up a rash.

A few minutes later we found another tree frog, although this one didn't seem so comfortable under the bright lights of my SLR, so we left him alone after a few minutes.

And then finally we found this larger thing, sitting next to the hole he lives in. I cant remember what type of frog he is, other than hes much more shy than the others and the photos involved creeping up very slowly on my hands and knees, edging ever closer, before he jumped back in his hole.

These are all the creatures which i have managed to upload photos from. There were a couple of other cool frogs, a fat toad and a lizard that we saw too, but technical issues at the moment means ill have to save the photos for another day. All in all though, the tour was a fantastic way to spend a couple of hours, and in terms of photography, frogs must be one of the best subjects in Costa Rica.

Rafting

The rafting turned out to be great fun, and pretty intense as there had been lots of rain the day before, so the river was quite fast. I was in a boat with 4 very friendly Americans from LA. 2 of us fell in (me included) but we were both rescued promptly!

Volcano Arenal!

La Fortuna

It has taken me almost three days to get here (with the brief detour via the beach party location of San Juan, which wasn't a huge success), but I'm now in one of the centres of adventure tourism in Costa Rica, La Fortuna. The journey here this morning involved three buses, but the scenery was beautiful and considerably cheaper than taking one of the tourist shuttles.

I arrived at around 3pm and found out what seems to be one of the best hostels in town, very comfortable and with a swimming pool! I then went off to some thermal baths a bit out of town which were fantastic. At least 6 pools, one of which is a sports bar, another which is a disco pool, and then one with water slides. All followed by an all you can eat buffet which I think I got my moneys worth from.

Some photos bus journey over here...

Another rather luxurious hostel...

Arenal volcano in the backdrop unfortunately covered in cloud at the moment.

Central American Breakfast

Granada rooftops

Mombacho volcano and cloud forest

I visited the volcano that overlooks Granada yesterday morning to take a look at the nature reserve that is now there. The top of the volcano is a cloud forest (meaning there is pretty much always cloud cover at the crater, even if the rest of Granada is hot and sunny).

Model of the volcano, with Granada on the lake to the right

View of Granada and the lake (with cloud)

The crater of the volcano with the lake behind. The small dots in the lake are the volcanic islands I visited the day before.

Granada, Nicaragua. But could easily be the Andalucian one

Horse-drawn carriage tours of the town

Some photos from my wandering around Granada. Whilst Leon had some charming colonial flair, in Granada a very extensive area in the town has retained its Colonial style, making it a beautiful town with a very European feel. This afternoon I did a short boat tour around the mini-islands on the shore of the lake. There's some interesting wild-life, and a number of the islands are owner by wealthy Nicaraguans who have their holiday homes on them.

Central plaza - rebuilt in a colonial style

Park

The tour guide this afternoon also talked a bit about the history of Granada, and the long tussle with Leon over which city would be the capital of Nicaragua (in the end they settled for the city in between the two, Managua). The city was actually burned down by an American soldier who had been recruited to fight the Leon-Granada dispute in the late 19th century and mostly re-built in the original colonial style, albeit with some building following the then-fashionable neoclassical trends.

The Cathedral of Granada, finally rebuilt in 1915 in the neoclassical style

Main tourist street

Alleyway with volcano at the end of the street

Okay, so the horizon is not straight here, I know

Granada's location on the shore of the lake is what made the city so strategically important for the Spanish, and attracted so much interest from English pirates. The navigable San Juan river flows out of the lake and into the Caribbean, making the western side of Nicaragua accessible by boat arriving from the Atlantic.

One of the over-200 volcanic islands

Interestingly, the lake has a number of marine species that are not usually found outside of an ocean environment (bull sharks are one example). This suggests that the land that now traps the lake may have been formed as the result of a volcanic eruption.

Cool tree with lots of birds nests that are hanging from the branches

Leon

I've spent the last few days in Leon, the second largest Nicaraguan city in the North West of the country. Its a colonial city with a number of beautiful churches. I found the city very tourist friendly with a number of good cafes and restaurants.

 I was also very happy with the hostel I stayed in. It was part of a bar/restaurant a couple of blocks from the centre of town, but the rooms were all off a courtyard a bit behind the bar, so it was never loud, and the atmosphere in the bar was always very relaxed. The courtyard was also a wonderful garden with hammocks, and overall a very nice place to spend a few days and nice to have a hostel where you can feel comfortable just spending time there.

The silver lining

Whilst my 2 days in Leon were pretty relaxed, one thing I did do was a spend the afternoon with a local jewellery maker, making a silver ring. It was suggested to me by a friend who had done a couple of other activities with this agency who specialise in more authentic excursions for tourists, always involving local people. I wasn't really sure if it was my kind of thing, but after 3 months of travelling, I didn't feel too inspired by a lot of the standard activities that are on offer, and this seemed at least like something new.

We started by looking through brochures and photos of what other people had made for some inspiration, before trying our best to draw out what we wanted to make and describe to our jewellery maker what we wanted. In designing the ring I was trying to balance wanting to make something a bit more interesting so that the manufacturing part of the project would be fun, with not wanting some garish piece of jewellery that id probably never wear. In the end I probably went for something on the more conservative (and therefore simple) end of the scale, but at least I'm happy with how it turned out.

The beginning - a silver bracelet

We were moderately involved in the manufacturing process, but weren't required to engage in any too strenuous activity. It was good being there and watching the transformation, as well as being able to have the ring sized exactly to my hand (although given the intense heat, my fingers were a bit swollen and I notice now that its a little bit loose).


Making melting down silver look cool

It took us about 4 hours to make the two rings, and we paid at the end based on the weight of the silver. My ring came in at exactly 4g and was 40USD.

Hitting the ring in a semi-controlled manner. This was partly to give it the unpolished effect I wanted, and partly to make the ring up to the size I wanted.

The final product - rough finish with two small lines around the ring

Chicken Bus!

With as much leg room as you'd expect on an ex-school bus!

To Nicaragua

Getting to Nicaragua from Honduras turned out to be a marathon, and not nearly as simple as it should have been. After spending the night in San Pedro, we were driven to the bus terminal at 4am, hoping to jump on the Tika Bus, which is a high-speed service throughout central America which runs bus lines only connecting the mayor cities. The journey to Managua (capital of Nicaragua) is still about 13 hours, but for 30 dollars it would have been in relative comfort and ease.

Well, turns out the bus was fully booked. Whilst irritating, we weren't really that annoyed with ourselves for not pre-booking because we couldn't really have - in Honduras you can only book a seat in one of the Tika bus agencies, and we hadn't been anywhere near one in the last week. Fortunately, we had lonely planet to hand so decided to make the journey south on our own, with the first leg being 4 hours to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on a comfortable-enough express bus.

After arriving in Tegucigalpa (there's no bus terminal there - just a number of bus stations near each other in a fairly rough part of town), we worked out where we needed to go to next, took a taxi to the bus station for this bus company (which was way over the other side of town), and got very ripped-off by our taxi driver (25USD for 4 of us for a 10 minute taxi ride...), but at least we got to where the next bus was leaving.

San Pedro to Leon - through Honduras

This was a further 2 hours down to the border town of El Paraiso, which had all the dodgyness you'd exepect from a boarder town in a narco-trafficking part of the world. Anyway, the locals in their cowboy hats and boots seemed rather intrigued by us at the bus stop and it wasn't a long wait in the heat before jumping on the last Honduran bus to take us to the border. This was only 10 minutes, but was our first experience of the day on the "chicken bus", which are the local buses that are retired US school buses sold to central American countries. Needless to say the seating arrangements aren't particularly comfortable, but tolerable given how cheap they are.

The border crossing was simple enough, paid 12USD to leave Honduras and received a receipt for 10USD, changed our money at the border, and hopped on another chicken bus to the Nicaraguan border town, around 20 minutes away. When we arrived here, before we'd even had time to say where we wanted to go, our backpacks had been taken off the bus and carried onto the next express service to Managua (I think this is the fairly aggressive technique used to make sure you take their bus for the next leg as there are a number of different-owned buses running very similar services). We communicated that we were headed to Leon, and the guy assured us he would tell us when to get off and change.

A few hours later at a cross-roads in the middle of nowhere, we were thrown off the bus and directed to the next, definitely-not-express service to Leon. We arrived around 8pm, after roughly 15 hours of buses. Despite the length of the day, everything ran pretty much as smoothly as it could have, and there was much less waiting around for buses than I expected. That does seem to be the virtue to the informal bus system here, in that there are no timetables, so the buses leave when it makes sense to leave, which more ofter than not is around 10 minutes after a connecting bus has arrived. I do have some photos to upload... but the internet is too slow here, so they'll have to wait.

Rain in the Carribean...

Island photos

Sunset from the dock, a few days ago.

Taken from the same dock half an hour ago!

The dive centre we're staying at. Very convenient being able to stay right next to the dock!

Sitting on the dock of the bay... (well, not really, but anyway)

Some colonial influences in the houses here (was a British island until the mid 19th century when it was given to Honduras)

The main street in Utila. Often not as peaceful as it looks here, with lots of scooters and quadbikes.

Life on the Island!

This blog needs an update, and I will endeavour to upload some nice photos of the place soon! The days this week have been pretty occupied with learning to scuba dive, and I've completed my Padi open-water qualification. Unfortunately, I've been having a few problems with my ears, so didn't get to go out diving with the others today, and I'm not sure when I will feel well enough (and confident enough again) to go out. Anyway, there is lots of good food on the island, and it's rather nice just relaxing in the (intense) heat, albeit avoiding the sunlight from 11-4!

A long day...

After the excitement of volcanoes and Mayan ruins, this blog needs a bit of tedium for a change, and today provided just that (although there is a bit of a Honduran style to the dull day). Executive summary: I made my way from Copan Ruinas across the country to the Caribbean Island of Utila.

I started at 5am with a bus to San Pedro Sula. This bus left about 10 minutes late, stopped 5 minutes later whilst our diver took a torch and a pair of pliers and opened up the engine. We left again after 10 minutes, but continued at a speed of around 10mph for the next hour and a half. At first I thought this low speed was to do with some sort of technical issues, although after a while I cottoned on that along the first hour of the journey or so, he's expecting to be picking up a lot of passengers along the road, so it doesn't make much sense to go any faster. We ended up stopped numerous times, often only 100m after the last stop (makes you think having a general gathering point, like maybe, a bus stop, would be a good idea).

After arriving in San Pedro Sula bus station (4.5 hours later) there was a number of people awaiting our bus' arrival and calling out the destination we were onto next, La Ceiba. We were escorted by one of these into a waiting room, with an armed guard outside. The waiting room was either really safe, or really dangerous.

After about 45 minutes in a waiting room everyone got up as it appeared the bus for the San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba had arrived. We got onto the bus, with the heat now starting to rise (comfortably over 30 degrees) Fortunately the bus wasn't too full, and I could sit next to the window and enjoy the breeze (although now have a tan/burn on only the left hand side of my arm and face). At pretty much every stop or traffic lights a number of people come up to the window of the bus offering generally fruit and other small snacks, and about 30 minutes in, when I was starting to get quite uncomfortable, a kid was selling 2 litres of bottled water (cold!) for 2 dollars, which was a great relief. Possibly the first and last time I'll complete a transaction through the window of a bus...

Final leg of the journey was the 1 hour ferry to the island (well, actually the intermediate leg was the taxi journey from the bus station to the ferry port, but I'll leave that out). We had about an hour to wait before the ferry left, very promptly at 4. The timely departure was about the only good thing on this journey - it's not nicknamed the vomit-comet for nothing. So, whilst it is a swift catamaran crossing, the thing is very bouncy, and I spent the whole hour feeling ill, and in the hours since coming on land, haven't really returned to my pre-maritime state.

The ending to this rather dull day is that I'm staying in a dive centre, where I've paid 280USD for a 4-day dive course and accommodation (which apparently is quite cheap for global standards). I'll write more about this rather odd island in the coming days...

Honduras: lush hills and... telephone cables everywhere

My career in archeology is in ruins...

The town of Copan Ruinas has one substantial attraction which gives it both its name, and makes it one of the jewels of Honduras' not-so-strong tourism industry. The Mayan town of Copan was the capital from the 5th to 9th centuries AD, located in the very southeast of the kingdom (not far from the boarder with Guatemala). The site has a large number of structures remaining, although the river apparently eroded away a large portion of the site, and is particularly well known for the quality of the sculptures and art work.

It gets pretty, or indeed very, hot here from around 10am, so after breakfast we headed off to the site at around 8 . It-s only about a 10 minute walk outside of the village along a seemingly safe path, and we spent a couple of hours wandering around the site. The buildings are very impressive (with the majority still being in very good condition) and some of the sculptures equally well preserved. Its also in a pretty nice setting, with trees around and from the tops of the structures you can see the rolling Honduran and Guatemalan countryside, which at this time of year in rainy season is wonderfully green. It doesn't quite have the dramatic mountain backdrop that Machu Picchu does, but then I guess that is the feature that makes MP so special.

The cover on the left of the photo is there to protect a particularly ornate staircase

In the above photo you can see (along with the staircase) the remains of the ballcourt (in front of the stairs it's the two identical sloping stone building opposite each other). Its not known exactly how this game was played but seems to have the general gist of teams of 11 having to keep the ball in play without using hands, in a sort of no-hands volleyball). The court actually features on one of the Honduran notes, and some research on line tells me that the game had a huge amount of religious and spiritual symbolism, with the winners considered to be granted a swift path to heaven.

Another quirky feature of the Mayans is their practice of building structures on top of other ones. Some suggest this was done every 52 years when the solar and social calendars coincided, whilst others say it was just the done thing when a new ruler arrived in town (I guess similar to the Egyptians building pyramids bigger than each other, the Mayans just build structures on top of the last guy's!). As a result, there are a couple of tunnels underneath the site that have been dug, revealing even older structures. We didn't actually go into these tunnels, as the guide book suggests they're considerably less impressive than what's above ground, and not really worth the extra money. An interesting fact about Maya architecture nonetheless.

There is also a small Macaw sanctuary at the entrance to the ruins, and it seemed that we got there at the right time as the birds were all out and sitting on their perches for feeding time. The Macaw is the national bird of Honduras but I gather is rather endangered. Anyway, they were very colourful and didn't seem to mind our obnoxious cameras whilst they were eating away.

Hello Polly