Monday 25 June 2007

Bogota - plastic surgery capital of the world!


Well, having sad our adíos to the Caribbean coast, we headed on an 18 hour bus journey to Bogota, not really sure what to expect. The sleeping tablets worked a treat and we landed full of beans. Bogota was an absolute treat, full of galleries, museums, fancy shopping malls and gorgeous places to eat and shimmy!


It was the first time I was ever in an art gallery (Botero), where the ushers smiled and were mad for chat. The warmth of the Colombian people never ceased to amaze us. We ended up hanging out in Bogota for about 5 days, trying to figure out how to head to Peru (with the help of our new student cards!). Never once did we feel threatened or unsafe, compared to any of the Central American capitals. It was so nice to just wander around, eat, drink and be merry. We even went for a boogie downtown, which was a bit of a larf. It certainly is a visual treat for the lads, considering the enhanced cleavage of most young females!

Tayrona National Park - hidden paradise

Having returned to civilisation after 6 days hard slog in the jungle, we headed to Tayrona National Park to hang out on the beach and do nothing. That´s exactly what we did. Each day involved sleeping in a hammock, waking up for sunrise, hanging out on the beach, collecting coconuts (those trees are a death threat, we could hear them dropping all night on our hut!) and mangoes and then playing cards and nodding off at the latest by 10 or 11, on a late night. It was heaven! We stayed 4 days, until our money ran out (bank machines don´t exist out there, along with every other normal modern luxury). We then headed back to Santa Marta reluctantly, as we knew it would be at least another month before we were back on the beach and it would be the last time we saw the Caribbean. What a swan song!!

La Ciudad Perdida - penance in the jungle!

6 days of serious hiking, crossing rivers chest high, sleeping in hammocks, constantly wearing smelly wet clothes and nursing blisters, sore muscles and lots of mozzie bites; the trek to the Lost City was absolutely amazing.

The Lost City is set in the Tayrona National Park on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and was only discovered sometime during the 50's. About 5 years ago a group of British and Israeli tourists trekking to the Lost City were kidnapped by guerillas and kept hostage for three months. We didn't tell our folks that before setting off!

There was a group of twelve of us and we hiked between 4-6 hours each day. It took us three days to get to the Lost City and yes, it was physically excruciating at times. But oh did we eat and sleep afterwards and felt like we deserved it.

The park is inhabitated by the Kogi tribe, who still use the Lost City as a sacred ground. The darker side of the story is the fact that there are numerous cocaine factories within the park, it was even an optional visit as part of the trek!!

As most people say about doing treks like the Inca trail or this one, it is often the journey and not the destination which has the most impact on you (how long have I been waiting to use that one!!). It really was a physically and mentally amazing journey which reduces you to you, your rhythm and the nature which surrounds you (and lots of card games). I would so recommend the whole experience from start to finish, from the warmth and generosity of our guides, to the bonding of the group (on the whole) to the reward of seeing such natural and unadulterated beauty.

Tuesday 19 June 2007

Round 2 - Colombia te quiero!



Well alot has happened in the last month. It's funny how plans change so easily, when we were planning this trip we only intended to go to Belize, Guatemala and Costa Rica in Central America. We ended up going to every Central American country, bar El Salvador, and legged it out of Costa Rica after ten days cause we got washed out. Of course we never thought to check that it would be rainy season. Us Paddy's like to think we know what a rainy climate is like, I don't think so. After about a week of torrential rain where having a conversation with somebody is difficult because of the noise on the roof, we decided to shelve the rest of our Costa Rican plans for the Caribbean coast and leg it to Panama.
Panama City was really weird, a big oppressive modern, rich city where electronics are super cheap. So, despite the guilt factor, we spent a day in an air-conditioned mall shopping, it was a treat. I even had sushi!

After doing the Panama Canal and dossing around town for a while waiting for a boat to sail to Colombia, we got ants in our pants and wanted to leave. We had been planning all along to sail to Colombia via the San Blas islands on a sail boat which would have taken about 5 days and sounded like pure bliss. The problem was the only boat going around our time frame was a small one which would only take 4 passengers. Luckily we ended up meeting the other two, who turned out to be freaky Americans who lived out of their laptops, so 5 days on a boat with them and the captain didn´t seem too appealing. So we hopped on a plane to Cartagena.


Considering Irish people needed a visa to get in to Colombia until January because of our republican friends (apparently they weren´t the only ones!!), we expected a bit of a grilling coming through immigration, like we´ve gotten at other borders. We got a céad míle fáilte and entered this beautiful country of amazing people.
Cartagena was one of the most beautiful colonial cities we´ve been too and the most depressing. The old colonial part is as elegant and opulent as any European city. We actually ended up being in Cartagena for it´s birthday so partied with the locals. Outside of the policed old town however, the streets at night transformed into seedy alleys of prostitutes and scavengers eating from bins, which I found quite bleak.

We left Cartagena and headed for Taganga, which is a beautiful little fishing village just outside Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast towards Venezuela. After spending a couple of days there, hanging out by the sea and drinking every combination of fruit juice from the ubiquitous street vendors, we headed for La Ciudad Perdida.





Sunday 27 May 2007

San Jose - lots of shoe shops and a hostel with a mechanical bull!

We had arranged to meet Lenny & Catherine again before they left Central America, so hooked up with them at Hostel Pangea, which advertises itself as the only hostel in the world with a mechanical bull.


The bull wasn´t working, but that didn´t stop Lenny & Dave seeking out a photo opportunity after a few beers.




San Jose isn´t as bad as some of the other Central American capitals we´ve been to. We thought it would be alot worse, but certainly not a city you´d visit unless you had to. This town has bars on all the windows and a shoe shop on every street corner. Our original plan was to nip through here en route to the Caribbean coast and head to Panama from there, but the weather´s so pants we´re going to fast track our way to Panama City and try to catch the first boat we can headed for Colombia. Hopefully it´ll all work out and we´ll start round two of this adventure in Colombia sometime next week. Bring it on!!

Monteverde, Costa Rica...adrenaline tapped!

Monteverde is a cloud forest area in the middle of Costa Rica, which took us 12 hours to get to from Montezuma, including 2 buses, 1 ferry and a taxi. It´s only about 150km in distance, but it was excruciating.

So we landed and hooked up with Scott & Alex again, having left Lenny & Catherine heading south. The canopy tour, a way to get from one tree to another on a zip line, was pioneered in Monteverde, and the tour we did had 18 zip lines and a tarzan swing (fear of heights = the whole flipping jungle heard me do that one!). It was too much fun, seriously.

We cooked up a storm in the hostel that night with Scott & Alex and lots of Imperial and giggle fits later, crashed out with the prospect of a 5am start for San Jose. No kidding, I haven´t been up later than 7am in about a month. It gets dark here at 6pm on the button every day so Central America wakes up with sunrise!!




Auntie Aoife - eeek!!!

Sitting in an internet cafe one morning (yes, I do get withdrawal symptoms sometimes) I opened an email from Máire, which kicked off in bright pink huge font ´You´re going to be an Aunty´. Yup, I was pretty blown away. So thrilled and delighted for both Máire & Victor, but twinged with a little sadness that my big sis is going to glow through a pregnancy and I won´t be around for any of it. So another bloody O´Mahony November birthday, as if the month wasn´t expensive enough anyway, cheers Maur!!

There are times like that when it´s a little strange to be on the road and completely dependent on one person for your entire social interaction. Dave & I are both suffering a little traveller´s fatigue so that day was a little strange to be so far away from my family.

I guess the creation of a new life makes you think of the cycle of life and inevitably those who have left it, so Timmy is never far from my thoughts. This trip has certainly opened up thoughts and chambers in my head that were firmly shut for the last couple of years. I have no doubt it´s cathartic, but completely disorienting at times to go through that so far away from everything.

Anyway, that´s my kimono opening done for this broadcast...

Costa Rica...a little later than originally planned!

Considering our original plans for Central America were to hit Belize, Guatemala & Costa Rica, finding ourselves in both Honduras & Nicaragua was not factored in to any schedule we have. I guess that´s why very quickly we figured out that a schedule is a silly thing to have on a trip like this anyways. Our time in Honduras & Nicaragua, albeit brief, was really special and definitely some highlights so far, so we´re really glad they were en route.

Lenny & Catherine, another couple of Irish rat-race escapees, who we first met in Grenada showed up in San Juan so a debaucherous night of copious amounts of Nicaraguan rum ensued, finished off of course by a swim at 4am. Needless to say the appeal of doing the border crossing to Costa Rica the next morning got postponed another day as we nursed a very nasty hangover.


So we eventually packed our bags again and headed for the border after a brief enchanting encounter with Nicaragua. It´s definitely a country of people who have been through an awful lot and now with their new president, Ortega, chumming up with Chavez and Cuba, Nicas are quite afraid that all the Americans looking for a better bargain than they can find in Costa Rica will look elsewhere to spend their dollars. I have no doubt that if I went back to San Juan del Sur in three years time it would be completely different.


Leaving the dry, parched Nicaraguan soil the lushness of Costa Rica which literally changes as you cross the border was a sensual treat. As green as any Irish landscape, albeit slightly more tropical, it was gorgeous to see the land dripping with life. A week later and about 32 inches of rain, my appetite for rain has changed slightly. So Costa Rica is the most expensive country we´ve been in so far because they´ve managed to attract tourists for a lot longer than their more turbulent Central American neighbours. Is it worth it? Maybe, if all I was to see of Central America was Costa Rica, I would be pretty impressed but considering what I´ve already seen it´s not as an amazing experience as I thought it would be.


We headed straight for the Nicoya peninsula to look for more surf (nope, still didn´t make that barrel) and after a couple of nights in a relatively commercial Tamarindo (Cancun it ain´t, but wasn´t in a rush to stay either) we headed south to Mal País. Despite being Central America´s most expensive country, it officially has the worst roads. One 30km trip we had to make took over 2 hours, seriously!!


En route we hooked up with Scott & Alex, a Canadian couple from British Columbia, who we had lots of giggles with for the last week. The weather turned in to the equivalent of a month of Irish rain each night, so we had to get pretty creative with our leisure time. (Apologies for those of you who have busy, stressful lives at the mo, I feel your pain!) We stayed in this huge hostel in Santa Teresa, where for the first time in about two months we could flush toilet paper and have a hot shower. It´s the little things you miss sometimes.





In between surfing some gnarly (cheers Scott!) waves, we rented ATV´s and took off for a hilarious day to Montezuma. Needless to say the boys need for speed and the dodgy roads were an entertaining combination. We hiked up a river to some beautiful waterfalls and then bumped in to Lenny & Catherine again in Montezuma.


So we hooked up with them again the next day (Champions League is very important on a round the world trip) and had a very productive afternoon of drinking beer, learning to juggle (Dave), learning new card games (Geneva) and giggling.

Officially the most low maintenance wedding I´ve ever been to...

We moved from San Juan del Sur town out to stay in a hostel called Matilda´s out on the surf beach with great intentions of catching our first barrel (for those of you who know my athletic ability, you can tell how successful that effort was!). It takes 45 minutes on a dirt track to get out there and there´s virtually nothing out on those beaches so it was absolute bliss for 4 days of sunrise and sunset surfs, filling the sweltering middle hours of the day devouring books in a hammock.


A couple of hours after we arrived we saw a guy walk in to the hostel with a big bunch of flowers. Dave asked him if he was in trouble or something, his replied ´no dude, I´m getting married at 5 o´clock). So that´s how we met Dwayne & Tracy and ended up at their wedding on the beach. In fact Dave got seconded as their photographer!

So after exchanging vows, with the help of a local to direct them through, they were married and we spent the rest of the evening, chilling out around a bonfire under the stars with everybody else from the hostel who ended up being part of the wedding party too. No, we didn´t get any ideas of doing anything similar, as saccharine sweet as it was, it wouldn´t be my way of getting hitched...I´d be too sad that my family and friends weren´t there to share it with me. It definitely was a very special day.



Friday 11 May 2007

Mi cumpleaños!!


Had an absolutely gorgeous day for me burfday (David, my bro, thank you so much for bootiful card!)...we´ve been in Nicaragua since Sunday, spent a couple of days in Granada, which is really nice. I much preferred it to Antigua. Did a really cool volcano hike, got to look in a crater and see magma sloshing around 2000m below. Met up with a lahvley Irish couple who are doing pretty similar trip but have just spent 6 months in South America including Christmas in Antarctic which just sounded mind-blowing.



Chicken bussed it down to San Juan del Sur, surf town on the Pacific coast the morning of my bday. Poor Dave under mad pressure to sort out the day and a pressie, considering we´re in each others company most of the time, no easy feat! He pulled it off of course and was treated like a princess! Thanks to Maura P we had a completely posh, splash-out meal in amazing restaurant looking down over the bay, my first bottle of wine in 2 months and it took 2 waiters 10 minutes to open the bottle...they don´t drink much of it around here!!

Anyway...that´s me for the mo...moving to surf beach today which is completely isolated save 45 minute dirt track...will be lots of surfing, hammock swinging and dreaming of dreams, how bad!

Muchas gracias for all the birthday wishes (including all the late ones!!)
xxx

Monday 7 May 2007

Roatan, Bay Islands - Paradise Found!

Just resurfaced from a week spent on Roatan which is one of the Bay Islands set in the Caribbean off the coast of Honduras.

Got there via a 16 hour bus journey from Antigua back down to La Ceiba in Honduras (we got burger king as part of the meal service on the bus!!) and then after a very hot sweaty night in unpleasant La Ceiba we got the ferry out to La Ceiba. It´s funny how the length of those bus journeys never seems to daunt us but by the time we got off (having started at 3 am) you feel like you´ve done a Trans-Atlantic flight! No fights yet, but I think we´ve both just learned to be quiet after those journeys cause the littlest thing is the biggest challenge...especially after you get off the bus and attacked by the hoards of taxi drivers trying to rip you off!

So we chose to go to Roatan despite the fact that every other backpacker seems to go to Utila...Mr Paul O´Connor worked in Roatan a couple of years ago and sang its praises so that was good enough for us.


After 2 weeks of non-beach in Guatemala, by the time we got to our hostel in West End Roatan, the first peek of the Caribbean was as sweet as ever! Considering the beach was right in front of our hostel, a hammock & sweet porch right outside and a bar with the perfect sun-set and piña coladas right in front on the beach, what else d´ya need, eh?

The Bay Islands are all about diving so signed up on Monday morning for our Advanced Dive Courses. I did one dive Monday morning and nearly passed out with the pain so 1 hilarious trip to a cowboy doctor later, I was forbidden from diving for the week due to an ear infection. So while Dave headed off I was resigned to swimming the beautiful calm water, reading books, hammock swinging & cooking food (eating out here was seriously expensive, so considering we could eat like kings in Guatemala for about 2 yo-yo´s, the beanie boyfriend ordered that if I wanted to continue sipping Piña Coladas, some restraint on the food expenditure front was required!).

So, considering we were never supposed to go to Honduras at all, 5 days turned in to a week and even at that we found it hard to leave. We had a couple of hilarious nights drinking the local rum & coke down on the pier (I haven´t had a glass of wine in 2 months!!). We met a guy from Carlow there who had visited on his way to Panama 16 months ago and he´s still there...lots of people like that out there.So the Bay Islands are definitely a recommendation, thumbs up and will be going back!


Next stop Grenada, Nicaragua...2 days of travel, about 17 buses, taxis and lots of dodgy movies on the bus!

Wednesday 25 April 2007

San Pedro, Chi Chi & Lake Atitlan

Eventually got out of Antigua and headed north to Lake Atitlan in a shuttle bus (anything to avoid the lunatic chicken buses who make it a rule to only overtake on corners).

Had to stop a couple of times on the way up so that they could finish the road...which meant sitting on the side of the road. Of course the entrepreneurial Guatemalans always seem to come out of the woodwork at any opportunity to sell anything from hot fudge to chickens!


To say that drugs are freely available in San Pedro is like saying it´s easy to get a pint of Guinness in Dublin! That said it is a beautiful sleepy town on the volanic lake Atitlan and we got a gorgeous rooftop room in a hostel with a view on to the lake.









On Sunday we headed up to Chi Chi which has the largest market in Guatemala twice a week. It was pretty chaotic and the bargaining was hilarious...the street was full of pigs, chickens, beautiful illuminous textiles and materials.









Monday we started spanish school, which is $60 a week for one on one tuition in beautiful gardens looking on to the lake. Dave´s loving it...not! Well, he´s definitely trying more than I thought he would...he´s back in our room diligently doing his homework now! Headed out canoeing on the lake yesterday which was ok, heading in to rainy season here so it completely clouded over. The Caribbean it ain´t!