Central America Backpacking Episode 8/8: Playa del Carmen

Playa we hope will have a place we can spend our remaining 6 days before flying to LA on a relative budget. We manage to find a place for 280 pesos per night with a kitchen we can use and a fridge. Sweet we can cook! Funny that here in Mexico there is a Wall Mart, we may as well be back in the USA with the amount of Americans there are here. What we find interesting is that this Wall Mart is not actually that cheap. Some things like the fresh baked bread and the vegetables are good but appliances and clothing seem to cost more…?

We busy ourselves here by making daily trips to Wall Mart for sandwich ingredients and snacks We then head down to the beach for a walk and swim. Really making the most of our time on the white sand beaches here in Mexico. The main street has a whole bunch of souvenir shops catering to the ‘all inclusive package tourists’ or ‘the cruise ship crowd’ who come across on the ferry from Cozumel Island just off the coast. The shops are all overpriced and the small amount of shopping we did do was well bargained for!

There is not much to say about Playa for it really is a tourist destination, not somewhere we would normally choose to spend time. We are only here because of its proximity to Cancun Airport and the best value accommodation and food we could find. We have no doubt there are other parts of Mexico that would have been great to visit, possibly with a higher budget than we can allow by now.

White sand beaches

Central America – A conclusion

We began our time in Central America in Nicaragua with very little Spanish between us and knowing no numbers at all. As our Spanish slowly improved we moved north. Our favourite thing about Nicaragua was Gallo Pinto: rice and beans and the Avocados which were huge and only $1. Least favourite: high price for accommodation $17 – 20 USD per night. Its a real shame that while we are here its the tail end of the wet season and raining for a few hours at least every day. Because of this we missed some hikes and seeing some volcanic areas. Our time on Ometepe island got completely rained out and the whole island was put into a state or emergency with no power or water! We moved onto Guatemala faster than originally anticipated because of the rain, hoping we would find some finer weather.

Ometepe Volacnoes clouded in

Guatemala is the absolute highlight of our time in Central America, the locals, other nice travellers, culture, organic food, the coffee and most of all the natural environment here make it a place worth going back to. All this plus a daily budget of $15 USD for 2 of us. Not Bad at all! Guatemala will always hold a special place in our hearts!

Mexico/ anything after Guatemala will have a hard act to follow. Of course as already mentioned the part of Mexico that we ended up going to is by far not the most desirable! Culture here is different if not non-existent. They feed off tourism so much more here and this way of life seams lacking. For example the guy on the street charging tourists for a photo with his pet monkey/raccoon on a rope. Although very cute our hearts ache seeing these creatures trained for humans exploitation!

Tour groups at Tulum

One more thing that would have been useful to know is that because we crossed into Mexico at a land border (therefore not paying taxes which are usually included in flights here) and because we stayed in mexico more than 7 days we were required to pay $300 pesos each in taxes and fees before we could leave the country. Owel, one step closer to home, further from this type of bureaucracy!

Thanks for reading

xxx

Sly-Zo

Central America Backpacking 2/8: Isla De Ometepe & Granada, Nicaragua

Leaving San Juan Del Sur was actually harder than anticipated, we liked the simplicity of staying put for a while and enjoyed our time here regrouping, relaxing and eating tropical fruit again. Nina (if that was here name) of Ninas Hospedaje was sad to see us go too – we had just paid here$100! As we get on the bus directly outside the hostel we are struck once again how straight forward things can be sometimes. The bus tariff is displayed at the front of all government buses so we know how much to pay, 16 Cordoba each do about .50c (remember here that we are still operating in US currency) for the 40min trip.

The bus dropped us and 3 other girls on the side of the road just down from the road towards San Jorge pier where the boats leave for Isla De Ometepe, of course he drops us here so we are conned into taking a taxi rather than waiting on the side of the road for a bus. The girls are negotiating price and he starts at $3 per person, ‘do you guys wanna join?’ – no not at that price. We will pay $1 each or wait for the bus. We are happy to wait. ‘Oh but there is no bus’ says the taxi driver. Mmm yup of course he says this. We know he’s wrong. So we eventually get him down to $1 each and in we pile. Two of them are from Quebec ‘you know, the French part of Canada’. Yes we do know, but thanks for pointing that out – very French. The other is from Israel.

Sadly this is the best we got, volcano conception

The boat over to the island in the middle of this huge lake takes about an hour and costs 35 Cordoba each ($1.25). The boat is a “Launhca”, similar to some of the small boats we have been on in Asia, always dodgy. There are larger ferries that take cars but these are more expensive and slower. A few rocky waves into the trip the amount of water coming in at the back and sides is slightly alarming but it seems to be a regular occurrence. Bags off the floor and lift your feet seems to be the trick. By the end of the boat trip we are both feeling a little sick, a combination of the waves and the fact we are being choked out by engine fumes as its exhaust is expelled into the main cabin.

Where’s Zoe?

Arriving in Monoglypa we have decided, since its wet season and forecast to rain, we will stay here and rent a bike to explore the island.

Rain rain, go away!

Bad timing as it rains heavily all night and we wake to no power and a sodden island. Everything we own is damp and musty smelling and without power or running water we can’t even shower or flush a toilet. We lounge about in Hammocks reading and playing cards as it continues to rain all day and a state of emergency is declared on the Island. Simon went to the shop to get water before it got dark and came back laughing at the locals running in buying candles and water all panicky and stressed with darkness and more rain descending rapidly. There were land slides around the main roads of the island and many were stuck on the other side. Apparently the power will be out for 10 days, looks like we are leaving tomorrow. We did enjoy a lovely, romantic candle-lit dinner however. Small silver lining!

Happy to be leaving here but sad we couldn’t see the island in its glory. In Summer it would be beautiful with hummingbirds, trekking, coffee plantations and swimming in natural springs not to mention the lake! We team up with a Brazilian couple in a Taxi to Rivas where we will get a bus to Granada. It’s not till 2 pm so we all head off to find a lunch spot. They were really lovely people and helped us with Spanish communication for a few hours before going separate ways in Granada, their hotel budget was our daily budget.

A so-called chicken bus. No chickens and rather comfortable padded seats inside. Very fancy!

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Granada

Granada, Nicaragua not to be mistaken with Granada, Spain is a sweet little place! Bustling with life and locals in a way it reminds me of Hanoi without the plethora of motorbikes. Granada is the first of what I imagine will be many Colonial towns we will visit as we make the way North to Mexico. Granada was built by the Spanish to be a ‘show’ town of sorts, a way of the Spanish to say ‘look what we can give you by colonising you, a pretty place with lots of beautiful churches’ and in a way they are right, its pretty. Hard to imagine the Nicaraguans liking being run by another country and culture for long, they are a proud people.

We have enjoyed our time here finding a hostel called Entre Amigos $16 with all the trimmings. Free local coffee (omg yum), free water, use of a kitchen, a quiet courtyard area and a great room. The details the owner has gone to are lovely and its the small touches like a hand-made mirror and nice tables in the room that make the difference. We have enjoyed making pasta for dinner and avocado on toast for breakfast. I’ve actually missed toast, bread is fine but toast is better! Cant wait to eat Vogels when we get home!  The gift shop out front (that you have to walk through) makes me want to buy everything! Everything! It’s so mean!

 

6 beers for 125c or $5

 

Today we head out of here and catch a bus towards Managua again. We are going to get a bus to Guatemala, found one that’s only $5 more than Tica Bus, the notoriously bad company. We have to be at the bus station at 2:30am so instead of wasting a nights accommodation like all the others we sit at near by bar till they close at 10pm. The owners were very nice and we had a long half Spanish half English conversation. While we are here there is small earthquake. Apparently a 7. something but for us it was small and only lasted 20 seconds. The locals were buzzed. The owner was very caring and I guess they don’t get many tourists coming by as they offered us a ride to the bus station (500m away) and we offloaded the remaining coins we had.  The bus journey only ended up taking 17hrs, the longest bus ride we have taken on our 2 year trip, but with foot rests, in bus meals/drinks, Wifi and a bathroom the time flew by.

We had one issue at the Honduras border. A greedy agent must have looked at all the strange stamps in our passport and seen an opportunity as we were asked for a vaccination certificate. With the help of an English passenger who translated for us we paid a $30 bribe each and were on our way. The alternative was to wait in town for 10 days to get yellow fever shots and a certificate. One other south american looking girl was pulled up because she had been to Peru, but no one else. Other travellers also didn’t have the certificate but probably had no other stamps in their passport, I’m guessing it was the Asian countries in ours. The crazy part was we were only passing through this country for 4 hrs or so, no reasoning here. Oh well we just hope the money goes to his family not the bar later that day. We were a little worried as we still had two more boarder crossings, El Salvador and Guatemala but luckily no other issues.

Thanks for reading

xxx

Sly-Zo

Central America Backpacking: Week 1/8 – San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua

After the stress and hassle we went through in the last month in America we are just overjoyed to be backpacking again. Lets be honest here – there are some things I have collected that cost too much to post home but cannot be thrown away – so we have our small 10 kilo Deuter 30L packs each plus a duffel bag with some extras. Not how we usually backpack but this time its only for 8 weeks and not 9 months like the time we spent in South East Asia, so we can deal with it. I hope!

More than our traditional type of packing light….

Arriving in Managua, Nicaragua the capital city we get a cab to the place we are staying and I cant help but giggle. This is hilarious driving in a beaten up Honda Civic at breakneck speeds through traffic our driver yelling obscenities out the window at anyone too close to him or in his way. We sharply stop and he asks us for money, an on the street money changer is there so that we split our $20 and he can get the $10 we decided on for the fare. Are we back in Myanmar again?

It feels so good to laugh, there hasn’t been much of that recently! We missed this type of chaos, that’s for sure! ‘Tour?’ he says, in one of his only English spoken works, “No gracious, siesta!” using about all the Spanish we can muster right now. Shower and sleep, in a real bed. Thats all we need!  We managed to find a place to eat later on, 2 tacos and 2 Mexican cokes $3.

Managua aint great and we just need some time to regroup, eat tropical fruit and rest for a week before we tackle the rest of this trip so we decide to go south to San Juan Del Sur, a surfing town. Lucky for us our guest house guy gave us a ride to Humembes Market, for bus to Rivas, $5 each, im sure we over paid. From the side of the road where the highway splits off towards San Juan Del Sur we waited for a bus but settled on a taxi for $2.

 

On our first day here, Simon got a small cut on his foot while swimming which then turned out to be a stingray. It was just a tiny mark in the skin next to his big toe. It really stun and swelled but thanks to Helen preparing us with a hearty first aid kit before we left we had some antibiotics for him to take and put some antibacterial cream to keep out infection. He’s fine now but it put us off swimming a few days!

Staying at Ninas Hospedaje, we have a great upstairs room with a double and single bed, towels, a nice outside area and a view over the rooftops towards the ocean. Right opposite the market and the bus stop right outside it can get noisy sometimes but at $17 per night we have the place mostly to ourselves and like to support the mum and daughter team who operate the place.

We found a local bakery and get a loaf or bread for 30c ($1) a massive locally grown Avocado for the same price, 3 tomatoes for $.50 and about 10 limes for the same price. This lasts us breakfast and lunch. $5 for two meals for two people – not so bad 🙂 Gallo Pinto, rice and beans from a place in the market for $.75 each or a full fried chicken meal with rice, salad and cheese is about $2. Such simple and tasty food, it’s so obviously local and mostly organic. So nice to eat well again!

The Nica people are friendly, not pushy like Asia and active here as it’s a surfing area. Locals and tourists run along the beach or swim to keep fit.

San Juan Del Sur literally translates to Saint Juan from the south. You can obviously see the Christian influence here with statues and the biggest building being a church. Most evenings we have been treated to a great sunset over the ocean, we are really enjoying it here and are able to eat cheap to save some money so we’ve ended up staying a week.

 

Tomorrow we move on and head to Isla De Omepete, a small island in the middle of  huge lake with 2 volcanoes on this tiny island. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading

xxx

Sly-Zo