Friday, April 29, 2016

Backpacker diet

As I sit here watching Jason take in another item of clothing I feel compelled to write about the backpacker diet.  It’s a simple diet, and its efficacy can not be denied, given my informal observation that very few backpackers are overweight.  The premise of the diet is simple and at its heart follows the motto one local used to describe backpackers “more time, less money.”  Well actually he said “Mas tiempo, menos dinero.” and was referring to our decision to wait for a bus, rather than pay more for a taxi - but the sentiment is correct.  

The more time, less money way of life means that you try to avoid buying food, with many backpackers living on only one real meal a day, plus those free pancake breakfasts.  Any food you do purchase must provide maximum nutrition/calories for the cost.  There is also the eternal backpacker dilemma of whether to use their limited funds to purchase alcohol or food.  I’m sure you can guess which wins out most of the time.  (This must be why we’re bigger than most backpackers we meet, we choose food over alcohol.)  The other side of the equation is to avoid paying money for transport.  Taxi? It’s only 2km to my hostel, I can walk with all my belongings on my back.  Bus?  It’s only 6km, I can walk, it’s not like I’m in a rush and who knows what I’ll see on my way.  Then when your diet needs that extra boost, food poisoning is just the thing to drop those last few kilos.  


I think I should market it.  It’s got to be a lot more enjoyable than most intensive weight loss programs, well except for the food poisoning part.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

One island, two volcanoes and high expectations.

Ometepe is somewhere I have mixed feelings about.  The expectations were immense - the highlight of Nicaragua, the highlight of central america, love love love, paradise on earth and so it went on.  From other travelers, blogs, guidebooks, the consensus was that Ometepe was THE destination.

Our journey there left us with a slightly unpleasant feeling before we’d even set foot on the island.  It was the first time when we have felt ripped off and lied to by a local bus.  Usually the fares have been either clearly displayed, or we have been obviously charged the same as the locals.  On this occasion, however, we were asked to pay before getting on the bus (a slight anomaly) and when we saw the locals pay it seemed they paid around half of what we did.  Even more unusually towards the end of the journey the conductor started approaching us and the other tourists on the bus about needing a taxi to get to the port.  Then all of a sudden a taxi driver was actually on the bus with him convincing us of the need for his services.  I was fairly certain there was a bus, but the others thought we needed to take the taxi.  Everything was rushed, chaotic, there was a ferry in 20 minutes we were told, if we leave now you can make it.  The price of the trip halved, quickly enough that I’m sure we still paid twice what a local would.  When we arrived at the wharf it was to discover the next ferry wasn’t for 3 hours, and the less comfortable small boat not for another hour.

The money involved was small, but always before bus conductors have been a reliable source of information regarding onward travel.  It set us on edge, and our distrust meter was turned on.  Eventually we did make it to our hotel, but it took 7 hours, 3 buses, a collectivo taxi, and a slow ponderous boat trip with waves splashing in the sides as the crew bailed water out of the belly of the boat.  Not to mention a swarm of touts that had to be negotiated between the ferry port and the bus on the island.

The next day the island did show us why it’s so famous.  It is beautiful.  We were staying in the middle of the island, between the two volcanoes that form it.  Concepcion is a child’s drawing of a volcano, Maderas a smaller, greener version.  We walked along the beach with a volcano in front and a volcano behind, as herons, vultures and hawks flew around us.  As we headed inland blue-tailed magpies flitted between trees, and always a volcano dominated the landscape.  We spent much of the afternoon at Ojo de Agua, where we slipped off the slackline and jumped from the tarzan swing, enjoying the refreshing clear water (with miraculous healing properties, of course).  Later we sat in the gardens of the hostel as everyone gathered together watching as the sky turned orange and the sun set behind Concepcion.  It was magical.   

But even so, for us, it didn’t live up to the hype.  I would still recommend it as somewhere to go, but without the pressure of expecting it to be the best Central America has to offer.


Wednesday, April 20, 2016

A place to get stuck for awhile

When you’re traveling for a long time occasionally you find a place where you get stuck, Granada is one of those places for us.  We had originally planned 2 days here, but it’s ended up being closer to a week.  We were lulled by the beauty of the city, the hectic chaos of the market, volcanoes to climb, crater lakes to swim in, and a hostel with a pool.  Some days we chilled out, exploring the city for a couple of hours before returning for a swim during the heat of the day.  Other days were much more active (climbing a volcano comes to mind), but all of them were good.  

The volcano in question was Mombacho volcano.  All the guidebooks list it as a good easy volcano to climb, but this is based on taking a tuk tuk from where the bus stops to the entrance and then a truck to the top of the volcano.  This approach lets you enjoy the walks around the rim of the craters, without expending a lot of effort.  This is not the approach we took.  We probably could have spent the dollar for the tuk tuk, but it was only a 1.5km fairly flat walk, so we didn’t.  The truck up the volcano on the other hand costs $20 per person, which in real terms for us meant catching it would equal 2 nights accommodation.    There was no way we were going to pay that when we could walk it.  We were pretty sure we could walk it anyway.  We had heard various rumours about how long the walk takes, 2 hours, 4 hours, just don’t do it.  Any and all of the above.  

It starts off not too bad, although the slope is relentless and we were reminded how bad we are at going uphill.  We had been walking over an hour before we reached the cloud forest, and although the scenery was more beautiful, the slope was steeper still.  Once we got to the top the information centre had a model of the volcano and a guide cheerfully pointed out the near vertical part of the volcano we had ascended in the last 2km of the walk.  I believe it.  

Once in the forest we began to hear howler monkeys, some close, some further away.  Turning yet another corner we suddenly saw movement, monkeys jumping in the trees above the path.  They were everywhere above us and on both sides, and they were calling in full voice.  It was amazing to be so close as they roared, such a loud sound to come from such a small animal.  I was entranced.  We took (yet another) break and pretended it was just to watch and listen to the monkeys, rather than because we were unable to go any further.  

I tried to take photos of the steepness, but it never quite comes out.  For my daily invert I laid down on the road and it was one of the scariest inverts I’ve done as even on the pavers I felt like I was going to slide headfirst down the hill.  

At the top of the volcano we went on one of the hikes around the crater rim.  The views were spectacular with Granada, the 365 islands created from one of the eruptions of Mombacho and Laguna de Apoyo spread out before us.  Stunning, and we felt we had earned it.

The next day we took it easy heading to Laguna de Apoyo, which is a crater lake reportedly over 200m deep.  We could believe it easily, having walked around a crater the day before which was a massive hole with near vertical sides dropping out of sight.  We kayaked, lazed in inner tubes, and jumped off the pontoon into the lake.   Jason attempted to teach me how to do backflips off the pontoon.  He failed.  Although that was probably the fault of the student rather than the teacher.  Then we returned to our hostel, where we quickly got into the pool to cool off from the drive back to town. 

We’re moving on tomorrow, and it’s sad to know that we won’t have a pool to cool us down anytime the heat gets too much.  Although we are going to be staying on an island, so we can probably use the lake.  





Friday, April 15, 2016

A fortress where you would least expect one

We didn’t really have any idea of what to expect from El Castillo, particularly as we hadn’t met anyone who had been there.  To get there involves a 3 hour boat journey down the Rio San Juan.  I love being on these local forms of transportation, where people who would not look out of place walking down Sydney streets get dropped off in the middle of nowhere where they are met by barefoot children, or machete wielding partners, or sometimes they are there alone with nothing but jungle around them.

On our way down we also came across a raccoon swimming from one side of the river to the other, much to the excitement of everyone on the boat.  Eventually we turned a bend in the river and there it was, a fortress on top of a hill.  It may not be the most well preserved, or elaborate ruin we’ve ever seen, but it is so incongruous to come across a pyramid shaped fortress in the middle of jungle where houses are mainly cobbled together from wood and corrugated iron.  


We found ourselves a very basic double with gaps in the ceiling, walls and floor.  But the location more than made up for any deficiencies, situated over the water with a terrace where we could laze in a hammock watching the fortress turn golden as the sunset, listening to the river bubble it’s way over the rapids.  Despite the number of hotels (most of which were empty, or like our own had only one room occupied) it felt very much like a town going about its business.  Even the main tourist attraction, the fortress, has the town library in the old headquarters and when school finished we watched as children entered the fortress on their way to the library.  

Passports please

Border crossings are normally an inconvenience that are just a part of trouble, however we were actually looking forward to the border crossing from Costa Rica to Nicaragua.  We had decided to go the less travelled route where the crossing involves a beautiful boat trip down a river, with a quick stop at an aquatic border post.  Unfortunately about a year ago they built a bridge across the river, so you can now take the bus.  Locals are very much in favour of the bus route and on arrival in Los Chiles we discovered the boat is nowhere near as reliable as it used to be.  Depending on who we spoke to the boat would arrive at 11am, 12pm, not until tomorrow and leave anywhere between 1pm and 4pm today or tomorrow.  We sat by the river watching tour buses arrive and all the tourists transfer to boats for tours down the river and debated what we should do.  Eventually we decided we would rather get across the border, than wait on a boat that may not arrive (it was 12pm on a Sunday by this point, so it wasn’t looking good).  We put our packs back on and traipsed to the other side of town where the bus stop is.  Here the confusion continued.  We struck up a conversation with a couple of locals, and after awhile they suggested we should just go with a car rather than wait for the bus given the price should be the same.  Jason went to find out the price from one of the taxis, only to be quoted four times the price we had been told it should cost.  Refusing to pay that high a gringo tax we went back to waiting.  However the taxi driver started talking about how the border would close at 4pm, and the bus wasn’t coming for another two hours.  After a bit more of a discussion with the friendly locals we kept to the wait for the bus plan and I enjoyed helping one of the locals with his German in anticipation of an upcoming trip to visit his brother who lives there. 

The bus did come, after approximately one hour of waiting and we were on our way.  The border post, was a few demountable buildings and a bit more confusion.  The first official wrote down our details in a notebook and looked in 3 of our 4 bags before waving us on.  We then had to figure out how to pay the departure tax as it involved using an atm machine without any instructions in English.  After a few attempts and asking for help, we discovered the trick was to slowly insert the credit card then quickly remove it - one of the few combinations we hadn’t tried!


After this things simplified, but still involved way more officials than I would think needed given we had to show about 10 people our passports on the way through.  It’s always amazing how things change when you’ve only walked a few steps.  In Costa Rica they don’t actually have a standing army, the first person we saw in Nicaragua was a soldier with a rifle.  We have seen so many armed troops, not to mention security guards sitting near atms with shotguns.  Then there was the evidence that we were on the drug smuggling highway, with frequent bag searches and having to provide our documentation to every third person (including 3 times on one boat trip).  It will be interesting to see how things change once we are on the other side of the country away from the drug smuggling route.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Corcovado, a tale of sweat and wildlife

To explain our experience of Corcovado, I really need to start with the heat.  It is the sort of heat that leaves you dripping sweat 5 minutes after having a cold shower, when all you’ve done is lie down in bed.  Combined with humidity that leaves the clothes you haven’t worn damp, the ones you have saturated.  Sunscreen washes off in minutes as the sweat falls like rain down your face, and even drinking 4 liters of water in a day not a drop makes it to your bladder.

It was in this that we set off to hike almost 20km to Sirena station.  It is a nearly 2 hour drive from Puerto Jimenez to Carate where the walk starts, so even with an early start we didn’t begin the hike until 7:30am.   By that time the small drop in temperature that night time provided had disappeared and the mercury was already topping 35 degrees.  As we started walking, much of it on soft sand along a mercilessly long beach which provided no shade from the pounding sun, we questioned what we were doing thinking we were up to this.  But by this point we were committed, and there was no turning back.  We were somewhat mollified when we caught up with the other group hiking the trail that day, a group of 20 something surfer dudes with tanned skin and ribbed abs all of whom seemed to have misplaced their shirts, to find they were also struggling just as much as we were.  (We felt even better about ourselves on the way back, when we did the walk in two and a half hours less than them!)

We joined up with them and entered the forest together to search for puma, our guides convinced they would have more success together.  Thomas, our guide, used his nose as much as his eyes and ears to search for animals.  Often proclaiming he could smell anteater, peccaries, tapir or cat piss.  Finger crossed we scanned the path, waiting as our guide disappeared into the undergrowth to see if there was something just out of sight.  It was not long, maybe an hour, before we were rewarded by two puma resting only 20m from the path.  We looked into their beautiful eyes, as they alternated staring at us and scanning the trees for prey.  It was an amazing experience to be so close and on foot to such beautiful creatures.  This was why we were sweating our way through the jungle.  It was magical.

Our guide was an interesting person.  He grew up on the border of the park and had started hunting illegally when he was 10 years old with his grandfather.  By 12 he was hunting at night as well as during the day.   In his words he would shot everything that moved, mainly for fun, but if something was edible he would eat it.  He continued hunting and mining for gold (also illegal within the park) until he was 20 and his uncle convinced him to become a tour guide.  He volunteered for a few months in the park, and a few more with some biologists, and has been a tour guide ever since.  Occasionally this background would come out, for example we now know that Great Currasow tastes delicious.  It also sounds more like a cow mooing than a bird, but I doubt that impacts the flavour.  

In the way of guides everywhere what is exciting for them, is not necessarily that exciting for the tourists.  We loved the monkeys and the coati, even though they were both common sights.  For him though the most exciting thing we saw was a wasp.  It landed on his leg and he was frantically trying to retrieve his phone to take a picture begging it to stay and not fly away.  What followed was a long explanation of this wasp with it’s long tail and how it uses it to breed in figs.  On another day we were together with another couple when the two guides started jumping for joy and giving each other hi-5s.  They assured us that a blob high up in the tree was a porcupine, although even with binoculars we could only barely make out a rough shape and a possible head.  The couple who were from Alaska, offered to send them a photo of a porcupine from their backyard, as the guides attempted to get an identifiable photo through a telescope.

Despite the heat, the sleeping arrangements (bits of foam under mosquito nets with everyone packed together on one raised wooden platform) and the ticks, it was definitely an experience worth having.  I loved being woken at 3:30am by the sound of howler monkeys, and starting the first hike of the day marveling at the Milky Way visible in all it’s glory.  I loved the the grin on our guides face when he returned from an explore of the undergrowth which meant he had found some animal or other.  I loved sitting by the river chatting to new friends whilst spider monkeys played (and fought) in the trees around us.  I loved coming across the unexpected such as a mother coati with two day old cubs who couldn’t even walk yet. 

One of the surprises for us was the sound that howler monkeys make, because it doesn’t sound like a howl to me, more the noise a monster in a b-grade horror movie makes.  They were even used for some of the dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park, and apparently other movies so we weren’t the only ones to picture monsters not monkeys when hearing them call.  It’s also loud, the loudest land mammal with their call being audible up to 5km away.

Unfortunately our last day had a slightly unpleasant start.  We woke up at 4am and packed our belongings ready for the 8 hour walk to Carate  However, when it came time to put on our shoes Jason’s were missing.  To cut a long story short they had been stolen by one of the construction workers and we did get them back; but it took 3 hours, some girl tears, and a refusal to just accept they were stolen given we were an 8 hour hike from anywhere, Jason needed the shoes to hike out and there were less than 10 suspects so it was perfectly reasonable to wake them up and search their belongings.  

We ended up leaving at 7:20am, which meant the sun was already up and the temperature rising rapidly, and we now only had 6 hours to make it to the car.  Yes, we made it.  Yes, we were exhausted.  Yes, we stank.  As Jason said as he went for a shower - “I really do stink, I’ve found two ticks and they’re both dead!”  I found this hysterical and spent ten minutes laughing so hard I couldn’t talk.  It may have been partly due to the sleep deprivation, and general exhaustion.



Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Let's take the fun route!


Rio Pacuare was not the most adrenaline filled rafting trip we’ve ever done, that title goes to the Nile in Uganda, but I think it was the prettiest.  We had a brilliant guide for our trip, who was quite dismissive of some of the other guide’s skill levels.  He took a lot of pleasure in being one of the few guides not to get stuck on the rocks in places where the water was very shallow.  He also tried to up the adrenaline as much as possible, much to the frustration of one of the other people in our boat, Adele.  Every time he would explain there were two routes, the easy one, and the "more fun" one she voted for the easy, and the guide took us the more fun route.  On the biggest rapid of the day she choose to move to a boat taking the easier route, whilst we went through the biggest section backwards! Jason fell out of the raft at this point, and the guide grabbed on to me or I would have followed.  After lunch he then gave us all a siesta, taking our paddles whilst we sat inside the raft using the seats as pillows.  We think this was partly to tease one of the guides who was frantically trying to get his boat to paddle forward, then backward, then stop, then forward.  Whilst we lazed in the sun and our guide made it look easy.  When we did hit the next rapid it was a bit of a shock as we didn’t see it coming and all of a sudden we were all knocked over to the side. All the while we made our way through beautiful rainforest and canyons, to the sound of monkeys and toucans.  Not a bad way to spend a day!

You'll have to find your own sloth

Costa Rica made a good first impression.  Puerto Viejo was really only on our list to visit the Jaguar Rescue Centre.  It was well worth a visit, but we were surprised by how much we liked the town.  There were easy walks through jungle, that cascaded onto the beach.  It seemed such a small stretch of rainforest between the road and the beach that we were surprised to find howler monkeys foraging high up in the canopy as we walked beneath them on our way to dinner, watching the sun set over the ocean streaming red and orange across the sky.  Not all the wildlife was quite so friendly, although it sounds somehow melodramatic when I say that an ant tried to amputate my toe.  It’s also a slight exaggeration, but it certainly drew serious blood, not pinprick blood more been stabbed and need something to slow the flow of blood, blood.  I naturally freaked and threw my shoe which was housing said ant into the undergrowth.   Jason then spent a good 10 minutes searching for my shoe whilst I tried to stem the flow of blood.

As for the Jaguar Rescue Centre, it was well worth the trip.  It is most definitely a rescue centre, and although it runs tours it is not trying to be a quazi zoo, and the entrance fees are used directly to pay for running the centre.  The enclosures aren’t massive, but as the animals are restored to health they spend time in the actual forest.  The volunteers who work there have varied jobs such as taking the adult monkeys into the forest in the morning, and collecting them in the afternoon if they choose to come back, or following the anteater around to make sure it doesn’t get into trouble.  During our visit it was asleep in a tree, with a volunteer sitting nearby just in case it woke up.  As the animals improve in health the enclosures are removed, and the animals decide when to move on.   During our visit we saw a toucan that had been released come visit for a bath, and an owl that was born in the sanctuary stared down at us with unblinking eyes.  We also saw a wild sloth with it’s baby in the forest that encroaches into the sanctuary, even though it had never called the rescue centre home.  

We choose to extend our stay a couple of days, but had to move on as our hotel was full. Refusing to pay the $40 per night that seemed standard we ended up agreeing to the cheapest place we could find, without reading the small print.  This included a thin foam mattress, cold showers and an absence of curtains and privacy.  We grumbled slightly, then we found the silks.  We played until our arms were shaky and our bodies dripping with sweat - all of a sudden this seemed like the perfect choice of hostel.

Our final day we visited Cahuita National Park, and were amazed at the amount of wildlife we saw.  I was beginning to feel quite proud of my wildlife spotting abilities after spotting sloth, numerous troupes of howler monkeys, and even stopping Jason just before an agouti ran across the path in front of us.  That is until we were stopped at a picnic table and a man started gesturing wildly at us, I looked behind me and saw nothing.  He continued his frantic pointing and I looked down to see a crab-eating raccoon less than 20cm from my feet!  


Most of the time it felt like we had the park to ourselves, however just after entering the park there were a lot more people and it was not long before we saw the first sloth high up in the trees.  As I tried to take a photo a tour guide approached me “I’m sorry, this is a private tour, you’ll have to find your own sloth.”  Incredulous I took a photo and we moved on, later finding another sloth much closer to the ground.  If only she had been there so we could have asked her and her group to move along, as this sloth was only for those not on tour!