Follow Amanda & Rob around the world for a year. From 30 September 2005!

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Final thoughts on Central America

As we prepare to leave Central America for the pacific islands, I thought I would note a few of our thoughts on this group of 7 countries, 5 of which we have visited.

Before we started our travels, Central America was the ´scary´place on our route, the countries where we thought we may be unsafe and it would be difficult to get around, buses would be infrequent and unreliable and we would be constantly paranoid that someone would nick our iPods. How wrong we were! Until a few days ago I was looking forward to leaving CA to start the next phase of our trip (we have mentally broken it down into bitesized chunks to make it easier to digest!). However, I recently realised that I´m not sure I want to leave after all.

Aside from a few bad habits, we have had a wonderful experience here - it is unbelieveably easy to travel around and extremely traveller-friendly. OK, we haven´t exactly made it off the beaten track, but even so, I have been pleasantly surprised by the frequency and punctuality of buses, people are generally friendly, helpful and a good source of information, and we have not had one bad experience concerning our safety. Aside from that, we have come to be used to the little things that make this place different. The chicken buses which have our packs balanced precariously on top no longer scare us, and a bumpy ride isn´t a bad thing, it´s fun! You get to see a lot more from a bus window than from the air. I even commented the other day when we got a fancy minibus to a Costa Rican reserve that it wasn´t very nice because I couldn´t see out of the windows properly (they were kind of blacked out), never mind that the seats were very comfy and it was air conditioned, I wanted a view!

There are a few things that I didn´t appreciate, e.g. in Guatemala it seemed that it was acceptable to urinate on the side of a street in public, in Honduras the people were generally a little miserable and the men insisted on spitting loudly and publicly, and in Nicaragua people threw all their rubbish right out of the bus window without a second thought. Costa Rica, although very beautiful, is also relatively expensive compared to the rest, due to too many tourists. But hey, you can´t have it all.

If anyone needs inspiration where to go for a 2-3 week holiday, I would certainly recommend going to Guatemala, Belize or Nicaragua, or indeed all three!

So, until the next time amigos - we´re flying from San Jose to LA on Friday morning and then overnight on Friday night from LA to Tahiti. It will be a shock to the system I expect, especially the price increases!

xxx

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Loved the uncompromsing position LOL! All the pictures are absolutely amazing, can't wait for the next batch.

Anyway, hope we'll have more time to chat on Y! next time... Miss you guys and am green with envy, never felt so tired in my life. B xox

08 December, 2005 22:29

 

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