Where Have You Been?

Carrie &Jonathon,

I’m confused looking at your site… you guys have traveld a lot looks like… where all have u been?

james

Hey James!

Well, we have done a lot of travel in the past, but since October, we’ve been Read the rest of this entry »

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Podcast #5: The Northern Part of Central America

In this podcast, we cover about 7 weeks of travel, from the time we left Granada, Nicaragua, early in December, through today, January 18.

Download the travel podcast MP3 here
We cover our travels through places and experiences like:

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Tourism Map of Central America: Our Map from 3 months of Travel

In three months, we visited 6 countries, covered over 2,500 land miles (mostly by bus) and saw some really amazing places.
We also met some truly fantastic people – both people who are involved in tourism as tourists and tourist guides, and people who are living their lives in the countries we visited.
This map is not yet 100% complete, but gives you an idea of the places we’ve been and what we’ve been up to.
If you’re looking to ride Ticabus or Tracopa and want to know exact locations, this map should be rather helpful for you.
Also, we’ve tried to put in all our hotel stays (Think we got them all on here) and will be linking from this map to the reviews on our site so that you can easily get to everything in one place.
This should help you know where to stay if you visit these countries.
If you’re going to Central America, we hope that this helps you to both find things you’d like to see and do, as well as to know where exactly those things to see and do are located.
If this map does prove helpful for you, please comment below and let us know!

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Carrie’s Current countries visited

visited 15 states (6.66%)
Create your own visited map of The World
On our trip through Central America, I got to add 6 countries to my map of visited countries. It’s too bad not all of them have a stamp representation in my passport.
I’ve actually been to more countries that this, but I didn’t spend the night, so they don’t count. I’ve been to France numerous times when I lived in Germany, and I also drove through Austria. They’ll be added to the list sometime soon through.

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Geckos, Roosters, Fireworks, Car Alarms, Children, Dogs, Sneezing, Parades and Bells, Doorbells, and Construction

What can you really do about so much noise but laugh?
I’m a relatively light sleeper, and have learned to travel with earplugs. In fact, before departing on this part of our travel/working experience, Carrie and I bought a box of 500+ earplugs on Amazon.
We used some of these at La Tortuga Feliz and haven’t used them too much since. Not that we haven’t had occasion to. With the exception of Hotel Angela (where we had an interior room) and our time in Boquete, Panama, every morning and often in the middle of the night, I’ve been awoken by the sounds of roosters, children, fireworks, children, dogs, parades, or bells. In general, I find North Americans and American culture to be pretty noisy, but I’m finding Central Americans and Central America to be even noisier.
As I’m writing this, Carrie just woke up and asked me (first thing – not “good morning” or anything like that, but) “Is that a dog or a sick frog?”
In general, every city in Central America (and in Argentina) has some stray dogs which seem to do the majority of their barking between 9PM and 3AM. About 2:30 AM and continuing through to about 5:30 or 6:00 AM come the roosters. They continue throughout the day, but this is when the majority of their sounds occur. Roosters are PLENTIFUL in almost every place we’ve been in Central America, most of them sharing their calls LONG before I can see any sign of sunlight.
Then come the fireworks. I like fireworks as much as anyone, but regardless of where we have been (again excepting Boquete), there have been fireworks every day just before 6AM, just before 6PM, and frequently around noon. Sometimes they also get shot off for a few minutes at midnight.
Why so many fireworks? Well, apparently that’s what they do in Central America in December and January to celebrate Christmas. There’s even a saying in nicaragua which goes something along the lines of “a man always has money for beer and fireworks, even if he can’t afford to feed his own family.”
In Granada, Nicaragua, they have 9 days of celebrations for the Immaculate Conception of Jesus in which they revere statues of Mary and parade them through the town to the church. These are fun festivals which include candied apples, trinkets, and of course, fireworks.

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Casa De Cafe, Copan Ruins

Missed writing last night because I was so tired. We caught the bus from Guatemala City to Copan, Honduras, at 5 AM from a hotel that was about 6 blocks away from our hotel (Hotel Dai Nonni). The shuttle picked us up at the Westin Camino Real, where we didn

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An evening in Copan, Honduras and current events (and travel safety) discussion with a local

Jonathan and I really needed a nap yesterday.
We got back to Casa de la Cafe after the ruins closed, at about 5:30 last night. We decided to just lie down for awhile.
4 hours later, we woke up. By that time, almost everything in town had closed (the internet cafe, and most restaurants).
We had a good talk with Cid about the current state of affairs in Honduras. We also got to hear his perspective on the situation.

It

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Copan, Honduras: Mayan Ruins

With all we have heard about political unrest and the lack of safety in Honduras, we were not sure if it was a country we were going to visit on this trip.
After lots of research, Jonathan and I decided that it would be very safe for us to travel to Copan.
Copan is one of the safest places in Honduras, and it is really easy to get to without passing through any of the “bad” areas.
We had also heard that it is best to visit the ruins at Copan before visiting Tikal, Guatemala. (Something about visiting Copan being anti-climactic after seeing Tikal.) So, we found a shuttle between Guatemala City and Copan.

We left our hotel at 4:30am (yep, AM) to walk (yes…we walked through Guatemala City) the 6 blocks (see – not far) to where the shuttle would pick us up.
After about 5 hours in the shuttle (more on shuttles later), and a very easy border crossing (where, sadly, we received no stamps, just a little slip of paper) we were in Honduras.

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