Notes from a Fairytale Island

Paradise found:

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There are times when you go travelling when you really have to, well, travel. The day we left Guatemala was one of those days. It began at 6am with an unscheduled backpack-laden sprint to Livingstone harbour thanks to an insufficiently insistent alarm clock. Catching the commuter motorboat just in time we squeezed in between our fellow passengers and were whisked across the bay in a cloud of freezing sea spray. We were greeted at the dock by Raoul, whom we were reliably informed could get us to the Honduran border cheaper than any taxi. Joining forces with fellow backpacker Nathan we jumped into a minivan and were soon speeding towards the frontier. Following some scepticism at Raoul's suggestion that we pay a friend of his to drive us on to our final destination, some complicated Spanish negotiations, hasty exchange rate calculations and a heated misunderstanding at the point of payment we found ourselves sharing the back seat of an American Honduran man's SUV en route to the nearest major bus station. Unable to find said bus station, our American Honduran friend dropped us in the town square where we found a taxi to take us the rest of the way and he tootled off to finish his shopping. Moments later we were reclining comfortably on a surprisingly luxurious luxury coach bound for Tegulcigalpa, the Honduran capital, and I was happily munching on complimentary chocolate biscuits and sniffling at "A Walk to Remember" as we sped across Honduras. One more taxi ride and a total of 12 hours later we found a hotel room and collapsed for a while.

Tegucigalpa is a typical Central American capital city - scruffy, dirty and a bit on the sketchy side so the plan was to spend a night recovering from our epic voyage and psyching ourselves up for the 9 hour bus trip into Nicaragua the next morning. Part of this recovery was a trip to the city centre to reassure ourselves the Lonely Planet wasn't duping us into missing anything. We weren't - it took us an hour in a taxi to travel the 2km from our hotel to the main square and most of that time was spent sitting in streets crammed with fume-belching cars and lorries, piles of rubbish and kamikaze motorcyclists with our boy racer driver's Honduran Christian rock cd as an unexpected soundtrack. After a cursory inspection of the city centre we spied a Burger King and, in need of a quick fix tea before it got too late, we headed over. As we got to the front of the queue we noticed that something called a "family feast" meal was slightly cheaper than the 2 regular combo meals we were about to order. Following the backpacker instinct to save money at every opportunity we automatically ordered that instead and were duly presented with 4 burgers, 4 portions of fries and 4 drinks. Realising with embarrassment that our impromptu thriftiness was taking the stereotype of greedy Westerners to dizzying new heights we spent the rest of the meal skulking in a corner pretending the rest of our family had just nipped to the loo and avoiding the sidelong glances of everyone who passed our table...

After a frantic early morning sprint around all of Tegucigalpa's banks in search of an ATM that accepted our cards we made it onto the bus and settled in for the trip to Nicaragua's capital, Managua. From there we buddied up with an elderly Israeli gent to charter a taxi to Granada, saving ourselves a couple of cordobas and a tortuous journey in a dangerously overcrowded, dangerously overspeeding minibus. Granada was a pretty place - a bit like Antigua at first glance with old colonial buildings, a very yellow catherdral and a peaceful leafy main square. Unfortunately it was also overrun with gangs of American teenagers on some sort of synchronised field trip and the main street looked inexplicably like it had been teleported in from the Canary Islands, complete with hordes of middle aged Westerners and tour groups. However, Granada did introduce me to the joys of vigorón - a local specialty consisting of pickled cabbage, boiled yucca root and pork scratchings all served up on a banana leaf. Surprisingly tasty.

The much anticipated highlight of our Nicaraguan adventure was the island of Ometepe. Formed over several hundred years, the island grew from the gradual accumulation of solidified lava and ash from two active volcanoes that rise out of Lake Nicaragua. Still mercifully untouched by developers and package tours, Ometepe is a backpacker's paradise and as our early morning ferry chugged across the lake it emerged from the mist like something out of a fairytale. We checked into a hostel room surrounded by banana trees and hammocks in the shadow of the imposing Volcan Concepción and just metres from the lake shore. Here we spent a blissful 4 days swimming in the lake, dining al fresco at the hostel's restaurant, watching spider monkeys lazing around in the tree tops and admiring the sunsets. If we had more time we could easily have stayed for weeks, but Costa Rica and our next Wwoofing assignment beckoned and soon we were on the road again.