:: Sunday, June 29, 2003 ::

Well, it looks like this is going to be the final diary entry of the trip. I'd like to go into detail about our last day in Mexico City, our fantastic-cum-frantic drive up the western coast of the States from LA to San Francisco in temperatures in the high 30s, and our big gay two day jaunt around San Francisco, but we get the feeling you wouldn't read it anyway. Besides, we'll be home in 36 hours, so we might as well tell you first hand.

Here then, is an incomplete and entirely random selection of high and low points from the year:

Best journey: London to Bangkok on Singapore Air. Honduras to Guatemala on 'King Quality' bus, with stewardess service!
Worst journey: Inle Lake to Yangon in Burma. Breakdowns, babies pissing in the aisle, hard non-reclining seats for 26 hours.

Best city: Sydney, Phnom Penh, San Francisco.
Worst city: Vientiane in Lao - dead as a dry dingo's donger. San Pedro Sula, Honduras - general sh!thole and AIDS capital of Latin America.

Best beach: Whitehaven in Oz's Whitsunday Islands or West Bay on Roatan, Honduras
Worst beach: Omoa, Honduras, China Beach, VietNam.

Hottest day: Day we crossed from Belize to Guatemala. 44 degrees C and 100% humidity. Nice.
Coldest day: Tied between Hong Kong and Milford Sound in New Zealand.

Best weather: Bay Islands, Honduras. Sun, sun, sun...
Worst weather: Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Rain, rain, rain...

Best animal: Tapir at Belize zoo. Nurse shark 15m under the water at Byron Bay, Oz.
Worst animal: A memorably mangy mutt in Bangkok. Hard to believe it's possible to have no hair AND no skin. Oh, and sandflies everywhere.

Best Beer: Beer Lao, Balboa Ice (Panama)
Worst Beer: Bia Chang (Thailand). Those changovers are not fun.

Best ladyboy: Cocktail 'waitress' in Bangkok.
Worst ladyboy: Unshaven manchick in Panama old town.

Most flatulent people: Burmese belchers, Hong Kong hoikers.
Most hygienic people: Singaporeans.

Best toilet experience: View from 32nd floor of spotless Swissotel bogs in Singapore.
Worst toilet experience: So many bins overflowing with bog roll. So many squat toilets. Maybe Kanchanaburi, where dozens of cockroaches crawled out of the rim after I lifted the seat.

Best New Zealand pie: Chicken, cranberry and camembert. Or something like that.

Best natural high: Skydiving, swimming with dolphins, Nitrogen narcosis diving at 40metres.

Least advisable thing stuck in a fan blade: Nose (Barney's in Fiji).

Highest number of toilet visits in a day: 20 (Barney after a suboptimal green curry in Lao).

Most surprising new thing learned about fish: They sleep.

Best girl companion for Barney: Claire
Best boy companion for Claire: you'll have to ask her.

Thanks for reading our humble offerings. See you on the other side!
:: Barney 6:40 AM [+] ::
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Guatemala

A few hours after leaving San Salvador, we were in the ugly smogpit of Guatemala City. We stayed in a central hotel, where prices were displayed by the hour as well as per night, but it was surprisingly comfortable, and we had no trouble except for the incessant hooting of bus horns from the bus station over the road. The next morning we walked through the market, hands firmly clamped on wallets, but found the people to be friendly and helpful. After our morning trot, we got on a high-speed chickenbus to Antigua.


Antigua is the best-preserved colonial town in Central America, despite various earthquakes which have damaged it over the years. It is in a valley surrounded by volcanoes, which makes it a very picturesque little place. As a result it is choc-full of tourists, some there to learn Spanish and others to buy ethnic-knacks from local Mayan villagers. We indulged in a bit of the latter, even staying behind a shop in an Adobe-walled colonial house which was until recently a sushi restaurant. The eccentric Paraguayan owner wanted to give each room a theme based on an extroardinary female historic figure. Our room was to be dedicated to Martha Gellhorn (like, who?). She was apparently one of the first female was correspondents, as well as being the only woman to have married, then left Ernest Hemingway. The owner tried to pressure Claire into painting a mural on the wall, but when she failed to produce any materials this proved somewhat difficult, so we left her with Claire´s sketches and told her to find someone else to finish the job.


On our second night we experienced what Antigua is really famous for. For the first time in the entire trip, the Earth moved. For Claire anyway - Barney was busy snoring away in ignorant bliss... The next day´s newspaper confirmed that the rumbling and shaking of the bed was not in fact Barney snoring, but an earthquake measuring 3 on the Richter scale. Nice. After a few days indulging in the exceptional variety of food and lively bars (mostly Irish, of course), we were Antigua´d out.


Our next stop was Lake Atitlan, our final Central American destination. The lake occup?es a former volcanic crater, and reaches 250m depth. Again, it is surrounded by volcanoes, so the camera has been wielded at every opportunity. Around the lake are a series of Mayan villages, and one tourist town called Panajachel, but known as Gringotenango (Mayan for "Place of the Gringos"). We have based ourselves there and taken boats to the other villages. As well as Mayans speaking their languages and wearing traditional clothes, we found some well-placed lakeside rocks and leapt around 6m into the warm water. Magic! One of the weirdest things about the local Maya is their fetish for gold teeth implants. We saw one woman on the back of a pickup proudly displaying a full set of gold gnashers, but most people make do with gold rims around the front teeth and the odd star-shaped bit of gold embedded in the middle two teeth. Mick Hucknall eat yer heart out.


Tomorrow a minibus will whisk us to the Mexican border, and from the border town of Tapachula, we´ll grab an 18 hour bus to Mexico City, making for a grand total of more than 24 hours on buses. Yikes! From there it´s six hours on a plane to LA. Then we´ll be hiring a car (which mysteriously works out cheaper than the train or coach) to drive to San Francisco up the famous Pacific coast highway.


After having a gay old time in SF, we´re embarking on our final journey. Not quite sure where it´ll take us, but wherever it is, we hope to observe traditional indigenous rituals and use only local transport to get from A to B. Oh yes, we are seasoned travellers now, dontchaknow.
:: Barney 2:06 AM [+] ::
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Nicaragua

War, Sandinists, Reagan, Iran-Contra affair, blah, blah, blah. Where Costa Rica was Central America´s peaceful exception, Nicaragua is the archetypal story of woe and destruction. The moment a vaguely left-wing government gained any power, the US found the nearest convenient counterrevolutionary bunch of bandits, and tooled them up to the hilt so they could rape, pillage and destroy any good work the government and people may have done. It´s not as bad as El Salvador, where there seem to be more guns than people since the US govt pumped $5 billion dollars into the right-wing army´s coffers, but it's still bad. Yet the Nicaraguans are, if anything more welcoming to Americans than to other nationalities. At the border, our US chum was allowed in with no delay, whilst the Brits were made to pay a border fee, pay to photocopy their passports (applied uniquely to Brits, without any explanation as to why). To cap it off, we then tried to get money out of the bank with our credit cards, and were told they would never work "because of your nationality". After two sweltering hours in a glorified Nicaraguan carpark, with no signs to tell border-crosees where to go, and excessive and unsympathetic bureaucracy at every turn, this was just the insult we needed. Having decided that our only option was to return to Costa Rica, we were saved at the last minute by Chris, who offered to lend us money till we found a Brit-friendly cashpoint. Cheers Chris! Neeedless to say, as soon as we exited the bank, we were hit with another mystery tax. On the verge of a tantrum, we paid up and left, righteous tears welling in our unwelcome British eyes!


Despite the shaky start, and nerves on the verge of collapse, we quickly realised that it was only the border employees who were a**eholes in Nicaragua. Everyone else was hugely nice to us. As we approached our first stop of San Juan del Sur, this time on the Pacific Coast, we breathed a huge sigh of relief. We found a nice quiet hotel, discovered a ridiculously good value local restaurant serving the best Chop Suey the world has ever seen, whilst screening the all-important finals of Miss Universe. Our interest in this classy competition was sparked whilst in Panama City - the city was hosting the final, and the "Misses" were being paraded roudn the country while we were there. Claire and I managed to miss the Misses by a day or so everywhere we went, but Alex and Chris followed them religiously, and swore blind that Miss Mexico winked at them (and brushed past, of course) at one of the parties the boys attended. San Juan del Sur was quiet and the beach was filthy, but it still attracted local surfers, and a stroll around the headland revealed loads of expensive properties (mostly owned by corrupt Nica politicians) clinging to the clifftops. In our hotel room we found an oil product amusingly called Lubri-M-Ass, as well as a crab who had taken up residence in my rucksack. Having atoned for an earlier hermit-crab-crushing incident by releasing the beast to its freedom on the main road, we jumped on a bus to the town of Rivas, on the edge of Lake Nicaragua. This is the biggest lake in Central America, and contains the unusual Island of Ometepe, formed by two adjacent volcanoes, joined in the middle by a giant volcanic tisnae/barse. The boat to the island was uneventful, but the 2 hour bus journey from the port to the town of Merida was so unpleaseantly bumpy it left us with double vision for days to come. I don't claim to understand the mechanics of building a road on a base of lava, but I'm pretty sure they could have done better than that. We stayed in a Hacienda, formerly owned by the Somoza dictatorship, then handed over to a local cooperative by the Sandinistas, then sold to a rich bloke who turned it into a one-stop backpacker shop. To give it credit, the place was cheap by Central American standards, dorm beds costing only US$2.75 per head. But it was nasty. There were holes in the walls, everything was damp, and one night Alex found a scorpion dangling from the windowsill by Claire´s and my bed. If you look at the photos, you'll see it was in the process of eating a gekko much larger than itself, using its pincers to insert gekko-goo into its gob as required. In deference to our belief that all animals have as much right to be here as we do, we allowed Alex the job of bottling the little b**tard to death. Very messy it was too, with much post-mortal twitching and bleeding by the scorpion.


One of Ometepe´s main attractions are the Petroglyphs, supposedly ancient stone carvings. Another attraction is a 100m waterfall, which proved decidedly easier to find than the petroglyphs. After a lengthy bike ride over steep, bumpy terrain, Barney and the boys were led first to the lakeside, where local villagers hacked away greenery to reveal a solitary and unimpressive carved stone. Then, promising more stones, three local men led us up a hillside. The promised 200m hike turned out to be more like 2km uphill, and bore no petroglyphic fruit. Only when we got to the top did the men suddenly recall that someone came and took the stones away some years previously. By now in fear of our lives (and imagining that, if we stayed, we would be married off to the village virgins), we made our excuses and headed off for our rendez-vous with Claire and top Ozzie bird Sue. By the time we got there, they had got fed up waiting and had gone, so we postponed our trip to the waterfall to the next day and cycled home to collapse in a hammock. The next daywe hiked for an hour up the side of the volcano and cooled off under the high pressure stream of the waterfall.


We left the luxuries of the Hacienda Merida with a bug in our bellies to compliment the ones on our window sill. Our next stop was the old Spanish colonial city of Granada. We sought out the amazing Oasis hostel and settled in for a few days of uncultured self-indulgence. The previous few days´activities and all-hours travelling had taken their toll, so we used the free internet and DVD facilities to the full. The hostel even had a courtyard pool, so it was a real effort to drag ourselves out to see the European-style town square and impressive cathedrals etc. which make Granada so special. We were also treated to a display of Nicaraguan frog soccer, which turned our pizza-filled stomachs.


Our final stop in Nicaragua was another colonial town - Leon. This was a hotbed of Sandinista action during the war, and the highlight was a trip to the Sandinista museum, a higgledy-piggledy one-man affair filled with photos of him and his mates firebombing police lines, as well as uniforms, badges and newspaper cuttings from the whole civil war era. We were even shown his original Sandinista membership card, but on the down side, gruesome photos of student friends murdered by government troops gave the place a chilling feel. The location of the place was important, as it was an ex-National Guard headquarters which had been overrun by the Sandinistas, and still bore the bullet holes in the walls.


From Leon, we took a combination of four buses, various taxis and a cyclo to get us north to the Honduran border. Thankfully, getting out of the country was significantly easier, and cheaper, than getting in, and we made our way to the the unpronouncable Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. After a quick meal in the capital´s scary nighttime district (where even Pizza Hut has guards armed with sawn off-shotguns), we said goodbye to our month-long companions Chris and Alex and headed to the hotel for 4 hours´ kip. The next morning at 5am, we were queueing for a "King Quality" luxury bus to Guatemala City, 14 hours away, The bus took us through El Salvador, which we had already written off as too dangerous a destination to spend any time. When the coach pulled into San Salvador station (where we had to change), the steel security gates were closed the moment we were inside. Before boarding the new bus, we were forced to go through airport-style metal detecting machines, and had to pay a "terminal usage fee", almost as amusing as the "X-ray machine usage tax" at the airport in Roatan. From what we saw, San Salvador had some nice areas, but the number of guns and the ubiquitous gun shops made it a menacing place we were glad to get out of.


:: Barney 1:25 AM [+] ::
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Costa Rica

Having singularly failed, through a combination of meteorological and motivational issues, to see either sea turtles or manatees we departed Bocas del Toro in Panama for the border with Costa Rica. Our expectations of the country the Americans call ´Coaster Wreaker´were low: we knew it was the most stable of the Central American countries (the armed forces were disbanded by the democratic government in the mid 20th Century), and therefore had become a tourist trap. We had also been warned that it was expensive and that the locals were predictably weary of the hordes of rich foreigners in their midst. We were even disappointed with the passport stamp. Our standards are high after some of the beauties we collected in South East Asia, but this one didn´t even have the country name on it, let alone fancy graphics. On this, El Salvador and Guatemala were the main contenders for the crown. However, Costa Rica wasn't all bad.


Our first stop was Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, further west along the Carribean coast from Bocas. This is a hot surfing spot for pretentious American kids, but was still chilled out enough to be preferable to the UK/German equivalents in Greece and Spain. The beach was rocky and unspectacular so we didn't stay long. The bars along the main street provided much more amusement. We (Barney, Alex and Chris, who by now were our firm travel companions) attempted to play pool against The Man with the Second Best Mullet in the World. Needless to say we all failed, as did everyone else who played him that night - but the pleasure of witnessing the Andy Fordham-like mega-mullet cascading down the back of this Hillbilly's sawn-off T-shirt gave the evening a tinge of excitement mixed with abject fear. It´s worth mentioning at this point that the best mullet was on a Brazilian soap opera seen at another bar. This was a full-on greased-back black triangular demi-wave affair sported by a man who seemed to be inexplicably attractive to his female co-stars. Anyway, enough frivolous bad-barnet talk. I can hardly comment, after all, with my record.


After a long and bumpy bus ride (for all its richness, Costa Rica's roads are still shoddy) we arrived in the capital, San Jose. This place is much safer than the other notoriously dangerous Central American capitals, and it had some pleasant areas. Occasionally, there was even evidence of town planning and landscaping. However, the Jade Museum - apparently the city´s main attraction - was closed when we got there, so we went to a historical museum with a lovely butterfly farm instead. Perhaps the highlight of the day was when a carload of local "youths" drove up behind us, rolled down the windows and shouted "PUTAS!" at us, before speeding off (clearly they saw how hard we were). It is truly an honour to be called ´whores´ in a foreign country, and I'll remember that witty gem to repeat to Cambridge´s tourists this summer.


After three relaxing nights in the capìtal, including a much-needed night on the town (where 29-yr-old Chris indulgd his passion for tonsel-tennis with a Tica teen), we got on an even less comfortable suspension-free bus to Santa Verde, a small town high in the protected cloud forests of western Costa Rica. Here we strapped on our hiking shoes (what's left of them) and followed 12km of tracks in search of "The elusive QUetzal", a native red and green Central American bird, so-called because it's fecking impossible to find. One's chances of seeing it are improved if one keeps quiet, which is somewhat difficult when you have eaten a dodgy bit of post-pub fried chicken from a street vendor the night before and have what locals refer to as "los guffs". Still, the cloud forest was a beautiful environment, and at the end of the walk, a specially-constructed tower provided excellent views over the whole area. Also in Santa Elena, we followed a suspension-bridge route which took us high above the forest canopy. As we were doing this, we kept hearing strange zooming noises, and when we looked up we saw people flying past us overhead. 'Ello 'ello 'ello, what´s going on 'ere then? we thought, adopting a pathetically cliched friendly bobby-style tone. It turned out that giant cable had been strung throughout the forest, and you could zoom down them on a special harness. We hurried back to the visitor´s centre, got kitted up with harnesses and quality "Village People" workman's helmets, before being clipped, one by one onto a cable and pushed to our certain doom by two grinning Costa Rican lads. As it turned out, we all survived the 16 cable zooms, some of which were over 600m long. We were even treated to a surprise 30m-high "Tarzan" cable-swing half way along.


As if all the high-octane "extreme" canopy zooming wasn't enough excitement, we got up the next day, and were whisked off by a combination of minibus and lake-going boat to the town of La Fortuna at the base of the LIVE Volcano Arenal. In order to keep our time in Costa Rica to a minimum, we "did" the volcano the same day. This involved heading to a local thermal area, with 9 baths of varying temperatures spread up a hill, and several bars. As we sipped a cold beer in a warm pool, we witnessed explosions and bright-red lava and rocks pouring down the side of the volcano. This place has been a major tourist attraction since the late 60s, when the hitherto dormat volcano spewed its guts out over a local village, then forgot to stop spewing. It's been safely hoying up red stuff in small amounts ever since. Nice work, Volcano fella.


From La Fortuna, the four of us (Claire, Barney, the Ginger Wonder and SeppoMan) headed to the border with Nicaragua, certain that it would be the Land of Milk and Honeys, and the answer to all our fevered prayers.

:: Barney 12:17 AM [+] ::
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