Belize (part 2)

8 August 2010

After weeks spent on the Mayan Riviera and the coast of Belize we thought we'd head inland and do something other than water-based activities, only to fail miserably as we went caving and then tubing!

We ended up in a wee town called San Ignacio near the western edge of the country.  Belize is so little, and English speaking that it's really easy to get around. And the Belizean dollar is pegged at exactly 50c so even the maths is easy.

Entrance to the ATM caves

You can see the evil in its eye

We first went to the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) caves which was just amazing.  We hiked and waded about 45 mins through the jungle and across rivers to get to the cave entrance.  I had slipped on the walk in so went to wash my hands in the river at the cave only to be promptly bitten really hard on the finger.  I pulled my hand out of the water in shock and very briefly the culprit, an eel, hung off my finger.  It was really big and fearsome looking as well!  There was quite a lot of blood, but the tour agency cleaned it up really well and sorted me out with a massive bandage, but it was (and still is - I think there's perhaps something still in one of the cuts) really sore. But onwards.....

Teeth marks!

We suited up in our bikinis, board shorts, trainers, helmet and head torch and then had to get into the same river that contained the evil eel and swim into the mouth of the cave.  This was the point where we found out swimming in trainers isn't nearly as easy as swimming with fins!

Looking glam!

We swam, clambered on rocks and climbed small waterfalls for the next hour or so, getting about 500m into the cave system.  At this point our guide pointed to a massive rock, probably about 15ft high and instructed us to climb it.  From there we had to step across a gap and climb onto some flowstone which was still very steep but much easier to climb.

At the top we removed our shoes (but left on our socks to protect the rock from our sweat) and climbed into this amazing cavern that was full of Mayan relics.  There were 14 skeletons in there, of which we probably saw 5 or 6 and lots of pottery.  And absolutely none of it was protected - there were no barriers or marked paths or lighting.  A human long bone at the site was smashed up and it turns out that's because a tourist dropped a camera on it.

Archaeologists have studied the site in detail, but have only removed about 2% of the artefacts (things that are easy to remove and valuable like obsidian blades etc) but have left the rest as some of it is calcified into the rock, but more importantly, there is no museum in Belize that would be able to satisfactorily protect the artefacts as well as the cave does.

The "highlight" of the tour was a skeleton of a young woman which was completely calcified into the rock and therefore sparkled. She's known as the crystal maiden.  I don't take pictures of mummies or skeletons so I'm afraid you'll have to google her or use your imagination!  Lou and I were very much in two minds about the site being open.  Obviously we felt very privileged to visit it but we can't help but feel that visitors are going to do irreparable damage. We went back out the same way we came in, racing through the jungle as twilight approached.

Amazing formations in the main cavern

The following day (because we just hadn't had enough of being soaking all day!) we went cave tubing which, unsurprisingly, involves sitting in an inner tube and floating down a river that goes through some caves.  The caves weren't nearly as impressive as the ATM caves, but it was fun nonetheless.  Another highlight of San Ignacio was this amazing restaurant we found which served us up ginger rum shrimp which we confusingly had with mashed potato as we were all missing mash so much and fed up with rice!!  Sadly the beer in Belize, Belliken, isn't up to much.

From there we went, with our new friend Kim, down on the bus to Placencia on the coast, primarily as we'd heard you could catch the ferry to Honduras from there.  Lou and I had a nice day sitting on the beach, trying to get over our stinky colds while Kim went diving.  Later that day I was asking about the boat (it only goes once a week) only to find there were engine problems and the only solution was to head up to another town and catch another ferry from there.  So, in the morning, we piled onto a bus back north to the town of Dangriga.  The bus driver, just for fun, was playing Dolly Parton's xmas album at full volume, at 7am.  He was cracking up.  The rest of us were less amused!

In Dangriga we found our "ferry" which was even smaller than the ferry to Caye Caulker and massively overloaded given the problems with the boat from Placencia.  Border control came down to the boat to stamp us out of Belize and we got going only an hour or two too late.  The boat took about 3 hours (I was seated on the floor the whole way!) and took us all the way to Puerto Cortez in Honduras......

Also, please have a look at Louisa's blog.  She writes so much better than me and has some different photos too.

Ferry to Honduras

Guatemala & Belize (part 1)

30 July 2010

We arrived in Flores, Guatemala, in the pouring rain and with no hostel booked.  Lou and I must have been talking too loudly about our plans (for me to go up to Los Amigos hostel whilst Lou waited with the bags) as a really annoying French couple decided to do the same so there was a bit of a comedy race where me and the French guy raced for the hostel.  Luckily I won (through stealth and planning, despite his speed and complete rudeness in talking over me when I was trying to book) and Lou and I got ourselves a nice wee private room at the hostel!  The hostel was an interesting wee place.  The bathrooms and showers were pretty manky, but the bar had great veggie food in huge portions, and there was a big telly which was used only for showing documentaries which was really nice.

Tikal

Coati / Jungle badger

Wild turkeys

We took a day off (from being on active holidays!) and the following day set off for the massive Mayan site of Tikal at the ungodly hour of 430am.  We arrived at around dawn and spent about 6 hours walking round the enormous site.  It's a stunning place with huge temples, some uncovered and some with trees growing out of them, surrounded by jungle.  We saw tons of animals too including Coatis (aka Jungle Badgers according to Lou), a grey fox, some orange-breasted falcons and some Toucans and tons and tons of monkeys swinging through the trees. 

Temple

Toucan

I cried off climbing one of the temples using vertigo as a perfectly valid excuse, but sweated up to the top of one of them for amazing views of the jungle with the temple tops poking out above the trees.  It must have been an amazing sight in its day when the entire area would have been cleared.

Lou and I also walked a couple of kilometers into the jungle all on our own to visit the Temple of the Inscriptions which I found to be quite an unnerving experience - I like to have people around!

After just a couple of days in Guatemala, the following day we got a bus all the way to Belize City, the old capital of Belize.  Belize gained its independence from Britain quite late, in only 1981 and therefore the country is mainly English speaking, there's still quite a British military presence there (to defend Belize against Guatemala which believes Belize to be their territory) and the people seem very pro-UK which is quite a change from the rest of the world!!

Lou and I have been compiling a list of people who need a good slap (we were trying to collate a list of actors that we liked and found it easier to list people we disliked!) and expanded our hate group that day to include French People after sitting on a bus with 20 of them!  Other categories of people in our hate group are: white people with dreadlocks; people wearing deck shoes whilst not on a boat; and men with ridiculous facial hair.  Suggestions are welcome!  (Don't hate us though - it's just for fun.)

Caye Caulker

At the end of this awful bus trip we got ourselves straight on the ferry (large bathtub with outboard motor attached) off to Caye* Caulker which is a lovely little strip of sand in the caribbean. *pronounced "key"

Caye Caulker

Upon arrival it was my turn to stay with the luggage and Lou's turn to race around the island to find us beds before anyone else!  We ended up staying in a place on the beach that was recommended to us, but turned out to be an airless concrete bunker with a random assortment of unwell (for various reasons!) backpackers in our room, so the next day we moved to a much nicer hotel with a lovely view of the cemetery!

The Blue Hole

After another day off from tiring sightseeing activities we went out for a dive on the Blue Hole.  Famous for being some kind of diving mecca we were faintly disappointed upon reaching this amazing, perfectly circular sinkhole in the sea only to see very little from the boat as the reef that defines the border is underwater and not all that visible unless you're in the air.  However, it was an experience to dive it, as we descended very quickly indeed to 42m or so, swam around some stalatites and then spent about 20mins or so ascending as at this depth your body absorbs quite a bit of the nitrogen in the air you're breathing and you've got to let it leach out again.  The increased nitrogen can also make you a little drunk or "narked" and, given Lou was thinking of her grandparents wallpaper whilst diving, we have decided she perhaps was a little narked!

We did two other dives that day which were much more interesting, and were also dropped off on Half Moon Caye for a wee stroll around a look at the frigate and red-footed boobies which nest there.  And the lunch was fantastic, so it was a good day all round.

Me!

We then proceeded to spend most of the rest of our time on the island eating at a lovely cafe for breakfast, snacking on numerous cinammon rolls throughout the day, and drinking the terribly-named, but very tasty cocktail called a "panty-ripper".  Made of coconut rum and pineapple juice it's really lovely, but Lou and I couldn't bring ourselves to ask for it by name!  We also were advised (damn you Lee!) to try a Lizard Juice up at the Lizard Lounge bar which was a flouro green coloured concotion containing about 15 different types of rum as far as we could tell!

Lou with Lizard juice

We ran into Jo & Nisha (from UK & US respectively) again in Caye Caulker and tagged along on a snorkelling trip they were going on.  It was a really great day with some lovely snorkelling (saw manatees, sting rays and nurse sharks amongst lots of other things), real sailing (with motor off and everything) and lots of rum punch and prawn ceviche to snack on.  I had always thought that prawn ceviche was made with boiled prawns, but I was wrong.  It really is just raw prawns marinated in lime juice until they've gone white.  And it's really really lovely.

Manatees

Self portrait underwater

Our snorkel boat in the rain

Mexico - Tulum, Palenque, Yaxchilan & Bonampak

23 July 2010

Tulum

We met up again with Scott from LA and the three of us got the bus from Playa del Carmen to the Tulum ruins which are a great set of ruins on the coast.  The site is pretty much a square with massive defensive walls around three sides and the sea on the fourth side.  It was absolutely overrun with people which was quite a surprise as none of the other sites had been particularly busy.  There were some really cool temples and some great carvings, mainly of the "Descending Man" which is possibly though to be homage to the bee which was apparently revered.

Tulum

The Descending Man (Tulum)

Corner or a building at Tulum - would have been amazing when painted

From there the three of us got the night bus up to Palenque, an enormous site much further inland.  Scott (being from the US) was a massive chicken about travelling around Mexico on a bus in the night and hardly slept, but it was fine!

False arches at Palenque

At the Palenque ruins we got a guide which was nice as he explained quite a lot about the construction of the stone false arches which created the ceilings of all rooms.  Each side of the arch will stand independently, but it means they can't really span much of a distance and the maximum room width was therefore about 2m.  It made for some dark small spaces.  Scott found a small clay head in the rubble up the side of one temple and I got in a major huff with him when he refused to put it back or give it in to the museum.  And the guide suggested he keep it too.  I was raging.  So that evening we all drank a large amount of Mezcal (cactus spirit of which tequila is a fancy subset) with chilli salt.  Particularly fun as Lou didn't know what Mezcal was up until that point!

Palenque grand plaza

Carving at Palenque

Scott then finally decided he'd had enough of us and left and Lou and I had a chilled couple of days in Palenque town getting my backpack fixed (again!) and doing laundry etc.

We arranged a tour down to Flores in Guatemala through our hostel which managed to get us to where they said they would take us, but didn't tell us anything along the way so we kept arriving in places with all the wrong stuff and no idea what we were supposed to be doing.

The first stop was at a site called Yaxchilan which involved a trip on a longboat down the river that borders that part of Guatemala & Mexico.  We had no idea where we were being sent (we'd already changed buses a few times by this point) so had our full daypacks (computer etc) to carry, but no bugspray so we were eaten alive.  This didn't improve our moods!

Roofcomb at Yaxchilan

Yaxchilan was a nice wee site though.  You had to enter the main square by walking through pitch black, bat filled tunnels under one temple which was pretty cool.  The howler monkeys were really going for it (we thought the noise they were making was fake for a while as it was so strange) and there was a nice assortment of wee temples and ball courts and the like.  There was also a massive temple with a huge roofcomb on it at the top of a very high, steep hill. Despite the cloying heat and heavy packs we climbed up there for amazing views out over the jungle.

Stela at Bonampak

After lunch we were driven off in a taxi to a site called Bonampak which is famous for its murals.  Lou and I took a leisurely stroll around all the carved stelae and the buildings to finish at the temple with the murals only to find that they'd been closed for the day (our fantastic tour company having failed to mention this).  Lou was in such a huff, refusing to even look through the mesh doors at the murals, that the guards took pity on us and opened the three rooms just for us.  They were absolutely amazing, vividly colourful stucco murals covering all the surface of three smallish rooms.  The style was similar to Egyptian paintings with people in profile.

Murals at Bonampak

We stayed a night in the jungle where the local Lacandon people (recognisable by their long hair, fringes and white smocks - male & female) were having some sort of religious ceremony (complete with Coca-cola to burp out the bad spirits) followed by a massive knees up.  It was quite cross-cultural with some people in Lacandon dress & some in western dress, indigenous religion crossed with catholic, and a pinata (papier mache shape filled with sweeties, hung up and beaten with a baseball bat by someone wearing a blindfold till it bursts and the sweeties fall out) to finish.

The morning had a moment of excitement when I noticed a 3" scorpion on the front of my shorts.  Luckily a local came and swiped it off me and then killed it.

From there we were taken back to the river and carried downstream this time to the Guatemalan border post and on to Flores.....

Mexico - Mayan Riviera

16 July 2010

And then my friend Louisa arrived....

I went to pick her up from Cancun airport in the pouring rain (not a great start to her hols) and took her back to the hostel for rooftop cocktails and food (the rain had abated by that point).

Chichen Itza

The next day we went on a great tour, first to Chichen Itza, a Mayan site and apparently one of the new "great wonders of the world" though I suspect it was chosen more for its proximity to Cancun airport as it wasn't the best of the Mayan sites we ended up seeing.  Nevertheless, it was pretty impressive, with a massive (reconstructed) temple and a huge (reconstructed) ball court.

Me & Lou in a cenote

From there we were driven off to a cenote which is a sinkhole in the limestone rock that is full of freshwater.  It was pretty impressive and the water was crystal clear and quite cool.

Ek Balam

And there to Ek Balam (Black Jaguar), another Mayan site, but this one much, much cooler than Chichen Itza because it's only recently been opened up, is mostly unexcavated, and is totally un-reconstructed (such bad archaeology).  It was a series of buildings round a main square, surrounded by jungle and a series of small hills which were the un-excavated temples.  We climbed a couple of the temples and the views of the jungle all around were amazing.


After a busy day we thought we'd treat ourselves to a day at the beach. Cancun town is actually quite nice, but there is a stretch of offshore beach which is known at the hotel zone and is basically hell on earth - all fancy american hotels, expensive malls and chain restaurants.  We (me, Lou and our new American friend Scott) took ourselves down to the Hilton and confidently walked through the lobby, past the restaurant and pool and out onto "their" stretch of beach.  It was all going so well until the winds picked up and the rain came pouring down!  So we spent the rest of the day at the aquarium and eating in terrible american chain restaurants!

The following day Lou and I got the ferry over to a lovely wee island called Isla Mujeres (Women's island) off the coast of Cancun.  We had a lovely day just chilling on the beach, enjoying the luxury of having cold beer and nice food brought to us.

Bull sharks in a boat at the dock

The next day was one of the best days of my trip.  We were up early with a bunch of other people from our hostel (Scott, Joe & Nisha and Matt, the german bodybuilder) and were picked up and taken to the docks to pick our boat which took us on a whale shark hunt!!  It took us a couple of hours in pretty heavy seas to get out there but we found a massive pod of whale sharks, each up to 45 ft long.

Whale Shark

It was really amazing.  And we were lucky enough to get in the water with them (snorkelling, life jacket on so we couldn't dive beneath them) which was fantastic.  We would be dropped in the water beside one and watch it swim past only to turn around and see another massive mouth heading towards us.  They feed on plankton & fish eggs and are therefore completely harmless, but quite a sight.

Hopefully the video below plays properly so you can see what they look like.

The day was rounded off with a bit of larking around in waist deep warm water, drinking beer and eating prawn ceviche.

We then moved onto the island of Cozumel (bumping into Geordie Rachel & German Matt on the ferry) and had a couple of days of diving which were pretty nice.  Two of the dives were drift dives on top of a reef, but the current was so strong we were whizzing by at such a pace it was hard to see things and even harder to stop and take a proper look.  We did see lots of fish and a turtle though so that was good. On the second dive Lou and I were doing our safety stop at 5m and I looked over and noticed a torch being flashed at us, turns out it was our group miles away as we'd drifted off.  There was quite a comedy moment where we realised there was no way we'd be able to swim back to them, but we were able to swim to the line our divemaster had sent up so that worked out ok in the end!  The other two dives were much more rewarding with really cool coral formations (see photo left) and some cool swim throughs (swimming through tunnels in the reef) in which was saw barracuda just hanging out in the water like missiles and a crab so large the legs looked like a human ribcage.  The water is about 30C here which means we're diving in our bikinis which is fantastic (I HATE wetsuits!).

Me (L) and Lou at about 18m

After all this diving we decided we really should do some more, but diving with a difference.  Cenotes are sinkholes in the limestone bedrock which have filled up with freshwater.  During the last ice age the caverns and caves were dry(ish) and so lots of stalacmites and stalactites were formed.  These have since flooded, creating some amazing diving.  We went (sadly suited up in not one, but 2 wetsuits each) with a local nutter (albeit very professional nutter) called Gerardo to a place called Dos Ojos.  The diving was absolutely amazing; the water is fresh and visibility is about 200m - it's so clear that it feels like you're flying or in space when you're diving.  And you're diving through the caves and round the formations and it's just amazing.  When your bubbles get stuck on the roof of a fully flooded cave they look like puddles of oil.  Gerardo told us when we came up to the surface in the middle of one dive that there were crocs in the water, but that they only liked blondes. During the next section of dive he had us all line up on the edge of this huge boulder and then had us all look down at the same time, only for him to shine his light on a plastic croc eating a blonde barbie.  Oh, the hilarity!!

Nicaragua (again)

16 June 2010

Leon Cathedral

After another epic day on a bus I ended up back in Granada again, enjoying the delights of a really nice hostel, the fantastic breakfasts at Kathy's and the banana-nut-choc-chip muffins at Euro Cafe.  I stayed a couple of days then bussed it up to Leon which was just as hot as Granda but not really quite as attractive.  I then bussed it up to a wee town in the hills (chosen because I thought the hills would be cooler - I was wrong!) called Esteli where I had booked some Spanish classes.

The town was a lot less touristy which was really nice in some ways, but meant it was very hard to find food other than the fried meat on the street.

My Spanish classes were exceedingly frustrating as the teacher didn't really know much about the grammar and didn't speak enough English (nor I enough Spanish) for me to be able to communicate my questions to him. It was a really bad week topped off by a horrible 36 hour bout of food poisoning at the end.

Leon

The highlight was a tour to a cigar factory midweek.  Nicaragua produces cigars which apparently do measure up to the Cuban standard.  The leaves are fermented in big stacks for a while (the smell is a little intense!) before being sorted, rolled and then finished.  It's quite a skilled job.  And the wee store room we went into to marvel at all the different types apparently contained about $6m retail value of cigars.  No wonder they had an ocelot in a cage out front!

Having decided that I couldn't afford to go up to the states to visit everyone I wanted to see so decided to treat myself and booked flights out to the Corn Islands on the caribbean coast of Nicaragua.  I flew out from Managua on a medium sized jet (a little bit of a surprise as they'd weighed all the passengers so I figured it must be a really small plane!), first stopping at Bluefields on the coast and then landing in Big Corn Island.  I had met an American father/daughter Sam and Morgan at the airport and the three of us plus some others got a taxi over to the dock where we loaded up onto a boat for the half our ride over glassy seas to Little Corn Island.  It's very much the Caribbean on the islands - most people speak English and with a caribbean accent and the way of life is laid back.

The view from my balcony - tough times!

It was really lovely on Little Corn.  There are no roads, just muddy paths to walk along and you can cross the island in about 10mins as it's really tiny.

I had planned to do a bit of diving on the islands, but the weather wasn't right in the first few days for the dive I really wanted to do (caves), and then the night dive I booked was cancelled for me by one of the divers after I had a few beers with him at lunchtime celebrating Canada Day (happily he then bought me another beer!)  I eventually managed to do a couple of dives near to the island which were really lovely and chilled out.  We saw lots of nurse sharks amongst other bits and bobs.  And then a group of us went out on my last day to Blowing Rocks which is a pinnacle in the middle of nowhere.  The diving was really great with quite a few reef sharks and lots of rocks etc which made it quite dramatic.
It was a really nice place and I wish I'd booked my return flight for a much later date as I would have loved to stay longer.

But, onwards again, on the boat, on the plane and back to Managua, stopping only to slip in some vanilla icecream in a shop and get it all over myself and my backpack!

The following couple of days and nights were mainly spent on buses - 36 hours worth of travel in just 48 hours.  The first day was from Managua to El Salvador via Honduras, staying the night in San Salvador, and the second day was up to Guatemala City, a change of bus and up to Tapachula in Mexico at which point I changed to a night bus to San Cristobal in Mexico.  The buses were mainly ok apart from the one in Mexico as it was air-conditioned to freezing point and the Mexicans do love their speed bumps.

I stayed in San Cristobal for a couple of days and then got a 20 hour night bus to Cancun.  Cancun was where granny advised me to get to a doctor (which I did, only to be diagnosed with exhaustion and got two shots in the bum for my troubles!) and where I hung out in air conditioned malls waiting for Louisa to arrive........

Costa Rica - Rancho Mastatal

5th June 2010

So, not sure if I mentioned, but wee Vikki, Drew and Jordan (all from previous post) met on a Ranch in Costa Rica called Rancho Mastatal, located, unsurpisingly, in the village of Mastatal about 3 hours south of San Jose. Given that they'd been banging on about the place for ages, and I didn't have any particular itinerary, I joined Vikki as she went back to start her internship.

The journey from Granada took us a good couple of days starting with an un-airconditioned Ticabus down to San Jose where we hung out (behind the security of sheet-metal gates at our hostel - not the best capital city) for a couple of days in the pouring rain, and then to Puriscal on a normal coach style bus and then finally to Mastatal on a chicken bus.

Chicken buses are named for their "bring anything on board" policy. In this case there were no chickens, but there was a twin tub washing machine, a strimmer, some boxes of barbed wire and an awful lot of animal feed, all piled onto the back of a retired American school bus (the yellow kind from movies). Vikki and I, with our usual British "oh no, you first" politeness ended up throwing our backpacks on after all the aforementioned items and therefore didn't manage to get seats which was super-fun!

After a while we did manage to get seats only for some old dude, drinking mooonshine from a Coke bottle stuffed down his trousers, to start bothering us. The rest of the bus was in fits of laughter as he kept touching me on the head and shoulder and trying to get me to do complicated handshakes. Sadly it wasn't really appropriate for me to demonstrate my Spanish by telling him to bugger off as it would have been really impolite given the communities are really small and everyone knows each other.

We finally arrived in the evening, just in time to haul our bags to Tiburon's house (more on Tiburon later) and head back up to the ranch house for our tea.

The Ranch is run by Tim and Robin and their 2 year-old daughter Sole (short for Soledad) who are American and ex Peace Corp. They've had the Ranch about 8 years and in that time have built numerous buildings from wattle, daub and lime render, started their farm (goats, tons of chickens, pond awaiting tilapia, veggie gardens) and contributed massively to the local community in terms of employment, community projects and loans/grants amongst other things. It's a really amazing place. It's run pretty much like I would imagine a commune to be, with communal meals, communal living and everyone contributing to the running of the place. But there's not too much hippy nonsense which suited me just fine!! You can see more about the place on their website.

Tiburon's house belongs (not surprisingly) to a guy called Tiburon who hails from the US. Tiburon means "shark" in Spanish and relates to a run in he had with a bull shark in Belize 20+ years ago.
Tiburon survived the attack with an impressive gouge and some pretty cool teeth marks in his arm. He's affiliated with the ranch and therefore his house is generally looked after in his absence by

someone that would otherwise be living at the ranch. Luckily for me, that person is Vikki as it's fabulous.

The house is absolutely amazing, built with no doors and minimal walls over two floors with amazing views out over the football field to La Cangreha (the crab) peak.

After excelling myself on the first evening by spilling one of the liquid pork-fat-and-palm-oil homemade candles all over the dining table, I settled into a great week of foods, friends and hands that smelled of cow shit!

The first morning I got my official tour of the ranch from Vikki and then Vikki, Anne (US) and I cleaned Tiburon's house top to bottom as he was due home soon. Turns out I can actually clean, I just choose not to most of the time!

The following few days involved lots of cooking (burning batches of Vikki's granola as the oven runs really hot), making mango bread (the challenge in the kitchen when I was there was to inventively use up the baskets upon baskets of mangos in the scullery!), cooking breakfast at 530 am for the ranch, making Biscotti, turning piles of Bokashi (fermented chicken manure), making jam from red hibiscus leaves (using tapadulce, a liquid cane sugar), making glasses from old glass beer, soft drink and wine bottles and making daub from 1 part cowshit, 1 part clay and 3 parts gravel, mixed with bare feet, and shaped into bricks with bare hands (hence the lovely scent I carried for a few days!)

There was also a reasonable amount of eating, drinking (rum with frozen cubes of pineapple in - mmmmm) hanging out at the bar and gossiping wildly (the ranch seems to inspire unusual behaviour!) Adam (US) treated us to a dance recital (Beyonce's Single Ladies) and concert (Flight of the Conchords mostly) and we spent a vast amount of time escorting Vikki home past the bar full of enthusiastic locals.

Tiburon was kind enough on our day off to take a bunch of us up into the national park and up to a beautiful set of waterfalls. We climbed up the first half of the waterfall to a flat area and just hung out, sitting in the spray and lying in the water which was really refreshing. We ate that evening at the Soda, a kind of corner shop, and were treated to the entertainment of the owner's puppy and cat having an all out fight. The cat won!

The following evening's entertainment was provided by an incredibly drunk Costa Rican biologist, visiting the area, storming into the ranch house and refusing to leave. He was persuaded into the front garden where he promptly fell into a swale which was funny. He was then picked up by the menfolk and removed from the property! Never a dull moment at the ranch!

I met some really lovely people at the ranch in addition to those mentioned above: Ashley and her daughter Courtney, a really sweet girl called Morgan, Carolyn and Tyler who know all about the ranch and all the new interns who I hope are having a great time as we speak. (Apologies to anyone I've forgotten - I'm useless.)

I left the ranch with Tiburon (on his way to pick up his students) and Adam (on his way home) and made it back to Granada in Nicaragua the same day.