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We've been in Nicaragua for a few days now and it's AWESOME. The people are much more friendly and humorous than any of the countries so far that we've visited. The bus stations and buses are filled with chatter, people make conversation in the lines at the grocery stores, and not as many people stare at you like you're an alien. People are laughing and smiling just about everywhere you look.

The first town we stayed in was Somoto, a town that´s only been on the tourist map for a couple of years since the news spread of a beautiful canyon (now called Monumento Nacional Cañón de Somoto) in the area. The canyon and nearby town are still pretty much left alone, we only saw a couple of gringos the few days we spent there. Apart from the 8 or 10 we saw crammed on a boat coming downriver through the canyon, with only 1 Nicaraguan rowing. Poor guy. Aside from that we had the canyon all to ourselves for the afternoon. Only a few residents washing themselves or their clothes in the river, and a couple of kids trying to rent us a boat. There a few people living down near the mouth of the canyon in little huts, it must be interesting for them to witness the rise in tourism over the past few years, right in their own backyard. We were able to walk along the edge of the river for a ways, after a while you had to start navigating around the pools and over rocks and such (left picture) and eventually you had to swim a little bit to get to the next section of the canyon (right picture).

Back in Somoto, we found this interesting business. Photocopies, passport photos, and....meat.

We got into Esteli yesterday, and contacted the office of a cigar factory here in town to arrange for a tour the next day. I guess the brand of cigars made here, ¨Padron¨, are pretty world class and smoked by celebrities and rich people. The tour can only be taken by special appointment supposedly so no trade secrets are leaked. We thought it was to hide all the young children that weren't supposed to be working there, but that must not be the case since we saw quite a few. Each worker here rolls around 500 cigars per day, every row of rollers is a different phase in the making of the cigar, once one phase is completed, the cigar is passed on down the line. We saw a few guys on quality control, must be rough! The most expensive cigars sell for $40 or more from what I could find online, someone is getting rich, but it's not the people working in this factory.

The factory smelled great, like fine tobacco, but the smell was so strong it had an onion like effect on me eyes and sinuses. Strange. Here is Rachel inhaling some of the fine aroma of the tobacco leaves, and the lady on the right is using a machine that is used to remove the stems from the tobacco leaves. It was made in the U.S. and looked really old.

So it turns out, making a cigar is a long, long process.

Last night we were hanging out in a bakery/coffee shop next door to our hospedaje and a lady came up and started talking to us in english. She was really excited to be talking to some Americans, I guess she was born in Nicaragua but has lived in the U.S. for 30 some odd years and was going through some sort of culture shock being here on a 10 day trip. We got to talking and after a while she told us she was here getting dental work done, because it is so expensive in the U.S. It turns out she knew a dentist in town who had been a family friend for years, and did excellent work. Since this lady was somewhat traumatized by just existing in this town we loved, we figured she would be pretty picky about what dentist she went to. Rachel was long overdue for a cleaning and checkup, and I was coming up on a due date for a cleaning myself. So today we went in and got our teeth cleaned! It was pretty interesting, it was a one man show. No dental assistants, hygienists or office workers. Just a small room with a door, and inside was a modest set of dental tools and equipment. The cleaning went great, just like any other cleaning I have had except it only cost me 8 BUCKS. No cavities either, yay. Rachel has 2 cavities and is going in to get them fixed tomorrow. It costs 10 dollars for a filling, and around 100 dollars for a root canal (according to our lady friend). Pretty crazy, it costs the same for a filling as a 12 pack of beer!

Thats another thing I wanted to mention, how cheap everything is in Nicaragua:

Private room for 2, $6

Teeth cleaning, $8 a pop

Internet, .40 cents per hour (on fast computers)

Plate of food in local restaurant, with drink, $1.50 (rice, beans, small salad, tortillas and a meat of sorts)

We bought a 1lb of organic coffee from a local farm for $4

The only thing expensive is beer, which sucks. Oh well.



¡Lejos!...¡es.LEJOOOooos!...

So we have successfully blown through an entire country without throwing a post up. Ooops..sooorry! So that I dont keep an eager reading audience *coughscottandpapacough*   :) waiting...Here it goes!

Tyler last wrote from Quirigua, Guatamala where we visited the final Mayan Archaeological Site of our trip. *tear* Five countries and 15 sites later, Las Ruinas de Quirigua is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and fosters the largest stela excavated in Mesoamerica!! If this paragraph makes me a total geek, then I am tapin up the glasses! Cause this was FANtastic. A very close first to a nice walk we had through a ton of banana plantations.Tyler pooped his pants on the walk home! Well..."sharted"..an accidental poo parading around as a casual toot.Anyway..I had to pretend like I was taking pictures of the mountains while people passed on the road so that he could clean himself secretly among the bananas. We were tearing in laughter..maaaaybe didn't boil that water all the way.

When we woke up the next morning we decided to ditch the Guat and rediscover Honduras! We planned on visiting Esquipulas, Guat near the border to see the Basilica. Once a year thousands of Guatemalans make a pilgrimage there to see the ''Negro Christo''  at the Basilica. Look it up! Turns out thats January 5th..the day we were rolling through town. Needless to say. We went, we saw, we ate and we elbowed. Then we went with a little old man in his taxi car mobile to the border. We spent the night in Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras.

After Santa Rosa we hit the rode to Gracias, Honduras. Outside of town is the National Park Celaque. This park houses the highest peak in the country: Cerro de Las Minas. We stayed a few nights in Gracias and decided to go on a backpack trip up the hill! The cool and exhausting thing about the peaks here is that we dont have the Jeep to drive to the trailhead. So we took a good look from the hotel in town and started walkin! On the way up we passed through Villa Verde. My friend from college taught at a school there so I stopped in to drop some cookies off to her class. We also passed these guys to the right hauling a trailor..they were not fun and did not race us. That night we camped and summited the next day. AWESOME hike. Not much of a view from the top..super treed in..we hiked into town, spent the night and took off for La Esperanza. Nice ride through the mountains in the back of a truck.

Colored chicks sell better. the end.

La Esperanza was a nice, clean, brick road town flooded with markets..We got a TV in our room and decided to veg out ALL night! Seriously. We ate a WHOLE pot of rice to start. OH yeah..and Tyler had an allergic reaction to Mango before we left Gracias. Turns out his favorite fruit is a relative of poison oak..Who knew?? We do. Especially that little tike. He's hangin in..and was all evening in front of the tele watching Lampoons Family Vacation while I went for chocolate cereal and half and half in a bag to sooth his lips and heart and chase our rice buffet. We pretty much gained 14 pounds together and didnt buy a single piece of nutricious produce from the HUGE street market. Bam.

 We got up the NEXT morning and bussed over to Comayagua. Cute city. 5 churches. We visited 3. The Cathedral in the center of town ticks the oldest clock in the Americas. One of the oldest in the world. 2 man survey in. We like this number 4 better than the NEW *ugh* Roman numeral 4. ALSO! They had some street theater and artists around the park that evening. We watched for a while..i watched all the little babies eat waffle coned soft serve and scoffed out the outrageous prices and refused a cone. $1.30 my full moon. We spend our money on great things...like wicked mango. Here are some photos of the churches in Comayagua, the old clock tower is one the left.

Today we're in Nicaragua. I guess we got up at 4:30 this morning, in Honduras, and bussed all day. WOW..that seems like days ago..I can still smell the faint scent of fried chicken and french fries from the city..I swear thats all they eat.One might think rice and beans..very wrong..thats the Guat. We are in Somoto, right over the north western border, and are looking to descend into a huge canyon, a gaping whole in the mountains...odd...and wonderful. We'll pút up more photos as they are loaded. The first 2 up top are from the internet as we bunked out our memory card with a virus in Quirigua. waaaa waaaaa......

OH and milk. I accidentally bought half and half in La Esperanza.. not the first time. Tyler and I once chased a whole pack of cookies with what we found out was Baby Formula in the Western Highlands of Guatamala....The lip licking is a great time to find out you can't decipher the milk packaging very well.. oh tomorrow!!  -rachel.

Ruins and things....

The past week we've been hitting a ton of the Mayan sites as the time is coming where we will now longer be residing in Maya country. We will miss it. Uxmal, Kabah and Dzibilchaltun. I don't have pictures from Dzibilchaltun, but you can google it if you'd like. Uxmal (left) and Kabah (right) were great, here is what they looked like.

We headed on up to Merida, a pretty old city with some cool building and history. And the ruins of Dzibilchaltun just north of it, which we don't have pictures of. We decided to buy a small hot plate and a pot, which has already payed for itself in the first week. I decided the dollar a day for coffee in the shops was too much, it´s home made coffee from now on. And also it´s surprisingly difficult to find a decent cup of coffee here in the first place.

We took an overnight bus out of Merida and on down to Chetumal on the Mexican/Belizean border, crossed, and then headed to San Ignacio on the western side of Belize. The plan was to visit some of the ruins of Xuanantunich, and then head south down the coast and take a ferry back into Guatemala. Then we noticed that the immigration officer for some unknown reason only gave us a 2 day entry visa and we nixed that idea. Which was fine with us as Belize is the most expensive country on our whole trip, doesn´t even feel like latin America (English is the 1st language), is full of tourists and feels pretty much like a run down Florida. Not into it.

So out of Belize we went and on into Guatemala, again. I look forward to the days ahead of fewer border crossings! They are coming. I believe this was our 7th border crossing. It´s fairly easy on the paperwork/official end of it, it´s just the bombardment of people on both sides of the border asking if you want a taxi, food, gum, trying to change money, pretty much just bothering you in general, all the while you are fumbling with your passport, currency, bags and paperwork. It´s not that bad, but not that good either. People just hang out on both sides of the border, just sitting there staring, and it doesn´t seem like they do much of anything else. Ever.

A couple of hours later we ended up in Dolores, Guatemala. There is an archeaological site there that houses the 2nd largest stela (a tall carved stone) in Guatemala. We got in kinda late and didn´t have much options on lodging and ended up staying in a room that had about an inch of standing water on the concrete floor. It wasn´t quite enough to creep over the top of the sole of our sandals, but almost. After Rachel was done using the restroom the lady handed her a bucket of water, Rachel wasn´t quite sure what she was supposed to do with it, and neither was I. I think it was to flush the toilet but Rachel dipped her hands into it instead, for some reason.

long blogs are for lazy bloggers.

In our final days in Valladolid, Yucatan State, we visited Las Ruinas de Ek Ba'lam and some of the most largely visited and photographed cenotes in the area!! Though Ek Ba´lam seemed fairly unimpressive, following Chichen Itza, the visit was a nice morning spent. They had no complementary wine served with the unexpected rise in price at this site..a suggestion i feel im not pushing enough at the ticket counter...luckily the people and dog watching usually pays us out if the structures don´t. BUT..small as it was...it was a nice site and is being restored very nicely.
After Ek Ba'lam we moved to the Dzitnup and Samula Cenotes. These are sinkholes that are true natural wonders in the Yucatan Peninsula. The Cenote Ring is perfectly circular and home to thousands of these links between underground rivers. There are theories that these limestone caverns were a result of a meteor that hit the Peninsula roughly 65 million years ago. They were once the only source of fresh water in the Yucatecan Jungle and were considered by the Maya to be the gateway to the underworld. Not all of them are open to enter but some that are, you can go and even swim! On the right is a shot of Dzitnup. We hung around for a bit and the whole crowd left it to us to enjoy in private.

On the left is Samula. There are tree roots coming down through the opening in the earth above. On the right is a sign that entertained Tyler and I very much.

 After this we went to Izamal. I love this city for several reasons. Not only is this another cobble stoned, clean, old colonial town..BUT it is also home to several archaeoliogical sites(smack dab in the middle of town) and every building is painted yellow!! It is known as the yellow city. I asked a street vendor why this was and he had no idea. It´s odd to me that he would never ask himself or someone else this question.

For whatever the reason, this was an awesome little town..we ate up some softserve and tacos like we were getting paid to do it. We visited Ruins in town and gobbled street food and cookies on the square in the night time.
We loaded up on bread from a local bakery and headed west for Campeche, Campeche. It´s the capital of its state. We landed there on a huge festival night. It was the celebration of the 3 kings. The whole city was craaazy with vendors, music, and food! It was awesome to walk into the town at night while it was illuminated. Campeche truely is a colonial fairyland! The city was founded in 1540 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site(the whole city) in 1997. The downtown is encompassed by a huge wall and 8 fortresses, stretching 5 by 8 blocks, that was built in the late 1600s to protect the port against pirate attacks. Every building inside these walls are painted pastel colors and have been restored.

Tyler and I couldn´t do anything but giggle when we got off the bus into the downtown area. This is the Cathedral lit up downtown on the square!! It was awesome and we scored a hostel that we could cook in for our last 2 nights there. We visited museum about the history of the city and took a bus out one day to visit the Edzna Ruins. These were awesome and as luck would have it..we had the place to ourself. We´ll throw a picture up in a few days. Really impressive structures. We got to see some stone heads that have really stood the test of time and were extremely vibrant in color. Edzna is sitting near the top of our site list.

This is a mexican meal made for kings- fit with a book exchange score on Mexican History and ice cold Coronas with lime that Tyler's been salivating over and raving about since we hit Central America. mmm.

Tyler really wanted me to share a story about trying to bargain with a hotel manager last night for a room.I feel like it will never be as funny to read as it would be to hear in person. The man offered us a room for 800 pesos. We laugh. He says we can negotiate. He won´t say a price but sent me off to see the rooms.- Yes. they were rooms. They were really there. We are about price. This is why we have a tent. Many people don´t seem to get that we aren´t looking for a palace somewhere. I see the rooms and return to the desk. He, now, is like a star from Telemundo..maybe a cross breed with Days of Our Lives. He is sweating and wanting to dance. We dance. 500 pesos. I say 300. 350..his final offer. Our eyes are locked and I refuse to budge. I say thankyou. I walk away. He lunges his arm out full length, biting his other hand, fisted, and says, now in perfect english, OK you win. 300 pesos. We were having a battle of eyebrow and wit. I told him I´d discuss it with the boyfriend. We walk away, never to look back at our mexican hotel negotiator, and wait for a bus. We found a way better deal in Santa Elena and were happy hippies and hillbillys.
We always win. -rachel.

Viva la Mexico

On Wednesday we headed off for Mexico by way of Belize, planning to make it in a day but we ended up spending the night on the Mexican/Belizean border in a town called Corozal. The town reminded me of what Key West might of looked like 50 or so years ago. It was an extremely drastic change stepping out of Guatemala and into Belize. All of a sudden everyone speaks english, litter doesn't line the streets, no latin music blaring, no "collectivos" or trucks stacked with people, the step up in the standard of living was very apparent. The standard seemed to even increase again once we crossed into Mexico. The buses are huge! You get your own seat, and they even recline! We spent the first night in Mexico in Tulum, home to some Mayan ruins and a beautiful beach. It was Rachel's first visit to the Carribean. We got up early and headed to the beach, there was a storm rolling in and it looked awesome! After came the ruins.

The ruins themselves were pretty small compared to some of the other sites but the setting was absolutely amazing. The site was a major port for the area in its time. Next came the ruins of Coba (left), about 40 minutes west, and then onto Chichen Itza (right). The king of all Mayan ruins.

Had a good New Year's here at the hostel, but missed the festivities in town, Apparently that all happens at around 10 and then everyone goes home and spends time with their family.