This is a country where men wear cowboy hats and tight jeans... in 35 degrees!


A place where even small market girls have security...

(well, to be honest, this is in front of a bank and in Central America it is absolutely normal to have heavily armed guards in front of every bank and other "wealthy" establishements) - I sight you just get used to after a while.

Happy kids in the country-side:


A great bar/restaurant in Copan...

...where the beer (and anything else) is served in a very special way on top of the head (also upstairs, also with plates full of food!):


And these are the Honduras Driving Rules

(these rules actually apply to all of the Central American countries as I have found out so far)

More rules, this time in a toilet


It wasn't this one though:

Copan Ruinas on the northern border of Honduras with Guatemala was my next stop and my first visit of Maya ruins (Copan is as south as their empire stretched).

And I was really impressed by these ruines in the middle of the jungle:








Copan Ruinas is mainly know for stone carvings in quite good conditions:




And this is Ingo, a german guy I met in Copan Ruines and with whom I climed these ****ing steep pyramids!


And this is me in front of one of these really big trees in the jungle:

From Laguna Apoyo I went to Managua where I only stayed for one night (not much to see and not the safest place on earth, they say) and then by bus across the border to Honduras to the capital, Tegucigalpa. Another big central american city, not much to see or do so I only stayed on night there also.

And no pictures... :-(

From Granada I went to Laguna Apoyo. This lagoon is actually a big crater lake, great to swim, relax and just do nothing!

On Sunday, March 26 I went to this Volcano called Mombacho very near to Granada:



Unfortunately it was a bit hazy so you could not see all that much of Granada for them top but you can tell that Granada is on the shore of Lago de Nicaragua:


There is cloud forest on top of the volcano:




On fertile land of the volcano they grow coffee (on the right side)...


...and bananas.


But as you can tell by the look of this "farm house", the farmers are very poor here and live in huts like this:


Or this family built a home out of an old bus:


This is another typical central american thing I have seen in Costa Rica before and then again in Nicaragua, the so-called Living Fence:

To fence off you piece of land you just cut off branches of trees and stick them into the ground. And because the soil is so fertile the branches start to grow again and you end up with this living fence!

Well, this was another reason for coming to Nicaragua. Through the organisation World Vision I have been supporting a kid in Nicaragua as a sponsor for the past couple of years and now I had the chance to meet her.

And it was one of the greatest days of my trip so far. Too much to tell in a few words but I got to meet with this 8 year old girl called Keli Damaris Martinez Guevara (isn't that just a great name!) and her family, spent some time taking, looking at postcards from Switzerland and then we also went out to see some projects of World Vision.

I haven't got a lot of pictures (yet) but this is me with Keli (sorry about the bad quality of this shot):



And this is Keli on the right in the fornt with her younger sister, her parents and her granddad. Her older sister couldn't come along because they only have 3 bycicles to make the trip to the comunity center where I met them...



Now if you are interested what World Vision is all about you can check out their website in Switzerland www.worldvision.ch or their international site at www.worldvision.org

In this "case" Keli, her sisters and her family get heath check-ups, the kids get there vacinations, they can buy school books at lower prices, they get f.e.building material for their house, the community gets colour to paint the school, water purification systems are being built and so on. Generally the support should help them to survive (!) and go to school and learn to help themselves when they are grown up... it as simple as that!

Well, okay, it is a strange name for a hostel, I agree, but this place is one of the reasons why I got stuck in Granada for almost 10 days:

The courtyard photografed from the dormatory:





So I got stuck in this place... but I wasn't just hanging around, drinking at the bar...


The bar, happy hour from 16h to 19h, double Flor de Caña (nicaraguan rum, the best there is!) for 1 Dollar!

... No! I also took Spansish lessons there! 3 hours a day, private lessons with Angelica Mojica (a great teacher) for a full 5 days in a row and I really learned quite a lot in that short time!
So that was another reason for staying in Granada for quite some time.

Granada in Nicaragua, what a great place. I came directly from Costa Rica to this old colonial town and really liked it form the first moment. Really friendly people, colorful,... just nice!

The cathedial on the main quare:



Street scenes:





Public transport - the old american schoolbuses you see all over Central Ameria:



The market:

Diving off Playa Flamingo great for me! I hadn't been diving since May 2005 so I was really excited about going again and it was fantastic. We even came across one of the Big 5 - divers know what I am talking about, we have seen a big Manta Ray which passed just above us!
(unfortunately I don't have an underwater camera with me)

In the afternoon we went to Playa Conchal which was just absolutely beautiful:

After returing to San Jose to pick up some luggage I met up again with Patricia and we headed for Playa Flamingo on the north eastern coast of Costa Rica to go diving.

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures but we had quite an unbelievable story happing to us on the way up north, just about half a hour from Liberia: the roads in Costa Rica are generally in not the very best condition (well, they are really bad, actually!) so suddenly the left rear tire virtually exploded in the middle of nowhere in blistering heat...
Patricia pulled the car safly over to the side street, we got out of the car, walked around it, looked at the exploded tire, started to discuss options... when we suddenly realized that in the middle of nowhere we actually pulled over just about 100m away form a... car mechanics place specialising in tires! What a coincidence! So to cut the story short: they couldnt fix the tire because it was really all torn up but they had a used replacement tire and worked on the car for 30 min... for only 5000 Colones (about 10 US dollars)! How lucky can you get?
We were wondering and laughing for quite a while in the car afterwards about the guy working at that tire-garage: what must he have been thinking, seeing us pulling over with a torn tire, then standing in the blistering sun looking at the tire pretty hopeless and discussing options... before finally walking over to him to ask for help. The whole time he must have been watching us, knowing that these two foreigner would sooner or later walk over to his place...