El Salvador and Honduras

After my second visit to Antigua (only for 2 nights, during which I couldn't replace the delicious organic peanut butter I'd just finished...), I caught a series of buses to Santa Ana, El Salvador. Santa Ana isn't really the nicest city, but I was recommended to stay there by a friend due to the excellent hostel there, with a swimming pool and 2 kitchens (for cheap as), and the nearby Santa Ana volcano.

The day after I arrived I went to the volcano with a couple of other people from the hostel (including another Cam from NZ!), and we climbed for a couple of hours from the carpark with our guide and 2-man police escort. The walk was pretty easy, with a rather spectacular view from the top of the volcano's crater and a bunch of western El Salvador. We then had a leisurely walk to the carpark, and hitched a ride with some locals that were heading to Santa Ana.

After Santa Ana I visited Juayua, on La Ruta de Las Flores (The Route of Flowers), which also came highly recommended due to their weekly food fair. I had some pretty delicious rabbit on the Saturday, and was psyched up to try the roadkill-lookin frog later in the day, but it rained and all the stalls packed up, so we got pupusas instead (pupusas are something a bit like tortilla/bread dough wrapped around whatever you want - usually with beans and cheese, then with chicken/pork or other things. The best were of course the pupusas locas (crazy pupusas), which were plate-sized and contained everything). The next day I did a short tour to some "natural" pools, created by a weirdly-designed hydroelectric dam. We also walked through a coffee plantation, where the guide described the process of growing and harvesting coffee, which is ubiquitous around here. That afternoon I returned to Santa Ana for another night, in preparation of going through Guatemala to Honduras on the Monday.

A day on buses later I arrived in Copán, Honduras, at a hostel Callum's stayed at, at which some of his friends still were staying. The following day I went with one to the nearby Mayan ruins, which were exceptional compared to the rest due to the preservation of the carvings and sculpures. Most of the Mayan ruins around the place don't really have much intact carving, whereas Copán is loaded with it. The ruins themselves were, as always, fun to explore for half a day, especially combined with trying to puzzle out what the carvings actually were (some of the heiroglyphs especially were pretty cool).

The day after the ruins I went to a bird sanctuary, where they have a whole bunch of different varieties of parrots and macaws. Apparently macaws aren't parrots - who knew? Also in Copán was a brewery/bar run by a German GC. Apparently he has around 12 different brews, but he only has 2 on tap at a time and hadn't changed them between the 2 nights I went, but they were both pretty delicious, especially when compared to the generic crap everyone drinks in CA...

Cal and I had arranged to meet in centralish Honduras at Lago Yajoa for my birthday, where there's a hostel with another brewery attached. Much drinking of more delicious beers ensued for the next 2 days, and we also walked up to a lookout on top of one of "Las Nalgas" (the buttcheeks), for a look-see at the lake itself, which is apparently all weedy and whatnot around the edge, so not really swimmable :/

After Yajoa, we split again so I could go to Utila in the Caribbean to learn to dive. Supposedly Utila is the 2nd cheapest place in the world to learn to dive (after Indonesia), and I'd been hanging out with diving-obsessed friends in Belize, so was really keen to try it by the time I got to Utila. I guess diving's pretty hard to describe to those who haven't tried it, but it's totally fucking awesome. Probably the closest us powerless humans can get to flying, amongst some of the coolest wildlife I've ever seen. Ten days of diving in the mornings and reading/sweating in the afternoons later, I left the island to head to Nicaragua, but I think that'll be a story for another day...