Entries about beach

Just a little update...

It was going so well, or as well as can be expected.

Firstly, Mum is ok, thanks for all the best wishes and love, it was amazing. She's still in hospital and getting better far too slowly for everyone (including her), but she is slowly on the mend. She'll be inside a while.

Some amazing looking hotels here

So I arrived in Mexico last Saturday and treated it like a bit of a holiday. Cancun is great, lots of beaches, lots of stuff to do, (very) hot weather and I found a fantastic AirBnB here with a hot tub on the roof. Bliss.

Enjoying said rooftop hottub

I spent the first half of the week chilling out and visiting attractions. I went to a water park, drove a speedboat out to the coral reef and snorkeled, did the wheel, aquarium, that sort of stuff. It was all going well. Also, the wifi here is much better, allowing me to video chat with Mum and family and friends. All I had to do was sit here, drink iced coffee and wait until I leave next week.

And then of course everything went to shit.

The UK Government is making Mexico a red country from Sunday, so I need to leave. I'm not even sure if what I'm doing is right, but it's what I'm doing. I'll have a week saved of 'amber' and then add an extra four days in America before I fly home. The problem comes if they decide that because I have been in Mexico in the past 10 days and it'll be red by then so it counts as red, then I'm screwed.

The lizards here are funny looking too

I've tried Citizens Advice, The British Embassy, online, even Simon Calder and no one can tell me definitively if what I'm doing is right. In my mind I will not have been in a 'red' country for more than 10 days so that's fine. If the customs people disagree though, it's worth nothing. It's all just so confusing and I only have myself to blame for it all, travelling right now is bonkers as I'm sure many others have also found out. It's worth pointing out though, that by the time I get back to England, I will have not been in a red country for 12 days and will have had 2 covid tests in the five days previous. What more do they want??

The only upside is that I've chosen to spend my four days in Orlando, where I can do Disney for a couple of days! I love me some Disney and even visiting there in the middle of a hot pandemic summer with packed out parks is better than no Disney at all. Hopefully it will make the four flight, 28 hour plus journey worth while!

I've never stayed at a hotel with a pig in it before!

I wrote that last night... Then came to bed to discover my flight to Orlando had been cancelled. It was no big issue really, I had another flight booked within 20 mins, but it was still stress. Just like today when I tried to book a car and a couple of tickets to Disney only to discover my bank card has been blocked for the fifth time in as many weeks and I'll have to wait until the morning to unblock it. Seriously Nationwide, could you be any more incompetent? I'll be shutting that account down in a week. Finally, I realised I had forgotten to book my US Visa (ESTA), but again, it was done in under half an hour. Phew.

Still, it's a fair representation of this entire trip. At least it's given me something to write about

The main reason I had come to Guayaquil was as a stop on the way to the Galapagos Islands. To come all this way and not visit them seemed insane to me, but I have limited money and everyone was telling me how expensive the place is. But as ever, I persisted.

I had found a nice cheap flight for £170 and a room in someone's house for £7 a night. Great start! All this came crashing down around me at the airport.

That way lies Asia

The process to visit the Galapagos is a bit convoluted. I first went to the counter, to be told I had to do the check in on one of the online machines. This was annoying, as it wouldn't let me do the online check in the night before, so why now? Once this was done, I then had to go get my back checked for banned items. You aren't allowed any non processed food stuffs as they're worried about damaging the eco system. Fair enough. Coffee was allowed though, so I was good. I then had to go pay for some travel card thing, which was another $20 and I was good to go.

But when I went to drop of my rucksack at the counter, I was told that I had bought an 'Ecuadorian flight ticket' and I would have to pay another $130!! I was pretty steamed at this point and if my plane ticket had been refundable I'd have likely cut off my nose to spite my face and told them to stick it up their arses. Fortunately after a couple of conversations with friends and family, saner heads prevailed and I paid up and got on the plane. I didn't buy a coffee in the airport. That will show them!

They really love Paul Bettany here! - Only one person I know will get that joke

So 185 years, 9 months and 27 days after Charles Darwin arrived in The Beagle, I arrived on a jet plane that landed about a mile from where he did. Darwin thought the island a deserted and isolated place when he initially arrived and my first impressions were pretty similar, but I soon changed my mind (as did he) as I started to explore the island.

For starters, as has been the way in most places I've been this trip, everyone is really nice. The family who own the house where I'm staying are lovely and despite little English being spoken and my continually crap Spanish, we seem to be communicating fine. The room was great, pretty basic, like most of the island, and terrible wifi, but you know, it's a small island in the Pacific Ocean 500 miles away from anywhere, it's a bit of a miracle they have wifi and phone service at all really! The phone service isn't really that bad either, I'm using it right now to uploads the pics on here because the wifi isn't cutting it.

Anyway, after dumping my stuff, I soon took a walk down to the beach to see if I could see any wildlife around. I was in for a bit of a shock.

Loads of animals everywhere!

The wildlife here is everywhere and I've only seen 5% of it. From the multitudes of birds, big and small, to the lizards everywhere, you can't walk 100 meters without spotting something, but when I got to the water and visited the closest beach to where I'm staying, I found it filled with sea lions, scores of them! Now you hear people talking about how the animals here don't view humans as predators so don't care about you, but their absolute ambivalence towards you is amazing really. They really could care less about you unless you go near their babies or they want to play with you.

I'm like Attenborough

And there are very few rules as to being around them. You're told to keep 6 feet away and not to touch them, that's about it and not always possible as they'll come right up to you whenever they please. You're supposed to walk away, but no one does, the result is some lovely close up pics of hundreds of (mostly sleeping) sea lions as I went from beach to beach. I also saw loads of marine iguanas, another of the animals I really wanted to see. All I need do now is pay a taxi to take me to the top of the island to where the giant tortoises live and I'll have seen the three land animals on my tick list!

Ahhh

The price of things isn't too bad for the most part either, considering everything that's being sold has been shipped over 500 miles to get here. I've found the food is pretty reasonable, especially if you go to one of the many little restaurants that are just really extensions of people's houses, but I had a huge burrito at a restaurant in town for just eight dollars, so that wasn't too bad. I did see a normal sized bottle of Jack Daniels in a supermarket for $80 though!!!

It was a big old burrito!

I'm mostly just walking / hiking around. This morning I woke up and went swimming in the ocean with the sea lions. I'd call it a once in a lifetime experience if I didn't expect to wake up and do it again tomorrow! It really was amazing sharing the water with them as they checked me out, swimming around me and then showing off some leaping out the water. I've taken some video, so hopefully I can do something with that.

Over the next few days I want to do a couple of scuba dives and also take a tour up to the volcano and down to the tortoises, other than that I just want to discover as much of the island as I can and maybe try out the three for $10 mohitos I saw at the beach!

So it must have been longer than I thought since my last blog post as I was talking about day 48 then and I've now passed 50.

Banos continued to be a great time as I travelled into the Amazon jungle, another tick off the old bucket list, although I hope to go even deeper into there when I visit Peru in a few weeks. The trip was great, although it started off a bit ropey as we went down a river in a boat cut out of a log that had no real business being on the water. As always, like an idiot, I had my wallet on me, so was more worried than I needed to be about falling in as we hit rocks, got stuck in the middle of the river and generally bobbed and swayed like the uncontrolled log we were.

We were lucky not to drown! Luck and the fact the water was about 2 foot deep

Miraculously, we managed to stay afloat and dryish and proceeded an hour further into the jungle to visit the Huaorani tribe in their village. It was pretty touristy, with native dances and demonstrations. We drank some drink, I have no idea what it was, but was told by my guide that before the coronavirus it was made with spit rather than water. Chalk on up to the virus!

We then hiked up through the jungle to a waterfall. After some much tougher hikes, this was a breeze! I'm pretty pleased with my generally improving fitness! At the top everybody jumped into the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. I say everyone, it was everyone apart from the guides and me! It was raining and the water was bloody cold! I did the swimming in the waterfall pool thing in Costa Rica, where it was 35 degrees. I'll give this a miss cheers!

All good things must come to an end though and the next day was my day to travel to Guayaquil. It was a 5.5 hour journey, but I've had worse. Or so I thought! Pretty much the entire journey apart from the last hour was just slaloming down through the Andes mountains. It was terrible. I couldn't read a book, watch a movie or anything because as soon as I looked away from the road I felt sick. I'm usually fine, but this was really hard. I tried to sleep a bit and I could listen to music or a podcast, but I had to keep my eyes on the road the whole time. Fortunately the Ecuadorian landscape is stunning! But it was small consolation to me as the journey went on for 7 hours straight.

Guayaquil Cemetery is pretty bloody incredible!

Guayaquil is going to be a bit of a rest for me, I don't have anything much planned. Today was spent walking around, getting to know the place, with a stop at a square filled with meter long iguanas! It was crazy seeing them all just walking around the park. They didn't care about the people there at all, and the park was filled with them. I hadn't realised how many there actually were until I narrowly avoided being hit by a stream of lizard piss and looked up to see the trees filled with them too! There must have been a hundred there!

Iguanas and turtles and Koi oh my!

Tomorrow is for the football (It's coming home!) and then Monday will likely just be getting ready for the Galapagos, so I may be away a few days, but I thought as I've passed day 50, in fact now day 52, I'd update with some stats:

I have travelled a total of 8,277 miles, through 4 countries if you include the 2 hours I was in Spain on day 1.

I have stayed at 15 hostels, hotels and apartments in 14 different towns and cities so far. The shortest time I stayed in a room was one night (The hostel in La Fortuna filled with kids). The longest I stayed in a place was a week, in Boquete, where I could have stayed even longer.

I have travelled a conservative 64 hours so far by plane, boat, car and oh so many buses. That doesn't include any time waiting for buses or sat in airports etc. I have walked 240 miles so far. Up and down mountains, through rivers, jungle, rainforests, beaches and mangrove swamps. I don't know how much weight I've lost as I can't find any scales, but I'm using a hole in my belt that's never been used before.

I've seen countless new animals, but highlights are Howler Monkeys, Sloths, Hummingbirds and Tapirs!

And this lazy bastard

I have lost or broken very little thankfully. I had a towel stolen on day 3 or so, lost a sock a few weeks in, so tossed the other one, cracked the back of my phone, but that can be fixed and the strap broke on my small bag, so I replaced it with a small rucksack.

I broke a fingernail in half, got dirt stuck up my thumbnail after a slip that hurt a lot more than you'd imagine and of course did something to my back 20 mins before leaving that seriously affected my first few weeks of travel. I've also been bitten by mosquitoes about a million times.

I'm having a fine time, and it's getting better. I missing everyone very much though.

Right, I'm gonna go, some hippy looking guy is doing something weird with a flower covered stick in the hostel and I want to see what's going on!

I can't get enough of hiking through jungles

Since arriving in Costa Rica I have met a lot of young Brits. The country has been letting in anyone without need of a vaccination or even PCR test since about October last year, so it seems to be the gap year place of choice for many 18 / 19 year olds.

That's all about to change as it looks likely that by the time I post this, Costa Rica will be on the UK's Red list which will come into effect Tuesday. These kids, who have mostly been here three or four months, now need to get back to the UK before then or face a £1750 quarantine in a Holiday Inn for 10 nights. Some of these kids were on the ball and got a PCR test yesterday and flights back to the UK. Others, including two young girls in my room, have been less lucky (or less smart) and are worried that they will have to fly via another country (they're looking at Italy as one of them has family there). No one will go to a quarantine hotel, they'll fly somewhere on the amber list and spend the money there, why would they do anything else?

more photos of nothing to do with the narrative, this is my room though, very nice. My bed is the bottom left.

The cheapest reasonable flight back to the UK (one that doesn't take 37 hours) is currently £350, about £100 more than you'd expect. I have no idea what this will end up as this evening after the official announcement. Another reason not to fly directly back to the UK. This can't help curb the spread of any virus surely? Still, about 30% of the people I've met here are young Brits, so there could be a sharp decline in the number of filled up hostel and hotel beds.

None of this affect me though, as I'm not leaving for ages and I don't think I'll be leaving from Costa Rica, although at the moment, Ecuador, Panama and Peru are all red list countries so If needs be I'll fly home via 10 days in Orlando or Morocco for a cheaper option.

Cute lizard sitting next to me as I type

Yesterday ended up being a literal washout for me. I had decided to walk to a local beach, about 4 km away, for a bit of exercise rather than getting a bus for 30p. It should have taken about an hour. The walk was ok, but very hilly, some of the steepest roads I've ever walked up. it it was bloody hot at 8am, around 28 degrees.

All like this. Insane. I don't know how some of the old bangers they drive round here made it.

Some beautiful views though

Eventually, I came to a gate with a pathway heading down through the forest to the beach. It was about here when it started raining. Only a bit, not too bad. By the time I got to the beach I was in the middle of a downpour, with very little cover. I got drenched. The sky looked ok a ways away, so I hung around for a bit and it did start to clear, for all of 5 minutes until it got even worse. By this point I figured I couldn't get any much wetter, but was worried about the stuff in my bag, my camera, tablet etc and didn't think it would improve, so I made my way back, up the pathway through the woods that had now become a stream, before finally hitting the road.

I must have looked more pathetic than usual as at one point an American woman stopped and gave me a lift a kilometer or so, which was nice of her, but I finally got back to the hostel around an hour after the beach. The weather was of course beautiful at this point. I had left so early in the day because the weather 'experts' said it would be lovely until about midday and then horrible for the rest of the day. It was pretty much the exact opposite.

At this point I remembered my passport was in my pocket! It was soaked, like it had been through a washing machine. I carefully dried each page before leaving it out in the sun to dry off, which it did pretty well. Phew. The camera and tablet were both fine in my bag, which was good.

Damp but usable, this is also the name of your sex tape

New tip - Always have a plastic bag with you to protect your stuff in Costa Rica!

The diving had been fantastic, I'd passed my Open Water certificate and was now allowed to pretty much dive anywhere, but I would also be losing the people I had dived with.

Of the four of us that started the course, only three continued, but all four of us had been out together every night since day one along with the boyfriends of two of the girls and often another couple that dived with Sairee Cottage. We'd also just run into people we knew as we went along. It's a small island.

I had my first bucket with them, for the uninitiated, this is usually about a mug full of some spirit (in this case Vodka) tipped into a small bucket and topped up with coke at a ridiculously cheap price. We sat together at a bar's beach party watching fire jugglers toss their flaming sticks 40 feet to each other over everyone's heads. We played pool and beer pong (how was this my first time? What did I do at Uni? ) we drank and we ate, it was great.

And now they were leaving.

One couple were off to another island, another off to Cambodia to Koh Rong where Klau and I visited a few years back. The last member of our group was going home.

This almost arbitrary friendship between people with almost nothing in common takes some getting used to. I've obviously travelled solo a fair amount, but usually I keep to myself, speaking to very few people and only rarely seeing them more than a day or two. No need to get attached. I got friendly with a group at the hostel in Bangkok, most of whom I only spent an evening with, but this was different because we went through a lot together, we were reliant on each other to get through the day and we chose to spend our time together in the evenings. It meant more. And then you share social media accounts and leave, maybe never seeing each other again.

I'm sure that as this trip progresses, I'll meet many more people, some of who I'll stay in touch with forever, but at the beginning of this experience, it feels a little sadder. Before I left, I was a little wary of hostels, thinking I'd always go for a hotel if it was cheap enough, but now I'm thinking hostels are the way to go. There's a much better chance to meet people there than in a hotel room where I tend to keep myself to myself.

I saw most of them again the next day as I started the advanced course and they were waiting for ferries to take them back to the mainland, it was nice, we wished each other safe journeys and went on with our lives. I'm following their Instagram, they seem to be having a fine time...

I continued my course, diving 5 times over 2 days in some of the greatest visibility (being able to see 15 - 20 meters underwater is incredible) and worst visibility (diving at 30 meters but only being able to see for 3 or 4 meters is scary as hell) I had experienced so far. I dived at night, which was incredible and scary all at once and I explored a wreck, probably the highlight of all the dives. Tired, but happy, it was time for me to move on. I said goodbye to Sairee Beach, Sairee Cottage Diving and the people there I had become friends with, but I promised to come back one day this week and share a beer or two.

I actually saw two of them later that same night as I was eating. Like I said before, small Island

Beer Pong at it's finest

A blurry picture of drunk people on a beach at night having a time

As I former fire safety officer, I should have been more wary, less drunk, when around these

Getting ready for our night dive