Entries about birds

Yes, I've been waiting forever to use a Jaws (2) tagline for my blog....

So while I made a big deal about 'Doing the Galapagos on the cheap', there were some things I really wanted to do or see.

Firstly, I wanted to see several animals. Sea lions, marine iguanas, giant tortoises and Darwin's finches. I would also have loved to have gone scuba diving, having passed my advance PADI course last year. It was very expensive though. Very fortunately, I have some lovely friends who gave me some money for Christmas / Birthday last year (Thank you so much Kevin and Lisa!! XX) that I was able to use to do just that. Go diving in the Galapagos!

These plants are like tiny Chinese lanterns, amazing!

I had looked around and decided that I wanted to go to a place called Kicker Rock. It was the place where they said there was the best chance to see hammerhead sharks. I needed no more convincing! I found a place that I liked the look of, went and spoke to them, checked out their equipment (VERY important! All Scuba companies are not the same!) and booked my spot for the next day, which would consist of two dives and an afternoon at a beach in the NW of the Island.

I arrived the next morning, very excited and raring to go. I met my dive partners. An older German guy who works as a photographer and was also once a German Navy Seal!! and a young Israeli guy, fresh out of national service and now travelling the world. We went over our diving plan, signals etc and got our equipment. After a quick dip to check it all out, the boat sped off to Kicker Rock and we were ready to go!

A pretty happy Chris!

I've only ever dived in Thailand, across eight or nine sites off the island of Koh Tao, but apart from the advance dives (a 30 meter dive with almost zero visibility, a night dive and a shipwreck dive) they were all fairly similar. Teaming with life, great visibility. How did these dives compare? There seemed to be a lot less variety of life, but what they had was amazing!

You know that thing where you're 20 meters under the surface of the ocean and you look around to see ten hammerhead sharks swim by? No? Well I do now! I have no photos (I'll get some from the pro photographer!) but I took videos with my fake GoPro and made a video, so here's the link!

https://youtu.be/A3V39iV_k58

It was amazing! I saw about 12 or 13 hammerheads in all, 2 black tip sharks, loads and loads of turtles and a sea lion. It was two of the best dives I've done. It really ignited my love of diving too. I love being underwater and I hope to dive again somewhere this trip!

Oh yeah! There were loads of dolphins too!

The next day I went on a highlands tour. It was arranged by the ladies who owned the house I was staying at. Basically it's a tour run by all the taxi drivers on the island, usually about four hours long and costing around $50 - $60.

At this point, I should mention the taxis on San Cristobal. At least 50% of the vehicles on the road were taxis, these big pick up trucks that drive around honking at anyone walking on the road. It's a marvel that the island survived the pandemic as far as tourism money is concerned as so much of the island's economy rests on it. At one point the island was pretty much running on a barter system. Thankfully Ecuador has a really successful vaccination program running right now!

So my driver came and picked me up and we headed to our three destinations: A lagoon in a volcano, a giant tortoise sanctuary and a beach on the North of the island. We headed first to the volcano, only for the weather to turn suddenly and the visibility was so bad we decided to come back later. Off to the sanctuary!

There's no animal I identify more with the Galapagos than the giant tortoise. I could go on about this for a while, but the differences between these gentle giants across the islands were one of the things that helped nudge Darwin to his Theory of Evolution (which I read again on the flight to the Galapagos! lol). I couldn't wait to see them.

I can't help it. I see these and have the Baby Elephant song in my head. Wrong animal, I know! I can't help it! Now you have the Baby elephant song in your head too. No? Don't know the song? Google it, I'll wait. Now you have it in your head. Forever

The sanctuary has two parts. An area where you walk around in the hope you'll see some tortoises and a breeding centre filled with tiny baby giants (is that a triple oxymoron?). Often I've been to these places where you walk around for ages trying to spot anything at all, but not here. The tortoises were everywhere!

Only a few of them were big enough for a saddle, but riding the big ones was.... I'm joking!! Don't try to ride the giant tortoises!!

They'll likely bite you I think. I doubt that'll feel great.

He'll bite you. He'll mess you up

After an hour or so of watching these ancient animals, some well over a hundred years old, we went down to the beach. Not much to see here really. Very nice beach, but no better than the beaches back where I was staying and far more crowded than some along the island, but a nice walk nonetheless. Time to head back to the volcano.

Oh the bloody volcano. Still no visibility, I went anyway. Got wet, saw little, got bloody muddy, walked back down. I'm sure it's lovely when you can see it. Great, thanks.

Great

I'd now seen and done everything I needed to see and do. Had it been 'on the cheap'? Well. Considering you need to fly to Ecuador to get where I started, then pay for a £170 flight to get to the island, then another £90 because you're not Ecuadorian, then another £70 Galapagos tax to help the ecology, maybe it can't be done on the cheap. Add to that the £150 I did in tours and you're already at £500 odd.

But when I was there, I mostly cooked my own food, did a lot of hiking and things that were free, I had an amazing time, swam with sea lions, dived with sharks and hand fed giant tortoises. I almost saw a volcano lagoon.

I think it was well worth the price.

• This post was of course, not sponsored by anyone, although Kev and Lisa helped pay for the diving! If any of you are interested in using your

hard earned money to pay for me to live out my dreams, it's more than welcome! I've never tried lobster! Chuck me £20 and I'll do that! Another £20 and I'll zip line! I could try any number of things, we could make a game of it, although there's likely a limit, I'll not have sex with anything weird or wear an 'I love Dartford'* T-shirt for cash. there's not enough money in the world for that.

Or I guess you could just spend that money on doing something fun for yourself! But probably giving it to me is a better idea

• Also, one of my posts here has hit 1000 views! Far more friends than I have on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere really, so maybe I should cut out all the local references for readers who have no idea what I'm going on about. Or it's my responsibility to help hundreds of people around the world realise what a hole Dartford is and help them avoid it.

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

*Before I start the blog* I've been trying to include more photos to the blog this trip, but this post isn't really about my travels over the past few days as I just travelled back from La Fortuna to San Jose in preparation for my latest trip down here to the Pacific Coast and much more jungle. I will include some pics though that I've taken over the past three days and will intersperse them into the text, of which they will have little to no connection. Enjoy

Pictures like this random picture of a bale of turtles doing nothing

Now on to the main post..

As I write this, it's 8pm and I'm in a hostel outside of a town called Quepos, on the Pacific Coast and about 4km from Manuel Antonio National Park, one of the country's best apparently. It's pitch black out and the noise from the light rain isn't coming close to drowning out the sounds of nature surrounding me. Even more than La Fortuna, this is how I thought Costa Rica would be!

The hostel is so far pretty great, bar the shit wifi outside my room on the veranda, but maybe it's better at reception. Within 30 mins of arriving, juice in one hand, book in the other, I was thinking about extending my stay here another week. I know it's early to be saying that, but the place has a pool (good for my back!), at least three amazing looking beaches, a massive jungle behind me and it's in the 30s every day. Perfect. The room is lovely too, no windows, just a mesh letting in all the noise and light from outside. I can't see me sleeping past 6am tomorrow but the room is lovely and cool which is good when it's 27c outside at night

The sunsets are lovely too!

The past few days were pretty dull as I spent a good seven hours of that travelling (three hours from La Fortuna to San Jose and four hours down to here) and 36 hours in San Jose which is really shaping up to be the world's dullest capital city. The highlight of my day was going to a tiny zoo in the middle of the city and checking out animals that are mostly found here in the wild. The highlight was feeding some monkeys after noticing one stretching through bars to reach a seed pod. There were loads of pods around me and no one in the park to stop me. I am a zoo rebel. I did see some nice butterflies and a dragonfly, but these were just flying around.

Monkeys are a lot more amiable when you feed the little shits

I spent an interesting evening chatting to a group of travellers. It's always great to hear what others are doing, helpful too, especially nowadays. One of the travellers though was, I shall put this delicately, an odd duck. An 18/19 year old lad from England that seems to have been all over the place, but apparently has spent the last six months discovering hallucinogenics and plans to travel to the Amazon Rainforest of Columbia to volunteer with some kind of spiritual guru and help him cultivate some kind of powder, which is in no way a drug, but is made from coca leaves, the same as cocaine. All legal though, I promise

I don't know how much truth there is in all that, but if you see a piece about a missing skinny blonde English kid on the news in a month or two, he's buried in Columbia.

Stopped off at a roadside cafe today for some nondescript meat on a skewer. It was pretty likely chicken, but tasted great for a quid!

It's now two weeks since I left my life to come do this nonsense. It will be two weeks since my back gave out on me at the worst opportunity and is just starting to get better. Some days I've just wanted to turn around and come home. other days have been highlights of my life. I've added countries to the travel list and taken others away. I've walked 50 miles, through airports, jungles, rain forests and up and down volcanoes. I've seen sloths, frogs, toucans and more hummingbirds than I care to mention. It's been a crazy fortnight.

My first ever view of the Pacific Ocean

I don't think I'm going to Honduras now, from what I hear it's not the safest place for solo travellers, so I think I may go South to Panama by bus, then fly to Ecuador, do a week in the Galapagos then head down to Peru. But I have no timeframe for any of it, even for when I'm leaving Costa Rica, I have a two month visa here, but may leave for Panama next week.. I'm able to travel pretty freely round here because of the vaccinations (thanks Dil!) but there's all sorts of talk about which countries will be made red in a couple of weeks here. I'm not really worried though, that's a ways off and I can always travel back to the UK via a green country

Hopefully this next week sill see more wildlife, both in the jungle and ocean, more hikes, more resting and more reading. Who know's where I'll be in 2 weeks? I honestly have no clue.

I've been trying to get these out every other day, it seemed to work, until I hit a day so devastating in it's blandness that I have absolutely nothing to say about it.

It was the rain. The bloody RAIN.

Look, I know it's a rain forest blah blah blah, but this was rain like I've never seen for the whole day. It didn't let up at all. I hear that it's been raining in the UK and I don't know how as I just assumed all the rain in the whole World had just dropped on me. In 2016 I drove from Orlando International to our house in some pretty mental rain, but this was worse and lasted for 14 hours. I had to put my earphones in so I could hear the TV on my laptop the rain was so loud!

So yeah, nothing going on that day.

Other than that, I seem to have hit a stride. Wake up, usually in some small amount of pain from my back. Move around a bit until that feels OK, go grab a pastry and coffee or breakfast then find something to do for the day.

Wednesday I went to find some sloths. There are a few 'Sloth Trails' around here. Essentially someone owns a stretch of jungle with sloths inside and has fenced it off so you have to pay to go in and spend hours searching for small, tree coloured mammals that cling to branches and don't move. It was hard going at first, I hadn't paid extra for a guide as it was pretty much the same price as 3 days accommodation, or 30 beers. I figured I could find them on my own. I was wrong.

Sloth are stupidly hard to spot!

I was having a pretty fine time though, just wandering around a very serene jungle only a few hundred meters away from town, checking out all the birds and frogs, of which there were many and far easier to find. It was at this point I started a kind of animal spotting barter system.

I had found a bush filled with hummingbirds. It was pretty great, I've never seen a real hummingbird before and they are amazing. They fly past you like the air is vibrating around you. It's an experience. I then walked past a group with a guide and told them what I had found, they then told me where a sloth was. I then told the next group where that sloth was to be told where another was and so on.

On the way back to the house, my Mum essentially butt dialed my sister and I so we all caught up, which was very nice. I hadn't realised how much I was missing talking back home.

I stopped off at a Soda place for a cheap but bloody nice dinner and that was pretty much me done for the day.

less than £3 for chicken, rice and beans, a coffee and fruit juice (tamarind) can't be bad!

Yesterday started very similarly, but I did a tour up to the volcano in the afternoon.

Now, Costa Rican's have a motto, 'Pura Vida', which translates literally to pure life, but in reality is more of a feeling, a way of life, but also the reason that no one is ever on time, you just have to roll with it. Pura Vida was likely the reason that my tour was an hour late picking me up, but also why it was so good. Everyone I've met here is great.

Volcano views

We started with a long hike up the volcano as our guide Eric gave us loads of information about the big eruption of 1968 and the wildlife that now lives around there. We walked a big loop around the area and down through a rainforest where we saw pretty much nothing until we stopped for coffee and saw this little guy:

Finally we took a trip down to one of the many hot springs in the area where I was able to give my back a nice deserved soak while drinking loads of local rum. The whole tour was fantastic, really worth the 30 or so quid.

There are loads of hot springs here attached to hotels, some costing up to $80!! There's also a natural little hot spring river. This was somewhere in the middle

Returning back to the house, I made some dinner and was invited to join my hosts for some drinks. And drink we did. All night. It was a great night but I'm feeling it this morning, luckily though, the weather is beautiful today, which makes it better as I think we're going off on another hike!