Month: February 2022

We made it to Costa Rica and boy is it hot here too! We somehow always end up traveling with our big backpacks at the hottest part of the day and arriving in San Jose was no different. (What is it they say? Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun?). After a stressful time being questioned by an immigration officer who must have been part of the Spanish inquisition in a past life, and collecting our baggage, where I thought mine hadn’t made it, we finally got out of the airport hours later than expected. We headed to a bus stop, after ten minutes of waiting in the sun, the bus came. However, the driver informed us we were wrong in our assumption the currency in Costa Rica is dollars (all trips and hotels have prices in USD to make it easier for the many many US tourists they get). So we trudged back up the hill to the airport, got cash out in Costa Rican Colón and tried again, this time with more success.

Once the bus dropped us off at the center of town, we decided to ignore the hostels advice of getting a taxi and to walk the 30 minutes to the hostel. It was only once we reached a six lane motorway, that we realised why the recommendation may have been a taxi. After a time consuming detour along the motorway until we found a footbridge, we made it to the other side and onwards to the hostel.

We dumped our bags and headed straight out the door again, back into the centre of town, this time in a taxi! We wanted to check out the gold museum before it closed for the day. The museum was three floors and filled with gold from pre-spanish times, along with pottery and some other sections on the beginnings of money in central America. It was an interesting museum and it was cool to see how the metal was used and shaped into various things and also to see the first coins and notes minted in Costa Rica. We also really enjoyed the short documentary about indigenous tribes in Costa Rica and how after generations of integration they are now trying to go back to their roots and re-learn lost languages and skills.

After the gold museum we grabbed some dinner at a BBQ place and it was delicious, one of the benefits of being in a much more touristy country is good international (in this case American) food. Then we waddled back to the hostel.

The hostel had a pool table so we continued our tradition of playing a very long very unskilled game of pool and then moved on to Uno. We made friends with a canadian couple and a few others and had a few rounds of both pool and uno with them before it got late and the hostel staff asked us to go to bed.

The next morning we decided to check out the Saturday morning market in town. It was super cute along a shaded avenue of trees. It was more of a farmer’s market than a local one, but we still enjoyed it. We had some toasted panini’s for breakfast, followed by some breakfast cake, because it’s never too early for cake and it just looked so good! Grace also brought herself some nice earrings. After a nose around all of the stools we decided to head into town to try and find a new battery for my watch. It’s been broken a few weeks now and none of the small local watch shops seem to be able to/want to replace the battery even though it would be a 2 minute job. So finally in a big city we found a Swatch watch shop in a mall and hoped they would be able to replace it. Unfortunately they wouldn’t either. So we spent some time shopping to replace things we’d lost or had broken in the wash or needed but hadn’t packed.

We returned back to the hostel and decided to go for drinks with the Canadian couple. We both had early buses to catch, so decided we would go for a quick drink and come home for an early night. Soon however word had spread around the hostel and we ended up with a whole group of us going to a rooftop bar. We arrived at the bar around 6pm and it was more of a open air nightclub than a bar and was pretty busy, especially for how early it was, the only place free to stand was the dance floor that overlooked the city. It was a really pretty view and after a few drinks we all ended up having a dance to music which none of us knew, but the locals were very into. After a few hours of drinks and dancing we decided to call it a night as we figured it must be getting on for past midnight, it was in fact 9:30pm… But on the plus side we’d had a whole night out and gotten to bed early. The sort of nights out I could get behind!

We said our goodbyes in the morning and got on a bus to Uvita, which I’ll tell you all about soon. Love Alice x

We had to get two chicken buses to El Tunco with two hours of waiting around in the heat between them. During out wait we met another backpacker, André from Slovakia, as we were the only other white people in the bus station he decided to come over and say hi. He was also headed to El Tunco so we got the bus together. We also chatted to a local man who introduced himself to us once we had taken our seats on the bus, he told us that he spoke English and asked if he could chat to us. His son who is 15 lives in the US and he hoped to join him one day so wanted to practice his English. He was an interesting guy, he told us how he had been smuggled across the Mexican border to the US twice already but had been caught and sent back and he was hoping better English would help next time. It costs around $20,000 USD paid to the Mexican mafia to be smuggled he told us helpfully. He also asked us about England and was shocked to hear we had our own currency, he’d never heard of the pound and found it crazy it was worth more than a USD for a currency only the British use. He got off the bus before us but helpfully told us where we needed to stop.

It was safe to say we were less than impressed with our hostel and the area in general. The hostel was full of very clique surfers who didn’t seem to be interested in talking to anyone who wasn’t a surfer. The bunk beds were also very flimsy, so I made Grace take the top bunk, for fear of turning over in the night and crushing her to death as the bed collapsed. Hopefully with Grace on the top bunk there was less of a chance of imminent death but still every time either of us moved, it would start the whole thing rocking and wake you up. The beach town wasn’t great either, the beach itself was made up of rocks about 10cm across and was not very clean, the town was geared for parting with blaring music from every bar from 9am in the morning. It was also soo soo hot. It felt like Magaluf had been put in a sauna. It is interesting how the most ‘touristy’ resort in El Salvador was actually the place we’d enjoyed least in the country.

We persevered for two nights there but we would still have another three before we could build our plane to Costa Rica so we scouted about towns nearby and ended up payinf way too much ($70 a night) for a beautiful double room in a hotel in the town next to El Tunco called El Zone. But it was worth it to get out of there. The beach in El Zonte was sandy, much cleaner and without bars blaring musoc, it just had local restaurants. Although it seemed they’ve already started building everywhere and the hopes to make it the next El Tunco, which would be a real shame.

It was absolute luxury a huge double bed, warm shower, Aircon and a lovely pool. We decided to treat it as a vacation from our vacation and eat at a lovely restaurant on the beach each night even splurging out on glasses of wine and a desert or two.

While we were there grace wanted to do a surfing lesson. After various lessons where I have proven my incompetence and had pretty much paid to almost drown, I’ve given up on my dream of being a pro surfer, deciding it was more effort than enjoyment. So I left Grace to it, spending the hour instead out of the oppressive midday heat painting my nails and shaving my legs. A private bathroom is a luxury you have to make use of, shaving your legs with people knocking asking what’s taking so long gets very tiring.

I’d just gotten dressed when she arrived back, I opened the door to let her in and she burst into tears. It’s not the first time my face has had that effect on someone! But it turns out she was upset after an hour spent with a surf instructor who thought the best way to improve someone’s surfing ability was to bully them into it. He was constantly criticizing and belittling her and moaning under his breath that she couldn’t already stand up on the surfboard. It was heart breaking to see, as she was so excited to go that morning and he had completely ruined it for her and charged her $50 for the privilege.

After some consolation, a nice lunch, some wine and a brownie Grace was feeling a bit more upbeat and ready to try again tomorrow, this time requesting a different instructor.

This time she returned back from surfing absolutely beaming and even managed to stand up a few times. So we got to leave El Salvador on a high note with some nice beach days and beers with our friend André.

Next up we’re off to Costa Rica. I’ll tell you all about it soon. Love Alice x

Our transfer from Antigua Guatemala took us to the city of Santa Ana, the transport company would have dropped us directly at our next destination in the mountain village of Juayua for another £40 but we decided to try and do it ourselves on chicken buses as it would cost less than $1 USD.

The Chicken buses here are all old US school busses that have been pimped out with sound systems, paintings of Jesus and lots of mirrors and flashing lights. They also have a constant stream of people getting on the bus walking down the center aisle trying to sell everything from fresh fruit, bags of Coca-Cola, phone chargers and anything else you can imagine. But at least they have set routes and bus numbers here which makes things easier. We had a pretty uneventful ride until it came to getting off the bus. Lord knows how people signal they want to get off, we tend to just hope Somone else wants to get on or off near where we do and try and get out then as quickly as possible. But it’s always fun trying to lift 12kg bags from the bag rails above peoples heads while standing as the bus speeds around sharp corners. I nearly killed a woman getting mine down, luckily she was very forgiving! We weren’t quick enough to get off the bus in time so we staggered to the back of the bus and hung on for dear life until a local took pity on us and did the secret whistle that is apparently the signal for the bus to stop. Somehow we had managed to get off the bus directly outside our hotel which was a bit of luck.

The next morning we headed into the centre of town to book our 7 waterfalls hike. Once we got to the tour place they informed us there was a tour we could join in 20 minutes so we rushed back to our hotel, got changed, got water and cash for the tour and then ran back, hoping the banana we managed to get down our necks would be enough to sustain us.

We joined a tour with 5 other backpackers, our English speaking guide, Andreas, and our local guide, Carlos. As El Salvador isn’t on many backpackers lists, the trails tend to get overgrown, so our local guide, Carlos, was ahead of us with his machete cutting back the route and pointing out any dangers, of which there were actually quite a few… including wasp nests, spiders and eroded parts of trails where we could easily fall to our death. So that was fun.

We were also joined by two doggie guides, Tony and Fernanda, who made the track more fun but also more deadly. They tended to run through your legs while you were traversing tricky bits of paths or to jump from ledges above you when there was nowhere to land but the spot you were standing on, or if you didn’t manage to scramble out of the way in time, onto you..

The hike itself was really fun, we climbed through steep forests and coffee plantations to reach the top of a river flowing down steep rocks forming lots of waterfalls. Then to my surprise we were told we would be rappelling/ canyoning down the waterfalls. It would have been nice to have been informed of this before hand as I have quite the fear of heights… But I was at the top at this point, and far too proud to make a fuss or let on I was scared. Something an American girl in our group had no issue with and complained loudly. I don’t blame her, as the poor girl had been telling us how uncoordinated she was and had already fallen over on flat ground when we had only just started the walk.

It was also a much longer way down than any of us were expecting and we had to do sections at a time. At points we were all perched half way down a waterfall, waiting for ropes to be reset and our turn to descend the next section, which meant we got absolutely soaked through. Luckily, with the human guides helping and avoiding the, now wet, doggie guides hindrances, we all made it down the waterfall. We were all pretty impressed with ourselves until Carlos shot straight back up the waterfall, untied the rope we were using and came back down with the rope in one arm and a machete in the other…all while wearing crocs.

Once we had made it to the bottom we waded down the river for a while, which was no easy feat. The water was running so fast it was hard to see under the surface where it was safe to put your feet. The river bed also changed depth drastically within a few steps, so that one minute you were knee deep and the next step you were waist deep. That’s if you hadn’t lost your footing and fallen over completely, which happened a few times. So we were all using the larger boulders and rocks to steady ourselves, which Carlos kept saying not to do, but with nothing else to steady ourselves with we mostly carried on. That was until he pointed out a tarantula under one of the rocks, we quickly stopped after that. Turns out getting a bit wet from falling in isn’t that bad. Grace and the American girl were not fans of the spiders and rushed past. Carlos found this hilarious and took it as his queue to point out every huge spider he saw. There were a lot.

He told me most of them weren’t venous which I passed on to grace in English, he also told me there were way more in the forest they were just less easy to spot. I chose not to pass that one on. He also told me the one that was venomous and spiteful to watch out for was the black and ??? one. Very useful, I wasn’t able to understand the second colour, the most critical info of the day and I had no idea! (Andreas later told me he was saying black widow, no wonder I didn’t know the colour!).

After Carlos realised I spoke some Spanish he had a great time chatting away to me, I’m not sure it mattered to him I was only getting about 60% of what he was saying, so I just nodded along. Although I did enjoyy when he told me about his friend that had moved to London and asked if I’d seen him about, which I thought was very cute.

The last part of the hike was the least enjoyable, we had to climb back up to where we had started but this time while dripping wet. On the plus side we got a late lunch of boiled egg sandwiches, which after a long hike tasted much nicer than it sounds!

The next day we headed into the center of the village to sample the delights of the food market held in Juayua at weekends. It was made up of loads of different market stalls selling different sweets, drinks and plates of food, and even one man who tried to sell me a baby rabbit by just placing it in my hand. As cute as it was, I didn’t fancy trying to smuggle it through airports and borders…

Interesting side fact Bitcoin (an electronic currency) is a national currency as of 2018 in El Salvador, the only country in the world to list an e-currency as a national currency. Even the market stalls in this mountain village took bitcoin which was very surreal to see.

Our first stop was a coffee for Grace which was reportedly quite disappointing as it hadn’t been strained properly and had granules floating in it. Next we tried a pineapple drink, where they core a pineapple, blend it with some ice and serve it back to you in what’s left of the pineapple. It was 50 cents more to add rum, so we figured it would be rude not to. Although it was 9am so we got some judgement from the lady running the stall, it was a good call and very delicious.

Next up we decided to try a plate of food. Grace was a bit apprehensive as she’s not keen on meat cooked in central America, and after seeing markets where it’s not stored well, I don’t blame her. But I figured the locals wouldn’t eat at the stalls if they had been given food poisoning there previously so I was going to try my luck. Once we started to stop and look at the different sample plates at the front of the stalls loads of sample bits of cooked meat on cocktail sticks appeared and they were delicious so Grace agreed to share a plate with me.

We opted for a plate that was a bit of a mix of everything. We had a chicken chorizo sausage, a thin steak, pasta salad, Pico de gallo (a mix of finely cut tomato and onion), sweetcorn, a rice and bean mix, a tortilla, spring onions and a potato with ham and cheese. All for $6 USD! And we ate every bit.

After this we were pretty stuffed, but we did want to try a local sausage that was supposed to be nice. So we brought one of these to try and asked for it without all of the extras which the woman serving seemed quite offended by, she gave it to a guy on the stall next to hers to bring over to us. We thought this was strange and that we really must have upset her, but it turned out that the guy who brought it over just wanted to practice his English on us as he had been learning for some while but had never heard an English accent before. After our chat we got down to business trying the sausage, its taste was really nice, like a corn chorizo mix, but the texture was not great, it was very grainy with lumps. We had one section each and threw the rest away. At that point the woman at the stall really was offended…woops.

We were really quite full after this so we decided to have a walk around the market to walk it off. It was interesting and we saw people selling donkey rides, a man selling turkeys and a reptile house charging a $1 to hold a snake. So of course we had a go.

We also came across a stall selling different fruits and sweets and had to have a go. The woman gave us a sample of pumpkin covered in honey which was surprisingly very tasty although extremely sweet. Grace brought some other fruits in a sugary sauce that tasted kind of like a very sweet tomato but had a pip in the centre, we think it was maybe a crab apple.

We finished off the market with another delicious pineapple drink, before wadeling back to the hostel to pick up our bags and get on a chicken bus to El Tunco.

I’ll tell you all about El Tunco soon, lots of love Alice x

We finally made it into Guatemala! Although we missed most of it due to me having COVID, we didn’t want to have to skip it entirely. As one of our favourite towns from our last visit to Guatemala, Antigua, is so close to the border with El Salvador we decided to make the short trip.

We spent our first afternoon nosing around the town, Guatemala is famous for its jade and we decided to have a window shop in the jewelers. Predictably the ‘window’ shopping became actual shopping and we both spent far too much on jade rings.

We also brought some necklaces with our Mayan birth animal on. We don’t really buy into the whole birthday dictating your personality and more just wanted a cool momento but we had to admit the description did match us quite well.. Grace is a bee, very organised but quick to anger. I am a spider, keen on learning and defending the weak but tight with money ?

After making our purchases we decided to track down our favourite restaurant that we visited the last time we were here, it was honestly one of the tastiest meals we had while traveling. Although simple food, chicken roasted over a fire with garlic potatoes and salad, it is done to perfection. It also comes with tortillas and a drink (no idea what of, but it’s tasty and refillable) for £3.50. We ate there everyday for all three days we were there.

The rest of the afternoon we spent wandering about the town.

Seeing as we’d already done the main attractions in Antigua the last time we visited, we decided to try some of the more obscure attractions this time. So on our second day we decided to hike through a national park above the city to a beautiful view point. It was so obscure as an attraction that our Uber driver had never been there before and seemed very confused as to why we would want to be dropped off at them end of a dirt road at the base of a huge hill and kept asking us if we were sure this was right and if we were going to be okay.

It was reportedly an easy hike, but myself and Grace definitely disagree. We’re not sure if it was the hot weather or the altitude but the hour long hike upwards to the view point was a hard and sweaty one. We had to limit ourselves to 20 second breaks, just enough to slow our breathing, or we would have taken most of the day to reach the top. It was a beautiful walk though, we saw woodpecker’s and beautiful little birds that looked black when still, but we’re a radiant blue when the sun hit them in flight. We also saw two rainbow coloured moths, which a friend who is a moth and insect enthusiast has since told me are either new to science or very very rare. So I present to you the Alice moths ??

Once we made it to the top we had to pay a small entrance fee to locals to access the view point. We paid ~40p to a man with a hook for a hand, wondering what we were in for but the view point was really cool!

After traipsing down the hill again, which was almost as hard as the way up and more of a controlled skid, we had a cool shower and then headed into town for the evening to meet up with Santi, Tod and Tom who we’ve met several times in Mexico. We went to a few cool bars including one Irish bar where we got chatting to the owner. He was teasing us that he had moved to the other side of the world to get away from the English and we’d followed him here. He treated us to his home made scotch eggs followed by a more regional shot of tequila. We continued on to more bars and eventually a local club until the early hours.

The next morning Grace felt really ill and kept throwing up, I gave her very little sympathy believing it was just a hang over but when she was still throwing up at 8pm that evening it was clear it was probably something more. We stayed in all day and unfortunately missed saying goodbye to the boys before they headed back into Mexico, but Grace was just too ill go out in public and I don’t think I’d live it down if she keeled over while I was supposed to be looking after her. Finally the next morning she was starting to feel better and passed on her supply of snacks and painkillers to the girl in the bed next to us who had started to show the same symptoms as Grace, clearly something was going around.

We decided to take it easy on our last day and signed up for a ‘bean to bar’ chocolate course. We learnt about the cacao tree and got to gut out the cocoa beans from the fruit and try them fresh, the pulp around the beans is lovely but the seed themselves are very bitter. Our guide explained how the beans were fermented with banana leaves and then left to dry out, which can take a few weeks. We were then given pre fermented and dried beans, (as we didn’t fancy the 3-6 week wait for one bar of chocolate) which we roasted and de-shelled before grinding them into a paste. The paste was then melted and sugar and milk added ready to pour into our chocolate bar.

While our bar was cooling in a fridge we also got to try making traditional hot chocolate drinks. We tried the spicy drink the Mayans drank, made with the Coco paste, honey and chili. It was quite nice and the spice actually really worked well with the chocolate. Spanish invaders learned how to make the drink from the Mayans and both groups discarded the waste shells from the Coco beans. However Spanish slaves used to use these to make a tea, which we also got to try, the tea was actually really light but a little bitter. We also tried the drink made for European royalty from imported Coco, with milk and cloves, this was also very tasty and smooth. I think a combination of milk coca and chili would have been my favourite of the lot.

It was a fun afternoon and we got two bars of chocolate from it, although someone ate half of Grace’s when she left it in the hostel fridge so that was less fun.

Next we’re moving back into El Salvador, tell you all about it soon, love Alice xx

We arrived in the El Salvador capital, San Salvador, after a very long journey and having been awake for 28 hours. Unfortunately for us the San Salvador airport isn’t actually in San Salvador, it’s an hour away so our journey still wasn’t over. Luckily some super helpful locals directed us to a local chicken bus and spoke to the driver about where we needed to go. We paid 60 cents (El Salvador uses USD) for the hour long journey, it was actually really enjoyable apart from the fact Grace had to sit on the door steps for the first 10 minutes. But we didn’t bash anyone with our massive bags and Grace didn’t fall off the back so we took it as a win.

When we got to the hostel we pretty much collapsed into our beds and had a 3 hour nap. After we woke up and started to feel slightly more alive, we decided to head downstairs and be social, well as social as you can be on three hours of sleep…

We met a group of English, Irish and Canadian people and went out to a bar where everything on the menu, food and drinks, was $1.39 so we ended up drinking waaayyyy more than we probably should have.

After the bar we headed to a ‘club’ although I use that term very loosely. It looked like it was just someone’s house that had been gutted and a dancefloor and bar added. It was very strange, the toilet still had a bath in it… But it was an enjoyable evening none the less.

The next morning we were headed to the second largest city in El Salvador, Santa Ana. We were going to get two buses, which we were not looking forward to in the heat, but realized two of the guys we went out with the previous night were also headed there and between the four of us an Uber would be the same price but much more direct. Unfortunately the only car that would take us that far from the city was tiny, we all had to sit with our big rucksacks on our laps. Poor Grace didn’t even get a seat as where the middle back seat is normally positioned in a car, this one just had a cup holder. After the hour and a half journey she was branded with cup holder buttocks for the foreseeable future.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Santa Ana looking at all the churches and pretty squares. El Salvador gets a lot less tourism than the other south American countries and the locals are a lot more interested in us. Everywhere we went people came up and said hello in broken English. It was very cute.

The next day we had planned to do a hike up a volcano, there is one bus a day to the volcano at 7:30am. After finally testing negative for covid we were planning to head into Guatemala the following day so needed an official test to cross the border. We were hoping to get to the clinic as soon as it opened at 6am and get seen quickly and be back in time for the 7:30am bus to the volcano. Unfortunately a lot of people had the same idea of getting there when it opened, we didn’t get seen until 7:30am and had to return two hours later for our results.

Once we had our results we decided to make the most of what was left of the day and got an uber to Lago de Ilopango, a lake about an hour away that we had heard was very beautiful.

The lake is open to the public but unfortunately there is no way to get to it for free as it is surrounded by lake front properties, so we found a bar that did a day pass for $5. Fortunately for us they let us in for free, I think because we were white and it’s good PR for them the have western ‘rich people’ in their bar. Little did they know me and Grace are a long way from being rich haha, but we enjoyed the free pass anyway. The lake was super pretty and we spent a chill afternoon swimming and divebombing into it.

Around 3pm we decided to head back to Santa Ana, we knew the last bus back was at 4pm and they came every 30mins, so we figured if one didn’t turn up we could get the next one. But obviously we don’t have the best luck with journeys, after an hour and a half there were still no buses. No taxis or Ubers would come to the lake to pick us up either and it was a three hour walk back along a motorway. A couple we were waiting with decided to hitch hike to their destination, but seeing as we would have to go further than them, we would have to travel as two women alone for most of our journey. It would be getting dark soon and again us not having the best luck aaaannnnd me being a big wimp, we decided not to hitchhike with them and continued waiting long after they were gone. Eventually we saw an American guy getting into an airport shuttle and I asked him if we could get a ride in his prepaid taxi to the closest town they would pass through and he kindly agreed. They dropped us to a town ten minutes away where we were able to get a chicken bus the rest of the way home.

Now we’re going to get an early night sleep as our shuttle to Guatemala will be picking us up at 4:30am!

Tell you all about it soon, lots of love, Alice x

We arrived in San Cristobal in the early evening. The altitude here (~2000m) means it’s a bit colder than anywhere else we’ve been so far, especially in the evening. So we decided to get some beers and sit around the hostel campfire to warm up. We were soon joined by other hostel guests with the same idea and got chatting. Including Santi, Tod and Tom who we’d already bumped into several times on our trip.

The next morning, after breakfast at a delicious french bakery, we decided to explore the local markets. First we visited the textile/craft market and saw a lot of cool hand crafted clothes, bags and jewelry. Grace brought a cute cloth bag.

Next to the market was a free museum on traditional Mayan weaving. We popped in and had a look around, it was interesting to see the different types of weaving and styles from different regions. Apparently the weaving skills, still on display today in the markets, have been passed down the generations for over a thousand years.

After the craft market we decided to look around the daily market that sells everyday goods. It was vast and like a maze. There were so many stalls selling every fruit and veg imaginable and some we’d never even seen before. It was super cool to just nose about, except the poltry stalls. I had a hard time not banging into the chicken heads dangling off the sides of stalls and the live poltry were no better, they stank. But they were more than made up for by the deliciously smelling spice stalls and the beautiful flower stalls. We spent a good hour wandering around the stalls, partly because it was so interesting and partly because we couldn’t find our way out of the maze. I didn’t take too many photos as it felt a bit intrusive to photograph people just going about their shopping. The last thing I’d fancy while in Tesco would be someone snapping their holiday shots of me. So the photos below were some I took sneakily.

Before we were completely shopped out, we decided to head back to the French patisserie. Tod, one of the boys mentioned earlier who we kept bumping into, was turning 23 and we wanted to treat him to a cake. We got him a teeny tiny birthday cake which he enjoyed greatly and even tried to cut into slices to share.

That evening we went out to a local bar to celebrate Tod’s birthday. It was a really fun night and we got to dust off our salsa skills which honestly had not been used for three years for good reason!

Some street doggos on our way home.

The next day we had horrible hang overs, I had the headache from hell and honestly felt so sick all morning. The boys well and truly showed us up by still managing to wake up at 8am to make their river tour around a nearby canyon. Me and Grace were sea sick enough on land without bringing a boat into the mix. Instead we had a lazy morning at the hostel and when we finally started to feel a bit better we decided to take a collectivo out to a local Indigenous village.

The village San Juan Chamula is almost entirely made up of indigenous people, they are self governing so make their own code of conduct and the community prison is completely open on one side so you can see all the prisoners and publicly shame them (If that’s something you’re into, we gave it a miss).

There is also a ‘temple’ in the town, it looks and feels for all intents and purposes like a Catholic church but as the Catholic church no longer recognises it as Catholic, it is now called a temple rather than a church. It is not recognised as Catholic due to the residents having a very strange blend of beliefs. Catholicism mixed with indigenous beliefs, mixed with well… A kind of intense brand loyalty to Coca-Cola!

It is cheaper to buy Coca-Cola in the town than water. The residents on average drink 2 liters of Coca-Cola a day! That includes the children. They believe it has healing properties and the burps it gives them are cleansing evil spirits out of their bodies.

We decided we had to have a look inside the temple. Unfortunately you weren’t allowed to take photos there, which is a shame as it was absolutely breathtaking. The marble floor was covered in a layer of pine needles and every inch of the considerably expansive walls were covered in fresh flowers. There were no pews, just tables around the walls, and every possible inch table and floor space was covered in lit candles, hundreds and hundreds of them. It was absolutely beautiful. The collective heat of them was boiling, but we walked around every part of the temple to take it all in. There were also families lighting candles and chanting/praying in unison and the whole effect was just surreal.

The above photos are ones I found online of the church, I think we must have visited on a special occasion as the walls were covered in flowers when we were there and there were waaaay more candles but at least the photos give you a small glimpse of what we saw.

On our way back out of the town we also passed through a graveyard, it was kind of sad to see, different colour crosses indicate deaths at different stages in life and there were unfortunately a lot of white crosses simbolising children and babies.

To leave the town we had to walk up a big hill. I’d had a cold since Palenque but walking up the hill made me very short of breath and my sore throat seemed to feel as if it travelled right down into my lungs. I’d been taking COVID tests every other day since I’d gotten my cold (not daily as we only had one box from the UK and they are £20 a test in Mexico) and the next morning when I tested, I was positive.

I think my awful headache was more covid than a hangover, as this is apparently one of the first symptoms. I felt awful that we had been out and about while I was possibly contagious but at least we had been hand washing and sanitising regularly and worn masks all the time, in Mexico you have to wear them even outdoors. We had also booked private rooms since I started getting a sore throat. Even though I was testing negative for covid at that point, it’s still not nice to risk passing a normal cold on either. After we got the positive test we booked a private air BnB to isolate in for a week and that is where we have been since.

Unfortunately we have had to change our plans quite a bit, firstly to make up the lost time spent isolating but also as although I am past being contagious I could still test positive via lateral flow for up to a month from now and a negative lateral flow is needed for entry into Guatemala. So our plan now is to skip Guatemala and fly straight to El Salvador. Not ideal, but seeing as I’ve recovered from COVID for a second time unscathed I feel lucky to still be travelling at all.

Our journey to El Salvador is going to be a long one. We checked out of our air BnB at 11am, we are now currently relaxing in an orchid park until 7pm when the last bus to the airport leaves. The bus takes around 2 hours so we will arrive around 9pm and then have to wait for another 2hr 30 for our flight from San Cristobal to Mexico city. Once we arrive in Mexico city around 1am we need to wait in the airport for another 6 hours until our flight to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. It’s going to be a very long sleepless night for us.

I’ll let you know more about El Salvador soon, lots of love, Alice x

Above are some photos from the orchid park. Below are our last tacos in Mexico and my favourite, a series of photos I took of Grace trying to con me into trying a chilli she just had, telling me it isn’t spicy. I think you’ll agree, the photos bsuggest otherwise!