Panama to Nicaragua and El Salvador

The panama canal

We spent a couple of nights in Panama, which is a bit of a strange city.  One end is really built up with skyscrapers and new buildings and the other end is crumbling down.  It's a working progress, and standing on a bridge in between the two areas you can see where they're up to.  Bizarre.


The Panama Canal was awesome, the sheer size of it all is phenomenal and the fact that it was dug 100 years ago almost by hand is incomprehensible.

Watching the canal in action!

We didn't stick around in Panama long, only a couple of night then caught the bus to Costa Rica, where we stayed for just one night, then headed up to Isla del Ometepe in Nicaragua. 

Panama City

The island was lovely, it consisted of two volcanoes and the people there are really chilled and friendly.  We slowed right down and just relaxed for a couple of nights there.  We decided to hire bikes to explore the island which seemed like a great idea but the bikes were awful.  Mine had a flat tyre within a couple of kilometres and Tim's brake was constantly on! Hard going especially with the volcanic hills and 35 degree heat, not to mention the humidity!  We managed to get to a freshwater pool which was lovely the spent the rest of the day getting more and more hot and bothered (and grumpy) trying to get around the island, whilst being passed at high speed by others on mopeds and quad bikes.  We did eventually get back to the hostel and had a beer so all was right in the world again. 

Sunset at Isla de Ometepe 

Relaxing on the island!

We headed from the island to Granada (past a dog with it's innards hanging out of it's backside in the bus station, poor, disgusting thing- makes you realise why we have euthanasia in England).  Granada was a lovely town, really pretty and full of little cobbled streets which has proved to be the running theme of towns in central America so far, where we spent a couple of days looking around.  We went down by the lake edge where there were loads of mango trees and ripe mangoes falling off them- we had a lovely time collecting and eating fresh mangoes.  I also bought a beautiful new leather handbag, which I love.     

Sunset from the church tower in Granada

The view over Granada

From Granada we moved on to Leon which was much the same as Granada except and little more rough and ready.  We stayed there for a few days - mainly because there was a hammock outside our room which Tim spent all of his time in.    

Relaxing in Leon- Tim spent most of his time here!

From Leon we then went to El Salvador where we were planning to stay for a while and have a look round a few towns. This plan quickly changed as it was the strangest place, they obviously don't get a lot of tourist so everywhere we went everybody would stare at us. We spent the bus journeys with the whole bus turned around to look at us which is funny to start with then becomes a little unnerving then just gets downright annoying. There were also armed guards everywhere, guarding clothes shops, fast food restaurants, basically every shop has armed guards.

Beautiful buildings in Leon

  All the buses are ridicously slow too, so it took us 2 days of being packed on sweaty buses to get out of the country.  At one point one of the buses was full and we were sat on the back row with 5 other people.  There was blantantly no more room but a lady with a HUGE bottom came over and tried to wedge her enormous behind into a gap which was never going to accomodate it.  The result was a had to spent the next ten minutes with her sat on me until someone informed her that there was no room- my spanish didn't stretch to explaining the situation and I don't think she could hear me from underneath her derriere anyway!

We spent one night in Santa Ana which was an unremarkable place and then headed for Guatemala.