Olas Permanantes...

We have just left Olas Permanates after 10 idyllic days on the beach. We are now back with James and Lysinea for a night and tomorrow we head to the Tica bus hotel for the night and get the bus at 2:30 am - arriving in Managua at 12:00 lunch time.

The last few days have been fun filled - we were woken a few nights ago by a massive thunder storm overhead which woke everyone in the hotel (apart from Sam of course). The next night I woke up and felt the room shaking, I thought I must be imaging it, but it happened a couple of times... I decided it was probably just a little earth tremor and as the ceiling hadn't fallen in I went back to sleep. The next morning we realised that it had been caused by waves crashing over the wall and landing about 5 metres from our bedroom! The same happened for the next few nights and although I didn't stay awake the whole night I did have a lot of water filled dreams. The good news is we weren't flooded.

In all we had an amazing time at the beach and really none of us wanted to leave at all. The place was so beautiful (check out the sunset) and the people were so kind and helpful, we felt really welcomed and very safe and I would highly recommend El Zonte and Olas Permenates to anyone travelling to El Salvador. The waves break just in front of the hotel (when they aren't coming over the wall) and both Sam and Will were able to surf all day ever day. I have been doing yoga, shiatsu and reading in a hammock, we have all returned to James's bronzed, tired and happy. There were also lots of great people staying at the hostel who Sam adored, they played ping pong with him, surfed with him, swam with him and generally made him a very happy boy. We hope to meet them in Popoyo in Nicaragua in a few weeks.

We have now officially started schooling and it's going very well. Sam has studied English, Maths and Science so far and has started reading his book (a chapter a day). We tend to study one subject a day and this seems to work well for us all. It's fun to learn science on the move and Sam actually seems to be learning.

So that's the latest - as I said El Salvador is brilliant and the land and the people we met are beeeautiful. More from Nicaragua in a few days.

Life's a beach!

Well the rain has stopped - in fact it only rained that first day and since then we have had glorious sunshine. In the sun this place is lovely - it backs right onto the beach - literally we open our door and there is the sea - brilliant. The people that run the place are very friendly and it also serves food - you sit at tables overlooking the sea (or in hammocks).

A couple of days ago we went to the beach, which has amazing black sand due to the volcanoes, the sand is very fine and shimmers in the sunlight, it also feels like it contains loads of energy, probably due to all the minerals. Anyway, we sat on the beach whilst Sam surfed and a local guy brought a tray of 12 fresh oysters with worcester sauce, salt and lime and we sat there and ate them for $5 (there was no-one else around) brilliant eh?

That evening we had a BBQ at a couple's house in El Zonte. They have a villa overlooking the sea and we BBQ'd Cuin fish (I've never heard of them but they were delicious). Sam ate the fish's eyeball!! The walk there was fun - it was pitch black and we had a little torch to light the way, but there were also hundreds of fire flies - like little sparks all around in the trees, We negotiated pot holes, puddles and dog poo to get there but all arrived in one piece and the way home was even more fun after a few beers!

A coupld of Americans stayed at out hotel a couple of nights ago and sat drinking all day, then around 6 (dusk) they went to the beach - they went to far into the sea and nearlly drowned and had to be rescued on a surf board by one of the locals...

Sam and Will have both done lots of surfing and Sam is learning more Spanish words and getting browner every day. Sam is currently still asleep as we stayed up and watched the Bourne Identity last night and Will is surfing. The only down side is I think we are spending way to much on food - the next place will have to have a kitchen.

Rain rain and more flippin rain....

So we are at the beach, staying in a beautiful place called Olas Permanentes. It's right on the beach and filled with hammocks and beautiful ornaments made from sea shells. It is absolutely idyllic...well it would be if it would stop sodding raining. Of course it's the rainy season here and it doesn't just rain it pours (but at least it's warm.)

We have a lovely room with two double beds a fan and air con and a bathroom with the obligatory cold shower and toilet paper bucket - but last night it rained so hard that the bathroom ceiling leaked so we are moving into another room tonight. We pay $200 for 7 nights here which is quite cheap compared to everywhere else, but food bumps the bill up a bit.

Because of the rain we are a bit stuck, El Zonte doesn't have any shops or taxis. We could get a chicken bus and may do tomorrow if it doesn't stop raining (and the locals say it wont!) Today we got up and had breakfast and then Sam did some school work (a bit of art) and Will is threatening to do some maths later! We watched Sherlock Holmes on the ipod and then went for a walk in the monsoon rain (and got soaked!) now will and sam are playing table tennis and i am writing this. There is another guy staing here called Jun he is Japanese and really lovely. He is a teacher in Japan and has taken 3 weeks to travel Central America, he has travelled a lot before and speaks great Spanish and English fortunately he also likes table tennis.

Will's itches have cleared up but Sam has got a few more bites which I hope will go down soon. No Benadryl cream Dad but he got some other stuff that seems to have done the trick.

So please everyone (especially you astrologers) pray for the rain to stop... it's such a beautiful location but we really need the sun because there is nothing to do in the rain :(

xxxx

To the beach

Thanks everyone for all your nice comments on the blog. Spoke to Mum yesterday and have been informed that my spelling is rubbish so apologies to anyone this offends but finding time to update it is not easy. We are heading to the beach tomorrow and that is both exciting and a bit scary because we are quite a long way from the city and we have had James and Lycinea as translators, tour guides and super hosts since we arrived.

Dad said he wanted a run down on what we have eaten since we arrived so here's a brief overview. One local dish is cevice which is raw fish cooked in lime juice and vinegar, eaten with biscuits (as you Bristolians might say' it's lush!') We also had Pupusas which are served all over and are a thick tortilla with any kind of filling you can think of, we had cheese and pork, these are about 30 cents and so a good cheap meal. Because El Salvador isn't geared for tourists it's difficult to find these places to eat unless you are shown them as we were. But the best thing is the fruit and the fruit shakes. The fruit here tastes so fresh it's difficult to describe, it's like fruit should taste but doesn't in England - anyway we have a fruit milk shake every day and it's lovely.

Health wise we are all ok but Will has been eaten alive by mosquitos and they have swollen up (it looks like he has shingles) and they are really itchy, but now we have some cream so hopefully he will feel better soon. Sam is very well and looks very healthy with his tan - he did find it hard to sleep last night though because it was sooo hot so we are a bit tired today as we all ended up in the same room bed swapping to get closer to the fan!

We are starting to plan the trip to Nicaragua now and may go down a week today - we get the Tica bus from San Salvador and cross Honduras and end up in Managua - it should take 10 hours! But the bus has air con, comfy seats, films etc so shouldn't be too bad, from here we head to Popoyo which is the surf beach so we are just looking for places to stay when we get there.

I'm not sure that there is internet at Horizonte (where we go tomorrow) so may not be able to update for a while. http://www.horizontesurfresort.com/ here's a link... see you laters and love you all x

One week in...

We are now just over a week into the trip and are settled in El Salvador, staying with friends. We have acclimatised to El Salvador and got used to the crazy driving, the poorer areas and the street dogs and are now looking for a place to stay. El Salvador is not really geared for tourists and as a result hostels are hard to come by and hotels are few and far between but pretty expensive.

The first day we visited El Zonte it was a bit of a culture shock, the houses are pretty run down and the village is quite poor with none of the pretensions that us tourists are used to seeing. Combine this with the welcome from the guide book saying that El Salvador is not the safest place to be and you can see why we were reluctant to stay anywhere other than behind the safely guarded doors of our friends house. But a few days later and we realise that the El Salvadorian people are (so far) a very friendly bunch of people who don't want to kill us or steal our things and are really welcoming. And so our second trip to El Zonte felt much better, we visited a hostel there and it was really nice, currently the rooms are all taken but I think we will rent one when it comes free. The hostel is right on the beach and has hammocks and palm trees, just what you'd expect really. Sam and Will can surf and I can read in the sunshine.

Today Sam caught his first wave on his new board, hopefully the first of many and Will played in the sea with him for a couple of hours whilst me and James drank fresh passion fruit juice with a view of the sea.

Sam was due to speak with his Dad today, unfortunately the signal wasn't very good and they got cut off which upset Sam a bit. If we could just get over this hurdle I think everything will be fine but it's hard to see him sad and to know that it must be just as hard for his Dad. Still I guess these weeks will be the hardest and in just 10 days he has learned some Spanish, drunk from a coconut, surfed, eaten cevice in an El Salvadorian cafe and seen countless plastic boobs in Miami... so hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!

El Salvador

We decided to head down to El Salvador to see our friends and looked into ways to travel there from Antigua. There were a couple of options including the Chicken Bus (a reconditioned school bus from the USA which all the locals use to get around), these can be seen throughout Central America and are called Chicken buses because it's not unusual to see people with chickens getting on! I'm not quite brave enough yet to take the chicken bus, apparently people squeeze on and the Guatemalan people are quite small but I think Will and Sam and the surfboards may take up a bit too much space.

The next option was the mini bus - a guy in the square was selling tickets onto this and invited us into his little office to try and sell it to us. I wasn't sure about this - the good thing was that it went to San Salvador directly from Antigua and they didn't charge extra for the surf boards. The bad thing was that we had no idea who would be driving us, if the guy was ligit and where we might end up!

The final option was the Pullman bus, large and air conditioned this sounded like the best plan - the only problem was that we had to take a bus to Guatemala City first and then take the Pull man to San Salvador making a 5 hour journey more like 6 or 7!

So we opted for the mini bus!!

We woke up this morning at 7 and the bus was due to pick us up at 8 . By 8.00 we were waiting by the door with no sign of the bus, by 9.00 Will was pacing and we had asked the travel agent around the corner to call the company and find out where the bus was. At 9:15, the cleaning lady came to the hostel and asked what we were waiting for, we explained that the bus should have picked us up at 8:00 and it was now 9:10...'No', she said, 'it's only 8:10!'. Turns out we hadn't set the alarm properly and were an hour ahead. So shortly afterwards the mini bus arrived and we jumped on along with 2 Americans and 2 Australians and an Italian.

Driving to El Salvador was a bit nerve racking at first, mainly because the guide books tell you it's a bit dangerous, but the people were really nice and crossing the border was really easy. We soon realised that the bus would drop you wherever you wanted so we called our friends and said not to drive all the way to San Salvador and asked them to speak with the driver to arrange a pick up point. We ended up being dropped at a Texaco garage not far from the border with news that our friends were on their way but would be 25 mins... but if we sat in the garage with all our bags we would be quite secure because the garages have armed security!! Anyway 20 mins later in pulled James and Lycenia and we are now sat in their house watching Ice Age, playing cards and this evening we will have a BBQ as it's James's birthday.

Apart from this all else is fine, Sam can't wait to surf and Will is covered in mosquito bites... 3 countries in 6 days not bad goinng but I think we'll settle here for a few weeks now. James knows a guy with a property right on El Zonte beach so we'll take a look at it tomorrow. More updates later.