Enjoying the sunset at Las Peñitas

Any Americans reading this who are looking for an unusual and varied short break could do a hell of a lot worse than visit Leon, Nicaragua. It’s only a couple of hours by bus from Managua airport, and in the surrounding area there is a fantastic variety of things to do. Aside from the charms of the beautiful colonial city itself, there are great volcanoes nearby to hike up and board down, all about an hour away from the city. And after all that activity, you can chill out at the equally nearby Pacific coast village of Las Peñitas.

On day off between hiking up volcanoes, Adrian & I sorted out our flights to the Caribbean and then headed down to the coast for a few beers while checking out the surf. It was a marvellous feeling, only four days after leaving cold and grey London to be sat in a quiet little beach front bar listening to the huge waves crash against the deserted beach as the sun went down.

Sadly the waves looked a little bit too big and dangerous for much swimming (and as I learnt last Christmas in Bali, surfing is clearly not the sport for me), but we had great fun letting the waves crash over us and playing around with the camera trying to get nice shots of the waves and the sunset, all culminating in the inevitable jumping shot.

Sadly we only had time for a very brief visit, but the town would make a great place to stay for a few days – it’s wonderfully quiet, with loads of nice little palm-roofed bars and restaurants, as well as cheap places to stay.

You can see all of my photos from Nicaragua here.

Next stop: Chilling out and diving in the Caribbean, on Little Corn Island

The amazing acrobatic kids of Malapascua

After paying virtually no attention to wildlife in the previous 35 years, I’ve been amazed at how much my attitude has changed since I crossed the Pacific. I blame the Koalas. Ever since then I’ve been going more and more out of my way to find unusual things both on land and underwater.

Malapascua High Street

Seeing the Tarsiers had fulfilled my terrestrial cravings for the moment, but I was soon hungering after a fix of big underwater action – so I headed north, to Malapascua, one of the few places in the world where you can relatively reliably dive with Thresher Sharks. I say reliably, but in fact I’d met a couple of people who’d tried on several occasions and failed. Despite hearing this slightly dispiriting news, I was determined to give it a go – this could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Another lovely beach

When you’ve been traveling for a while, it really feels like everything worth seeing inevitable involves an early morning start. The sharks were no exception – best time to see them is early morning, so I was up at half five to get on the boat at six, for what would turn out to be the most boring dive I’d ever done. There’s one place the sharks hang out, so we descended, sat on the bottom, and waited. And waited. There’s pretty much nothing else to see, and the visibility’s not great. And so we waited for about 40 minutes, and then gave up and came back up. But I wasn’t disheartened. I’d been prewarned that my chances weren’t high, so I remained cautiously hopeful (if not entirely optimistic) for the next day.

Yet again we had a pretty early start, and the dive started very similarly to the previous one. But half way through our luck changed, and a big shark swam right past us – our guide reckoned it was up to 4.5m long (with half of that being the huge, characteristic tail), and we got a good look at it as it slowly went by. That was the only one we saw that day, but that wasn’t it for the show, for a few big devil rays soon turned up and flew around for a while. Not quite as unusual as a thresher, I know, but seeing the devil rays confirmed my view that rays are the most beautiful, graceful creatures in the sea.

It's all about the humungous tail

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deep-blue/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

With mission accomplished, I felt like I’d earnt a beach day. And I honestly could not have wanted a better place for that than Malapascua. The island is pretty tiny, and sits off the north coast of Cebu, right in the heart of the Visayas. It’s probably my favourite island so far – in part because it’s the friendliest place in what is already the friendliest country I’ve ever been to. Everyone stops and says hello, everyone wants to help you out, and even the people selling stuff are low-pressure, friendly and chatty, preferring to win you over with charm and humour rather than trying to bludgeon you in to submission.

It had to be done

So my day on the beach turned out to be great fun, as we chatted to the local beach masseurs, made friends with the local beach dogs, watched the local men pruning the palm trees (can’t have falling coconuts ruining a tourist’s holiday, can you?) but best of all befriending the local kids. The beach kids on Malapascua were absolutely adorable, and they fussed around, wanting to listen to ipods, clamber over you in the sea while you try and cool off, and chase you round the beach (OK, so the day didn’t turn out quite as relaxing as I’d hoped, but was probably all the more fun because of it)

They were saving the best til last though – just before sunrise they put on an amazing acrobatic show for us, backflipping and somersaulting and cartwheeling down the beach, throwing each other up in the air, fearlessly reaching heights I’d be terrified by. It was pretty amazing stuff and reminded me you don’t need to spend forty minutes under water in scuba gear to see cool stuff. After all that hard work, they didn’t need to work hard at all to sell us stuff afterwards – we bought them all sodas, and then parted with more cash for the shells they were selling. Despite now having a bag full of shells I’m not sure what to do with now, it was a small price to pay for such a cool show.

Getting ready for liftoff

Airborne

Soaring over the sun

The stars of the show

You can see all of my photos of Malapascua here.

Next up: The final stop on my wildlife-spotting tour of the Philippines – chasing after Whale Sharks in Donsol.

Who needs Thailand?

Everyone’s seen pictures of the towering limestone islands of Thailand’s Andaman coast. It seems like most of the world has been there too. The similar landscape of Ha Long bay in Vietnam is getting almost as famous these days (in the UK at least especially thanks to the famous episode of Top Gear which ends up there). Before I arrived in the Philippines, I had no idea that a very similar landscape exists off the north coast of the island of Palawan – the many islands of the Bacuit Archipelago.

Getting there was a little bit of a mission – from Coron Town in Busuanga, there are supposed to be boats heading over virtually every day, but two of the boats were out of service. This meant rather getting a few days to relax and enjoy Coron, all I had time to do was a day of diving before having to leave the very next day, for fear of getting stranded. It turned out to be quite a journey – 45 of us crammed onto a pretty small outrigger boat, with no room to move around, for 8 hours. And a pretty choppy eight hours it was too, with every large wave showering all of us at the front on a regular basis. Yet again I was glad of my iron stomach, as others around me succumbed to seasickness.

The perfect way to see the islands

The journey was completely worth it though, for the Bacuit Archipelago more than lived up to expectations. The locals make it pretty easy to navigate around the many islands, by handily packaging them into three different tours, named A, B & C (and these are the same for all local operators).

Snake Island from above

First up was tour B, which started us off with a little spot of light snorkelling in crystal clear turquoise water just off one of the islands, which was pretty awesome. That was just a warm-up for the main event though – a stop for lunch at Snake Island, which is so named because of the thin serpentine slither of beach that winds its way out from the island towards its neighbour. It’s the kind of beach that looks like it could have been commissioned by the Philippine Tourist Board looking for perfect shots for postcards and brochures – and yet it’s 100% natural, and we had the place to ourselves to chill out for a couple of hours, while our boat crew made a delicious lunch of grilled fresh fish, chicken and pork – which was all a bit of a bargain considering the whole day-long tour including lunch came to around $10.

Snake Island

Lovely as it was there, we couldn’t hang around all day – after all there are hundreds of islands to explore – so soon we moved on to explore some fantastic caves on two nearby islands, each reached through a narrow entrance just off the beach, and then opening up to reveal huge, towering ceilings. Finals stop of the day was possibly the best yet – an island that consisted of a small beach clinging to the side of some imposing, towering limestone cliffs. The sand was the whitest and finest by far that I’ve ever seen, so much so that it was more comfortable lying directly on the sand than it was on a towel. With just the six of us there (oh, and the friendly island dog of course – even uninhabited islands have dogs here in the Philippines), it felt like we had a little piece of paradise all to ourselves.

Beautiful cliffs, clear water

After such a stunning day I was worried that repeating the experience the following day might disappoint – I needn’t have worried. For while Tour B gave me some of the finest beaches I’ve ever seen, Tour A took us to the best snorkelling I’ve encountered yet. Again and again we stopped at various spots with the clearest, brightest water imaginable, all framed beautifully by the sheer cliffs of the sheltering islands, swimming through narrow openings into warm, shallow lagoons crammed with coral and beautiful fish. All that snorkelling, swimming and generally gawping at the sheer beauty of the place can get a little tiring after a while, so the boat kindly took us to yet another perfect beach for a final bit of chilling – and even better, this one came with a nice surprise in the shape of a bar hidden away from sight behind the palm trees at the back of the beach. So the rest of the afternoon was spent sitting on the beach, sipping away at fresh coconut juice…and then moving onto the San Miguels.

Enrance to the big lagoon

The most amazing thing about the place is that for somewhere quite so stunning, it has remarkably few tourists (most of whom seem to be Swedish or Danish for some reason). I don’t mean it’s empty, but that there enough islands that it never feels busy in the way Thailand does. Get there soon before everyone else discovers it.

7 Commando Beach

You can see all of my photos of El Nido & the stunning Bacuit Archipelago here.

Next stop: Chilling out with a small monkey in Port Barton & exploring the Underground River of Sabang.

Christmas & New Year in Indonesia

If there’s one tip I could give wannabe round the world travellers that I failed to pick up on during my fifteen months of planning, it would be to think carefully about where you want to spend the Christmas and New Year period. I met countless travellers heading to Sydney who hadn’t planned ahead and were shocked to find hostels charging trip the normal rate. For a while I thought I was going to get stuck in East Timor – all the flights to Singapore and Bali were full, flights to Darwin were stupidly expensive, and all the buses out to West Timor were booked up too. Luckily I found out at the last minute that I was able to get a more indirect bus, and so I made it out just in time to get to Bali on the evening of the 23rd of December.

It wasn’t just the transport that I should have planned ahead with – I had fun enough on my last visit to Kuta back in November, but of all the places I might have chosen to spend Christmas day, it was far from the top of my list. Luckily though, I was meeting my friends Simon & Katie from back home, so at least I had good company and was able to spend the day on the beach trying my hand at surfing.

It was a pretty brief experience: I was utterly useless. I’d occasionally catch a wave and manage to get about one foot on the board before toppling off again, getting a mouthful of sea water and then struggling for the next twenty minutes to get back out to the waves again, only for each attempt to end the same way. After a couple of hours I soon realised I was never going to make it as a surfer and gave up to chill out on the beach.

If Christmas was a little disappointing, we had higher hopes for New Year. I’d loved the Gili Islands on my first visit, so we headed back there. Nice as Gili Trawangan was, I’d heard it would be pretty crowded, expensive, and difficult to get a room, so instead we decided on Gili Air as I’d heard there was going to be a party on the beach there for the once in a generation New Year’s Eve full moon party. Now, a little note to the Observer: the Gili Islands are not ‘the new Ibiza’, as a spectacularly idiotic article claimed last month. The comparison is laughable – each Gili Island is about the size of a single nightclub in Ibiza (and it’s worth noting that the islands don’t even have any nightclubs). About all the two places have in common is that they have a beach and a few hippies. It never ceases to amaze me, the drivel that British travel supplements churn out week after week.

Anyway, we arrived on Gili Air and instantly worried that we have made a bit of a mistake – despite most of the hotels being full (or out of our price range), it still felt as quiet as it had done on my last visit. The tranquility of the place is part of the appeal, but we were at least hoping for a little bit of action for the big night.

A final Gili Islands sunset

The place to be, apparently, was the Space bar, hidden away in the even quieter North Western corner of the island, so we hopefully trudged our way round the sandy coastal path with no idea what to expect. The bars we passed proceeded to get quieter and quieter…until eventually we began to hear the muffled thud of dance music somewhere in the distance. We finally arrived and were rather amazed by what we found – a full on rave on the beach, with lasers and projections and all kinds of glowing things hanging from the trees, and with a mixed group of about three hundred locals, hippies and backpackers dancing away on the sand.

Ooo! Aah! etc..

It was hardly Ko Pha Ngan but I reckon all the better for it. It was bust enough to feel like a real party, but still quiet enough that there were plenty of quieter places along the beach to chill out on when we fancied chilling out from dancing to the rather banging psychedelic trance music. As we spent the night drifting between dancing amongst the palm trees, watching people dancing with fire poi, and the beach, it was one of the best new year’s parties I’d ever been to.

Raving on the beach

The next morning (well, afternoon actually, by the time we finally emerged from bed), the island has returned to its normal, sedate self. The only mystery was where on earth all those other people at the party had come – we didn’t see most of them around the island the rest of the time we were there.

Time for a holiday

Travelling’s not all fun fun fun you know. There are endless hours spent on bus journeys (especially in a country as big as Mexico). Waiting around in bus stations (just as dull as back home, just twenty times busier). Sitting around waiting for photos to upload over veeeery slow internet connections. Sitting inside your hotel room waiting for the rain to stop. Dull things like laundry still need doing. So after five weeks of relentless, non-stop travelling and sightseeing (and swine flu-induced stress) it was quite a relief to arrive in Zipolite for a bit of a holiday.

Getting there is pretty fun itself (or it was for me anyway…one of my friends felt quite ill thanks to the insane bends and even madder driver) as the road winds its way through the mountains for about five hours before finally dropping back to sea level just before it hits the Pacific. Arriving was even nicer – the beautiful beach gently curves its way for nearly two miles between two rocky headlands, and we soon found ourselves a thatched cabaña set just back from it, with hammocks on the porch. We could have chosen any really – almost all of the accommodation on the beach consists of similar places, and for some reason, despite the place having been firmly on the backpacker trail for decades, more upmarket places have yet to arrive, leaving the place a tranquil contrast to the brasher resorts that make up most of Mexico’s more famous beach destinations.

After we’d found somewhere to stay, we very easily slipped into a routine of doing very little – long lie-ins in the morning, fresh fruit and granola for breakfast, the rest of the morning spent alternating between relaxing on the beach and then tiring ourselves out by jumping around in the huge waves that reliably crash onto the shore day and night, then spending the afternoon lying in a hammock reading or sleeping. Best of all was the fact that we arrived just at the end of the season, before the rains arrive for the summer, meaning that the place was almost deserted – probably less than 200 tourists when we arrived, almost certainly less than 50 by the time we left, making it the perfect place to relax. We were there for a week, and the routine of doing very little was so nice I could happily have spent far more time there (in fact it seems to be the kind of place that happens easily in, quite a few of the longer-term residents seemed to be tourists who’d never left). It’s interesting that the longer I travel, the less stressed I get about wanting to see everything, and the more I’m happy to just find a place I like and stay there for a bit. It feels like the stress of London life and working has finally well and truly left my system, and I finally know what it feels like to be truly relaxed for the first time in what feels like years.

Once the North American leg of my trip is out of the way and I arrive in Colombia, I think I may well try and find myself a place to stay along the Caribbean coast and just stay there as long as I feel like it. Now that’s a nice thought.

The Three Faces of Mazatlán

After three weeks of cities and canyons, most of which was almost stiflingly hot (not that I’m complaining, mind), it was time to hit the beach. Mazatlán was the obvious choice, sitting almost half way between El Fuerte, where I left the CHEPE behind, and Guadalajara, where I was due to meet my friends. I’d heard mixed reports on it, but I was just happy to see the ocean. While I was only there for a couple of days, over that time it revealed three rather different sides to me.

Morning mist over the beach

Mazatlan: the Torquay of Mexico
My first impression on arrival was that the city had clearly seen better days. Its heyday had been in the 50s, when I’m sure it was a rather chic little resort. Ever since it seems like it has made a gradual, graceful decline as it’s been upstaged by newer and smarter resorts. The impression was confirmed when I arrived in my cheap hotel, where it turned out most of the residents were Americans and Canadians spending the winter in the sun. By the looks of it, they were in the perfect place, as I suspect most of them had been at their most glamorous back in the 50s. That’s not to say I didn’t like it – I’ve always found fading seaside resorts to have a charm about them, like they’ve been slightly frozen in time, and all the nicer for no longer having to fit in with the latest trends. This part of town also revealed what the city must have been like back even before it developed as a resort, as the section of beach near my hotel was full of fishing boats bringing in the morning’s catch. To this day fishing still rivals tourism as the city’s big earner. The other highlight of this part of town was a chance to see the Clavadistas (cliff-divers) in action – they perform for tourists for money, and it’s a pretty impressive spectacle seeing them sail way out over the rocks and into the shallow churning ocean below.

Clavadista

Mazatlan: American cruise-ship destination
The next day I made the long walk along the beach, round the bay, up to the Zona Dorada (golden zone), where all the smarter, newer hotels and condo blocks are situated. I didn’t like it one bit. The hotels were huge, blocking out the view of the beach, and all were big and anonymous, like they could have been situated in any glossy resort in the world. The beaches were full of tourists who’d been bussed down from their cruise ships, with hundreds of hawkers milling around them, trying to earn a few pesos. I thought it was sad that all of these tourists were missing the older, more charming part of town. I quickly left and headed back down to the quieter, nicer beach near my hotel.

Mexican Mazatlan
Away from the beach is the old town, and handsome quarter of smart colonial buildings and pretty squares, a world away from the crumbling hotels of my part of town and the glitzy blocks of the Zona Dorada. It was in this area that I got my taste of the third face of Mazatlan, the one that would be my favourite.

There I was, enjoying a quiet meal of local seafood in a pretty little restaurant on the main square, when a clown turned up making a balloon animals (seriously – don’t come to Mexico if you have a clown phobia. They are EVERYWHERE. Seriously. I have never seen so many in my life. They must make up about 1% of the Mexican population. Weird). He made one for me, which then attracted the attention of a group of Mexican girls at the next table. They started off taking photos, and next thing I knew they insisted I join them for a drink.

Once we’d got the usual Anglo-Mexican formalities out of the way (Yes, England is beautiful. No, it doesn’t rain all the time, and Yes, English food is terrible – I’ve given up arguing on that point now, even describing the best bits still sounds pretty horrible to them. The only concept I’ve managed to impress any of them with is Horseradish sauce, as Mexicans are pretty disdainful of anything that isn’t spicy. Oh, and baked beans too – seeing as no Mexican meal is complete without a side-order of Frijoles, it’s comforting to know we have our own version), they made me get down to some serious drinking, and it ended up being a hilarious night, as they made fun of my accent (they’re more used to hearing American English accents), then moved on to talking me through the range of Mexican accents, with hugely exaggerated impressions, and then onto talking about all areas of Mexican life. Like all Mexicans, they were hugely proud of their country, and seemed to love having a foreigner to talk to about it. Despite my protestations that I had a bus to catch at 7am the next day, they wouldn’t let me leave until they’d taken me dancing, and we ended up down the road in a little backstreet club, where a Cuban band was playing, and the crowd were dancing and singing along, at various points various punters being invited up to sing various standards. I stopped worrying about the bus* and relaxed into enjoying myself, happy that I was having a much more Mexican experience than the cruise-ship passengers down the road. This is why solo travel is best, it’s so easy to get swept along into these kinds of situations.

*something I regretted somewhat when the alarm woke me up at 6am the next morning.