utila

well as always since ive been traveling, everything worked itself out again. its amazing how it happens every time. granted this one took a bit more work and i somehow ended up getting the approval of the top diving and cardiologist expert of the world, but still. long story short, i got cleared to dive, completed my course, and am 100% certified! super highlights: 4 foot wide sting ray, swimming with a turtle, swimming with huge schools of fish, iridescent coral, huge brain coral, looking up at the surface and seeing 60 ft of water and the sun above me. other recent funsies: snorkeling and seeing a 5 ft long barracuda and a white sea urchin; going spelunking in a cave and crawling through mud and stalagmites and talactites to an underground pool that i swam in (that was a crazy moment, thinking how bizarre it was to be swimming in a pool in a cave in honduras); hiking to the highest point of the island and getting an awesome view of everything; being super tan again (my butt is so white!). low point: being at least a little sick this whole week. i want my room and bathroom and tap water i can safely drink. i think im doing 2 last dives tomorrow and then we'll move on. ever onward as ms engstrom would say! tomorrow is my birthday and i wish i could have a bowling party like the good old days. im not sure quite how i feel about turning 19. its kind of a boring number im not sure i feel very much one way or the other. BUT, from tomorrow i have exactly 2 months left, which seems like very little and very much at the same time. i hope this finds everyone in good health. talk soon.

gus

Utila

in theory a beautiful caribbean island with world class scuba diving and snorkeling is a piece of heaven, but theory sucks, and for me its been a load of medical bull crap. the first part was just being sick again, which is whatever, it comes with traveling. the second part, however, has been the real pain, which is that i´m trying to learn to dive but everyone is too concerned with my heart condition and wont let me. well they will, but they just need someone to sign the medical release, and the heart doctor at home doens´t know enough about scuba, and the scuba and heart guy at home doesn´t know enough about me, and its a very complicated mess and i just want to dive. the whole point of diving is not exerting yourself and just kicking slowly along, making the whole thing even more rediculous since i can play basketball and soccer with no real issue. but legal is legal and no one wants to be responsible for everything and it is frustrating as all hell. on the other hand, they let me go as far with the training as doing the shallow water practice, so even if it ends up that i cant go all the way, i at least got to breathe underwater which was pretty cool. but enough about that. before coming here i was the la ceiba for a couple nights. one of the days was very exciting, in which i went to a real modern mall which had no garbage on the ground, air conditioning, enormous tvs, a food court, and escalators! it was truly amazing being in a building like that again after all this time. after we left there, the day just got better when we went to an insect museum that a private collector set up basically in his house. but he had the worlds heaviest beetle (1/4 pound), biggest butterfly, butterfly w/ the longest proboscis (something like 3 feet), shiniest butterfly, beetle with the longest legs, and a walking stick that was a foot long. there were also frog beetles that looked like theyd taken steroids their back legs were so big. the really huge beetles look exactly like small tanks, all with these huge horns/antlers. i also held a live tarantula there. the owner described catching the huge beetles in the nearby forest, which involved going out with lights and netsat like 3 in the morning, which is when theyre active, and then just snagging them. apparently they aren´t too quick in the air. while we were there we also read a book that a guy had written on his experiences traveling the world trying all the bugs that people eat everywhere, which was fascinating. then we got hungry and got dinner. ive been feeling a little more homesick lately, although maybe its just because ive been moving around so much and haven´t really been settled for a while now. so im thinking about maybe finding some more volunteerwork to do. but at the same time theres so much left to see! dillema dillema. ill play it by ear as always.

love
gus

pictures, tisey to tela

Tela, honduras!

welcome to honduras! if the flight attendants on your airplane can welcome you to where you are landing then i feel that i should be able to welcome you to here via my blog without any trouble. i am proud to report that i swam in the carribean for the first time this trip the other day, and that i am once again living in my bathing suit. life is saweeeeet. the last time i wrote i was still in nicaragua, so let´s sum up whats passed. crossing the border we promptly got scammed at least twice which was awesome. i think that day we took a total of 6 different busses to get where we wanted, and got there at 10 at night and with much difficulty. the last vehicle we ended up in that day was a van, the driver of which said he would take us to the hotel we wanted. next thing i knew i was in the back corner of this largish van stuffed with 16 people and did not physically have enough leg room to put my thigh straight. and i remained that way for approximately 3 hours, near the end of which the driver admitted that he didn´t actually know where the hotel was, and when he found out, refused to take us there. so we agreed to go to a different one and i said that we were going to pay him less. and next thing we knew we were at the gate of the hotel we wanted originally haha. money talks baby. of course then it turned out that we had to wake the owner up by banging on the locked gate, after which he sleepily and grumpily told us there was absolutely no more rooms. so we had to set up hammocks and a tent. it was not a good day. anyways, this hotel also doubled as a private beer brewery and thus we had very tasty raspberry and apricot beer. they also made rootbeer, which my german travelmates had unbelievably never tried or even heard of. much to my dismay they thought it tasted like toothpaste. the place was at lago de yojoa if anyones looking at a map.
from there we came to tela, which is my current location. its a very nice town right on the beach which is white and the sea which is turquoise. and we have a kitchen to cook in finally which is awesome because i was getting damn sick of rice, beans, and fried meat for every meal. the hotel itself here, however, is about the worst ive been in and the room is more reminiscent of a musty prison cell. i havent looked in a mirror for over a week now, which is a very strange feeling and something i never really gave thought to before. today i went snorkeling for the first time in 3 years and while it was cool i am proud to report that hawaii was like a bagillion times better. go america! oh, heres another crazy thing-the germans were taught that there are only 5 continents! according to the web its debatable, but i think the more accepted way, and the way i was taught, is that there are 7. anyways the way they know it, antarctica is completely neglected, and north and south america dont exist, its just america. this results in one of the girls getting mildly offended when i refer to the way something is in america, which for me is the US, but for her is the whole continent. and so it sounds very conceited of me to refer to anything from the US as american. verrrry interesting. i´ve also been thinking a lot about languages lately, since im learning one and all, and how accents or fluency affect the impressions people get of you. so mainly, if someone would come away with a completely different impression of me if they met me speaking english or my not so great spanish. and i think the answer is definitely yes, because ive met some europeans here who, because of their accents, sound stuck up, or not very smart, or whatever, and therefore i automatically don´t like them as much. but maybe they wouldn´t come off like that in their own language. i dunno. also the germans told me almost all the movies they watch are american (okay, USan) ones dubbed into german. which leads to the unfortunate conclusion that they dont know any of the actors real voices. which also makes me wonder how much recognition the voice-over people get. probably not enough. and finally, two awesome nature sightings: 1, an enormous black snake with a yellow stomach that was by our estimates almost 6 feet long and 5 inches wide. it was huge! and 2, i finally got to see a jesus christ lizard run across the water! it was sooooo cool. and really fast. we also visited the 2nd largest tropical garden in the world, but to us the most remarkable part was how much grass there was and how wonderful it smelled freshly cut. it reminded us all of home, as there is absolutely no grass in the cities here. oookay, thats more than enough words for one simple blog, so ill wrap it up. hope everyones well, ill tell the sun sand and fish you say hi.

gus

Somoto

hellloooo everybody. reporting live from somoto. When we left esteli for countryside nicaragua, we didnt realize how incredibly cold it would be. maybe the guy on the bus ride there with a live chicken in his backpack was some sort of sign. in any case for the next two days we absolutely froze our asses off. however, we met 3 travelers from tacoma there who had only left a week ago and therefore hadnt acclimatized yet and were perfectly happy in shorts and t shirts. so that put things in perspective for me a little bit. not that it changed anything. i actually used the gloves i brought, which i almost forgot i even had with me. everyone made fun of me for bringing them and asked why i did, and all credit goes to moms, who made me. so thanks for that. at night i also wore the long underwear you made me bring. though you forgot to make me bring a hat, so i had to tie a shirt around my head. it was cold! however, i got to do four fantastic things while i was there. 1: i finally met someone who knew casino!! he was the nicaraguan guy who owned the place where we (and everyone else, it was the only place) stayed. his rules were a tiny bit different but still. i wonder how in the world it made it out there. 2: we visited a real, live hermit! his name was humberto, he had approximately 4 teeth, and very white hair that stood straight up. he also had mutton chop side burns and was very tan, which contrasted fantastically with his hair. he is mostly, maybe entirely, famous in the area for his carvings though. i dont know how long ago he was an alcoholic, and to help get over it he started carving in the rock walls near his house. well he kept at it for the next 33 years and it was incredible. i dont know how many square feet of carving it was but it was a LOT, like an entire cliff face long, and the carvings were not half bad. he also gave us one of his fresh pineapples (fresh like we watched his chop it off the plant) that was hands down the most delicious piece of fruit ive ever experienced. 3: beaaauuutiful sunsets from the top of a nearby hill that over looked a very long mountainous valley. 4: visiting a town that makes swiss cheese. weird right? they also grew and sold worms and had an italian priest. anyways, its not like the swiss cheese from the store, it was soft and stinky and awesome, especially since all the local cheese blows. and i got to hike in a national park nearby that was pine forest and the smell of the drying pine needles reminded me a lot of home. so that was that. the place was called tisey. as for esteli, seeing noah and marian was perfecto. we made a couple delicious pasta dinners, one night watched ratattoui, and had good fun all around. now im in somoto with my three german friends, and today we took a great 6 hour hike/swim in a nearby canyon. it was hiking until the river got deep enough, then swimming until it was too shallow. and the water was unbelievable. k i have no time left but i will put up more pictures when i have faster internet! talk soon!

love
gus

esteli

so i mainly came to esteli to visit my friends from seattle (marian and noah) who are volunteering here, but its turned out to be a pretty cool place. and i was cold for the first time last night in who knows how long. not really a good thing, but it seemed notable. my friends have been volunteering here, guatemala, and honduras, teaching in schools. trading our stories, we´d done super different things but both sides were jealous of what the other had done. they also said that i was taller! who knew? it was once again very nice to see old friends though, and it was good to catch up. i also ended up running into two of the people i volunteered with at the turtle reserve! only a month later and in another country. so i think when i leave ill be going with them. today we went and toured a cigar factory which was fun and as an added bonus we got to smoke free cigars. i felt like fidel. or governor lepetomane from blazing saddles. they had one there that was over a foot long and god knows how thick, and i think smoking it is one of the manlier things i could imagine someone doing. they didn´t let us though. i think tomorrow we´re going to a little community outside of town for hiking and living on a farm for a couple days. and they make swiss cheese! i can´t wait. the cheese here sucks. so i´ll be ruffin it out in the countryside until i write next. hopefully ill have some more good stories to share. ciao

masaya, esteli

I just arrived in Esteli today, but for the past 2 nights was in Masaya, which is supposed to be the artsy center of nicaragua. it had lots of nice leatherwork and hammocks. i got to watch one guy making a hammock and he was crazy fast at it, so that was cool. his name was carlos. i also found baseball caps made out of leather, and one that even still had the cow fur on it which was hilarious to me. the city itself was pretty loud and dirty-at one point i was just walking along when something blew into my eye and started burning instantly. so while im standing in the street trying to blink it out some old lady invites me into her house to wash it out etc. and then she started talking to me about religion, which turned out to be a lot harder than i expected because i quickly realized i didn´t know any religion-related words in spanish. so that was a bit tricky. but she kept thanking the lord for this and that and told me i should get glasses to block my eyes from things in the wind. one of the days i went to the nearby volcan masaya national park and took a looksee at the craters there. one is constantly smoking and smells terrible, but not normal like sulfur, it was much worse. one lady said there was hydrochloric acid in it. there was also a huge cross above the crater for reasons i think relating to how the natives used to make religious sacrifices there and throw live people into the lava. i also took a tour of a cave which had lots of bats which were very hard to take pictures of because the dont like light. but i got one and they are funky lookin. mostly it was just good to get out into the park for a bit where it was quiet and the air was fresh. my hotel room in town was in a smoothie shop which was about equal to putting a coyote in a chicken coop. it was great. and now im in esteli where two of my friends from seattle are volunteering. i haven´t found them yet but i will! one last piece from granada-it was superbowl sunday the night before i left, and all the americans in town (plus one fanatical swede who said he streamed in every nfl game online at home and thought it was the greatest game on earth) came together at a sports bar to watch it. so that was fun. okay, thats all folks, write soon.

gus