Category Archives: RTW
Our Elephant Adventure
A little detour from our trip in New Zealand…we’re currently in Thailand and we crossed another thing off of our bucket list…We went to an elephant sanctuary while we were in Chiang Mai and it was amazing! Here’s a video we put together.
New Zealand Part 3
The first two days we had in Queenstown were pretty laid back compared to what we would get ourselves into when we returned later. We spent those two days walking around and getting to know the town and it’s layout and taking the ski lift to the top of the mountain for some amazing views of the city and do a little hiking. We would return to this town wth a vengeance a few days later, but first we had to go see another amazing part of New Zealand: Milford Sound
New Zealand Part 2
We left Blue Duck Station and made our way to the Tongariro National park. The highlight of this park is a 6-8 hour walk through some beautiful countryside of New Zealand. Unfortunately, my ankle was still bothering me from when I hurt it in Nicaragua, so we had to skip it. Mandy also had an unfortunate dental issue that would mean we would have to say goodbye to friends we made on the bus and stay in Wellington for a few days while we got her patched up. It sounds a lot worse than it turned out to be, and we really enjoyed our time off the bus.
New Zealand Part 1
I tried to come up with a tricky, funny title for our first post about this country but New Zealand kept whispering over my shoulder to keep it simple like much of their country, so here we are. Part 1. I have no idea how many parts this will take but welcome to the story of our journey of what we reckon will be the most beautiful country on our journey. Cheers!
Fast Forward
This post is going to be a little bit different. We’re sitting in New Zealand right now and I’m still behind on our Central America adventure and we think people would rather hear about our time here rather than the rest of our time in Central America. So I’m going to hit the highlights of the remainder of our time in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama in one big post so I can move on to New Zealand. If you have any questions about anything I’m about to run through, just leave a comment and we’ll try our best to answer it. (wifi is spotty here in New Zealand)
Granada blah
Granada was weird. I don’t know how else to say it. We got dropped off in the Central Park, which is a common occurrence we’ve found, and we didn’t have a place reserved to stay, so we started walking with our backpacks towards the main street. A guy approached us and asked if we were looking for a place to stay. Unfortunately, the bags on our backs are huge signs that say, ‘HI WE’RE NEW AND NEED A ROOM!’.
Don’t go chasing Volcanoes
The only proof we needed that we were on an active volcano (besides the fact that we had just climbed up an active volcano), was when our guide walked over to the edge of a cliff and pulled out a shovel and started digging.
Nope!
Our two drivers who would take us from El Tunco, El Salvador, through Honduras, and into Leon, Nicaragua didn’t speak a lick of English, which we found a little odd. Usually when there are two guys riding in the bus, at least one of them can speak a little English and between a few of us on the bus who can speak a little Spanish, we can make it work. These guys pulled out their cell phones and typed words into Google Translate for us. If you’ve ever tried to use Google translate, you know how accurate it is, which is to say it’s not. I was staring at this guy’s phone, looking at both the english translation from Spanish and the Spanish he had typed into the box and I couldn’t understand either one of them.
Get Stamped
We had walked across the border from Belize into Guatemala and gotten our entrance stamp. We weren’t on a bus and as it turns out that was a good thing because others who had entered on busses weren’t so lucky.
Beware of the coyotes
Our nine AM bus we booked out of Antigua to San Pedro the day before was 15 minutes late to pick us up and we were getting worried. We had booked it with a nice lady who owned a travel agency across the street from our new hostel and I poked my head around the corner to see if she was open, and she was. So I decided to go see what was up.
2crazybackpackers 