I would say to every traveler: pack a sleeping bag liner. If you’re a hardcore outdoor-nut and plan on camping out a lot, a sleeping bag liner will help keep your sleeping bag clean and all you have to do is clean and change the liner. Or even if you don’t ever plan on camping out, it will give you fitful nights in budget hostels knowing that the bed bugs won’t get to you. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it also keeps the damn mosquitoes away as they can’t keep a hold onto the slippery silk. Best of all, a liner can fit easily into your pocket, so it’s incredibly light to carry. Jagbags New Zealand has them hand-dyed in single or multiple colours, and can even custom make one for you. International delivery available. Click here for more information.

© meltravels — An old US school bus repainted into the infamous public ‘chicken bus’

If you’re flying into Guatemala City, upon arrival at the airport there are shuttles (even without prior reservation) to Antigua, from where you can then further your journey to other parts of the country. Otherwise, take a taxi to a bus terminal to catch a chicken bus to your destination.

Pros and cons between a shuttle and a chicken bus?

Truth is, they don’t differ very much in terms of comfort. Taking a chicken bus from Guatemala City, which is the starting point for most buses, you’ll be guaranteed a seat so you won’t have to be swaying interminably in the center aisle.

And in terms of time saved, I’ve found that there’s no significant difference between the two either since all the drivers drive like hell’s on fire anyway. The chicken bus will make stops for people to get on and off but that doesn’t contribute to a significant delay in reaching your destination. Any delays will be due to highway constructions.

In terms of cost, the chicken bus is generally cheaper, although for some routes there is no significant difference. For example, from Antigua to Panajachel or Guatemala City, you can get it as cheap as $5 or $7 with a shuttle, which works out about the same as a chicken bus. But for longer routes there might be a larger margin of difference.

Point is: if you’re hesitating about taking a chicken bus, don’t… unless: (1) you have a hefty amount of luggage, then you might want to consider a shuttle, or (2) if you don’t want to take the chance of being robbed while you’re asleep or unaware - I’ve had my wallet stolen from me before while I was asleep, and I met a traveler once who unknowingly had his pocket sliced open with a knife and his passport and cash stolen. But the better reason to opt for a shuttle over a chicken bus is (3) not having to make multiple connections. A shuttle brings you from A to B in one vehicle, sometimes even door to door.

However, for every first-timer in Central America, the chicken bus is an experience not to be forgone since it offers up a true local experience (once you’re a veteran you’ll probably tire of it). So here I’ve listed a few places in the country you might want to make your way to from la capital, with the bus terminal addresses provided in Spanish.

Read the rest of this entry »

This was played every six hours on Guatemalan TV in September 2007 to commemorate the month of the country’s independence. Guatemala became independent from Spain on September 15, 1821. This video will also show you the amazing greenery of the country, its landscapes, its people… all the nice things about Guatemala. The more unpleasant ones… well, you won’t find it here.

¡Guatemala feliz! que tus aras
No profane jamás el verdugo;
Ni haya esclavos que laman el yugo
Ni tiranos que escupan tu faz.

Si mañana tu suelo sagrado
Lo amenaza invasión extranjera,
Libre al viento tu hermosa bandera
A vencer o a morir llamará.

CHORUS:
Libre al viento tu hermosa bandera
A vencer o a morir llamará.
Que tu pueblo con ánima fiera
Antes muerto que esclavo será.

Fortunate Guatemala! May your altars
Never be profaned by cruel men.
May there never be slaves who submit to their yoke,
Or tyrants who deride you.

If tomorrow your sacred soil
Should be threatened by foreign invasion,
Your fair flag, flying freely in the wind,
Will call to you: Conquer or die.

CHORUS:
Your fair flag, flying freely in the wind,
Will call to you: Conquer or die;
For your people, with heart and soul,
Would prefer death to slavery.

Upon arriving in Granada, most people will head straight for The Bearded Monkey to find a bed. I’m sure it’s a fantastic hostel — at least, it is surely the most popular, something along the tradition of Big Foot in León or The Black Cat in Guatemala. But if you’re looking for something cheaper and more offbeat, which isn’t even listed in the guidebooks yet, there’s Hostal Nicarao, very near el Parque Central.

It’s on the same street as Hostal San Angel, which is listed in most guidebooks, and which is also slightly more expensive than Hostal Nicarao, though still cheap, all things considered. In all honesty, I probably would have checked into San Angel if I’d found it first, but Nicarao was a cheap and cheerful alternative nonetheless. There is a big open courtyard right smack in the middle which keeps the place mostly bright and sunny, something which is a consideration for me since in a bid to save electricity, most places in Nicaragua don’t turn on the light in the day. So if there’s no natural light coming through it can be very dim. In fact, most restaurants and businesses often look like they are closed in the day, because it’s so dark you can’t see the inside from the sidewalks.

It’s easy to get to Hostal Nicarao. From the southeast corner of the Parque Central, walk south to the end of the first block. On the way you’ll see San Angel, and then a few doors down, Nicarao, which sits on the corner. It’s got a very colourful wall to advertise its presence. You can’t possibly miss it. And you can probably walk right in and find a bed to settle in for a few nights. There’s no website or online booking system for the hostal, and anyway if it’s full there are an abundance of other options.

It’s manned by some local guys who I suspect have a penchant for porn (but what guy doesn’t, I suppose). They close the doors after 1 a.m. but that doesn’t mean there’s a curfew. All you have to do is knock and they’ll open it for you. Knock loudly though, and be patient and wait a little bit. They have to switch the channel to football before greeting you, you see. It’s only appropriate

There are dorms and private rooms, beds are clean and bug-free, fans to save you from the heat, a communal kitchen, and I think, laundry services. They also have a resident computer, but they charge you for using the internet. I don’t remember them having hot showers, however, so if that’s a problem for you, I guess you’ll have to go somewhere else. But the weather in Nicaragua, especially in Granada, is sweltering. I had no need or desire for hot showers except when I was in the highlands like Estelí or Jinotega. You’ll probably love cold showers in Granada. Taking one in the middle of the afternoon is absolute bliss!

I was searching for photos of Nicaragua on Flickr in hopes that they would jolt the deepest recesses of my memory of that indefinable country (I have no photographs of it because I didn’t have a camera with me while I was traveling there), and I stumbled upon this collection of the revolution (and also some photos of the proceeding years leading up to the Contra War) by Marcelo Montecino. This first one in particular, which immortalizes a soldier who had just returned from the front, is my favourite because of the juxtaposition of violence and innocence: the baby, and then the rifle; and the smile on the father’s face. The rest of the selected photos will show you that the revolution wasn’t just the story of men, but of their women and children, too.

However, history has clearly proven that revolutions tend to go wrong along the way, and the Nicaraguan revolution was hardly an exception, as was Cuba’s, no matter how many people go touting Che Guevara with his beret on their chests. As a reminder, I’ve got a t-shirt of the Che wearing Bart Simpson on his chest, a cartoon strip by Matthew Diffee for The New Yorker (you can buy your own here). I don’t have to tell you, I love the irony.

When all is said and done, there is a certain dangerous romance in the idea of revolution, the possibilities of change it induces you to want to believe in, which is obviously why so many people sign up to it in the first place. And well, I guess that’s what these following photos illustrate: the romance, the idealism and the camaraderie… but also the more inhumane parts of it, like putting rifles into the hands of children.

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common – not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.

Buy this book from Amazon
Revolution and romance have always been inextricably linked, and there is no better example of this than Nicaragua, the underpopulated isthmus (“it was the emptiest of the countries of Central America”, and still is) that forms part of the slender waist of America. The mere whispers of its syllables is poetry, and despite — or because of — its poverty one needs only to delve into its recent history to find romance and ideals and hope, which luckily, isn’t very difficult. Her history echoes at you wherever within her borders you travel: through the bullet-holed walls of the fading buildings, the colourful revolutionary murals, the young men you meet who were even younger when they fought in the revolution… As the Indian-British author Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Versus, Midnight’s Children) wrote in The Jaguar Smile, a firsthand account of his three-week visit to Nicaragua in the July of 1986 for the seventh anniversary of the triumph of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN):

In Nicaragua ‘at seven years’ the walls still spoke to the dead: Carlos¹, we’re getting there, the graffiti said; or, Julio², we have not forgotten.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Carlos Fonseca was the founder of the FSLN in 1956, and who died in November 1976, two and a half years before the Sandinista victory. [↩]
2. In his memoir, Salman Rushdie also relates the story of Julio Buitrago, who had been surrounded in a ’safe house’ in Managua along with some others. “Finally he was he only one left alive, resisting the might of Somoza’s tanks and heavy artillery hour after hour, while the whole country watched him on live television, because Somoza thought he’d captured a whole FSLN cell and wanted their destruction to be a lesson to the people: a terrible miscalculation, because when the people saw Buitrago come out shooting and die at last, when they saw that just one man had held off a tyrant for so long, they learned the wrong lessons: that resistance was possible.” [↩]

© Emily Ding - Stansted Airport, London

John Mayer - Wheel

An excerpt from Starting Points and Destinations, an honours research paper by Marlaina Read:

The airport is a place where journeys begin and end. These are the places that I start feeling like a traveller. In the airport I feel a sense of dislocation, it comes, I think, from knowing that there are hundreds of airports just like this one all around the world. I cannot be intimate with a location that is constantly repeated because it does not exist as an individual place. The structure of the airport does not require individuality in order to function. Its production of repetition and homogeneity is the basis for its efficiency worldwide because it creates an order through which people’s movements can be controlled smoothly. Any intimacy I could want to feel in this space would, therefore, be swallowed in the airport’s overwhelming sameness. This is a space that serves to move people on their way, it does not exist of and for itself, but instead only as a means of delivering people to their destination. The airport is a place of transition; it does not need to describe history or culture because no one is coming to the airport to be at the airport. They come to the airport in order to leave. The airport is what Marc Auge calls a non-place.

Read the rest of this entry »

The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute… being allowed to be a coward, and not be executed for it, is his torture.

— War photographer Robert Capa,
killed by a landmine in French Indo-China, 1954

Click here for the book’s official website

I don’t have any aspirations of being a war reporter per se, but since it’s an offshoot - or perhaps the seed - of global journalism (which I’m interested in), I guess that’s why I’ve always tried to follow the whereabouts and stories of a number of conflict journalists. And with all of them, what amazes me is how they seem not to comprehend the reality of their own mortality - or maybe it’s exactly the opposite, maybe it’s because they do that they take chances with their lives. So when I came across Chris Ayres‘ memoir, so intriguingly titled, I had to pick it up. It was a great read, but I must say, however, that it wasn’t what the book cover set it up to be. I was only anticipating a laugh-out-loud, omg-that’s-so-stupid-this-guy-is-a-joke kind of read. But it wasn’t. For all his professions of being a coward, Chris Ayres really isn’t one at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

“You can be just as faithful to a place or thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there.”

– Andy Warhol,
from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

© 2007 Emily Ding - Bumbling along the dirt tracks of Masaya, Nicaragua

Metric - Love Is A Place

“If every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

[…] And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

– travel writer Pico Ayer,
from ‘Why We Travel’

If you want to have a package sent over to Nicaragua, you need to know a few things. As a tourist, if you’re completely clueless, you might have a hard time tracking your package. It’s a rather tedious process, and one in which your things might easily get lost amidst all the bureaucracy.

The circumstances: I was waiting for a package to arrive from the United States and tracking it online, I learnt that it left the States December 5 and arrived at the Nicaraguan customs office December 10. But by December 17 my package still had not been dispatched to my friend’s address in the capital city of Managua, which I’d designate it to be posted to.

Increasingly frustrated and anxious because I was supposed to have left Nicaragua 3 days ago, I decided to look up the customs office and request for my package in person.

Read the rest of this entry »