Thanks everyone for having a close look at my disgusting wound and for giving me your expert opinions…
It’s not that I don’t trust you… but just to be on the safe side I decided to see a doctor in Granada. I walked into a clinic, more or less randomly and asked the receptionist ¿Habla usted Inglés?. She shakes her head and asks in Spanish what I came for. I point to the wound on my ankle and ask ¿Possible leishmania?. She understands my concern and calls the doctor – on her mobile phone. The whole reception area of the clinic looked more like a hotel lobby. I didn’t see any doctors here either. She indicates me to follow her and to my surprise we leave the building and walk down the street. About 150 m away is the actual office of the doctor she called. It seems like this is a slow day for his business. There were no other patients. I can’t remember when was the last time I got to see a doctor right away without any waiting time. He greets me with a friendly smile and shakes my hand. Do you speak English? Nope. It also appeared he did not understand a single word of English, so during the 30 min meeting I relied heavily on my non-existing Spanish skills and ‘sign language’. The first thing I noticed when entering his office was how cramped and messy it was. It seemed more like an evidence room: Stacks of folders randomly distributed throughout the room, boxes, medical tools, etc. The highlight however was a large tapestry of Ariel, the little mermaid. How random. And creepy.
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August1st
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August1st
San Juan del Sur
My Central America experience so far consisted mostly of small underdeveloped villages, dirty dangerous capitals, lots of jungle and volcanoes. Time for a change (I love change). After spending the last week in super hot Managua and Granada, I was planning to visit Ometepe, an island in gran lago de Nicaragua formed by two volcanoes. But after yet another very hot day in Granada I decided to visit the Pacific coast instead and went to San Juan del Sur. It’s a small town on a horseshoe-shaped bay with a hill on one side that has a over-sized Jesus statue on it. It’s a bit like a miniature version of Rio de Janeiro.
Rainy day
This is the first time I get close to a proper beach in a while and guess what happened? I lost my swimming trunks a few days ago… Lot’s of gringos hang out here in San Juan, surfers as well as party-hungry college kids. I met a bunch of British guys and girls and an American with whom I went partying. It’s a pretty chill place where I could easily spend a week but I have to move to Costa Rica tomorrow. I am much looking forward to the colder climate over there.
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July30th
Looks like I got my first exotic parasitic disease. ….or not?
A few days ago, I felt a strong itch on my ankle and scratched it hard until it started bleeding. I thought this was just another of those annoying mosquito bites. But the wound, about the size of a finger nail, didn’t show any sign of healing since then. Yesterday I had a closer look at it and it seems to resemble the symptoms of one of those tropical diseases not uncommon here in Central America: leishmaniasis. It is being contracted by the bite of certain species of sand fly that injects protozoan parasites (Leishmania) into the wound. The main symptoms of the resulting disease, Leishmaniasis are skin lesions at the location of the bite. I am concerned because I have been bitten by plenty of sand flies over the past month, especially around my ankles.
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July27th
My new Jesus T-shirt
This is the story of how I found Jesus …
The other day I was complaining about all the things I have lost during the trip. This time I found something that I never lost. You know how you sometimes lose a sock when you do laundry? I did a whole bunch of laundry in Managua. Unlike Guatemala, I couldn’t easily find any laundry place here and had to ask around quite a bit. Eventually some woman living in the neighborhood agreed to wash my things. This wasn’t any official service, she did it privately for a few dollars. Also, no laundry machine, this was a hand job! Anyway, I picked up my nicely folded clothes the next day. A few days later, I was already in Granada, I realized that besides my washed clothes there was an extra T-shirt that doesn’t belong to me. And it has Jesus on it! Should I take that as a sign from God? For those non-Spanish speakers, the shirt reads: “I’m happy because I have Christ in my heart.“
I love this shirt. I’m going to keep it and wear it with pride. And it goes well with my cap, too…Seriously, how many people can claim, they found Jesus in the laundry?
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July21st
I lost it. Again. What? Well, usually it starts with something simple such as a towel that put somewhere in my dorm room on the hostel for drying and forget when checking out. This time the first item I lost was my Kenneth Cole body wash. Left it in the shower of my nice hostel in Washington DC. Now, several months later the list of lost items has grown considerably:
- Lens cap of my camera (quite expensive for a piece of plastic)
- Insanely cool Adidas SL72 sneakers
- Favourite blue Urban Outfitter shirt with the Japanese flag
- New Ray-Ban sunglasses I bought only 2 months ago in Knoxville
- NIKE hoodie that my gym mates Mai and Aixiao gave me
- Useful Swiss-made universal travel adapter
…and three socks (needless to say, each from a different pair)
The only item I ever lost and found again, of course, is entire value- and useless: an oversized safety pin that I used to fix the broken zipper of my jeans. I lost it one of the many times I slipped and fell during the Santiaguito volcano expedition. My fellow explorers Loreen and Rene found it during our return trip and I got it back. The jeans in turn were shredded to pieces by the many falls and I parted from then voluntarily.
Adidas SL72
Ray-Ban sunglasses
NIKE hoodie
Update: In the meantime I lost more stuff: swimming trunks, ear phones
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July20th
This is one of those stories that make traveling fun. After over three weeks in Guatemala it was time for me to move on to El Salvador. I booked a Pullmantur bus to the capital San Salvador. The bus trip turned out to be surprisingly comfortable with a free meal, soft drinks, snacks, the obligatory Richard Gere movie (‘Hachi: A dog’s tale‘) and free WiFi throughout the entire trip, yeah! You have no idea how happy it makes me to be able to email and blog throughout my bus ride. Hours pass like minutes. And this trip took an hour more than expected. Or did I enter a new time zone? Around 8:30 pm we arrived in zona rosa of San Salvador. Nope, that’s not the gay area. But it is the safest zone in the city. That’s relevant when you realize that El Salvador is currently the country with the highest murder rate in the entire world, 80 times higher than Germany! So, unlike some other bus stations I had seen during my travels there was nothing to worry about right here in front of the Sheraton Hotel in zona rosa. A bunch of taxi drivers were awaiting us. I asked how much? ‘Five Dollars’ (by the way US dollars are the official currency in El Salvador). I had no idea what a realistic taxi fare would be but figured that down the street prices might be lower than here in front of the Sheraton. I said no and started walking away. The taxi drivers though managed to change my mind. Only 5 steps of walking and the fare had dropped to $3. Fine. My driver spoke no English but who cares. First, I had to withdraw some cash. When changing my Guatemalian Quetzales to Dollars at the border I got ripped off by about $10. During the bus trip I had looked up nearby ATMs of Scotiabank online and the closest was still too far to walk, so the cab had to get me there. The driver asked if he should wait and I said yes, because this place looked deserted and I didn’t see any other taxis around. I withdrew a few hundred Dollars (they are, without question, the most useful currency in Central America) and got back into the car. The driver was talking on the phone with someone. I asked the guy to bring me to my LonelyPlanet-guided choice of accommodation for tonight. He didn’t know of any ‘Casa Huéspedes de Australia’ though, so I gave him the address. We drove for about 5 min; the area looked dark and industrial, not very much like the neighborhood with restaurants, parks, and a major shopping center around which the hostel was supposed to be located. How strange… Then the driver indicated that he is going to take a shortcut – at least that is what I understood from his Spanish-speaking and hand-waving – and turned into a small and pitchblack side street. Oh no, that couldn’t possibly be the shortest way to the hostel. I had studied the map and the hostel is very close to a big boulevard. That was the moment when I got
a littlenervous.
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July17th
Tomato juice + beer = Michelada
One of the pleasures of traveling is making new culinary discoveries in the countries you visit. Yesterday I discovered Michelada. It’s an alcoholic mix drink: Gallo beerand tomato juice with a slight salsa taste. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t taste bad at all. I like it. The locals say it’s a great cure for hangovers. But I guess you could also use it for creating hangovers. Isn’t that great?
PS. Wikipedia tells me, there’s more than one kind of Micheladas.
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July10th
Growing coffee fruit
One of the places Marissa really wanted to visit was a certain coffee plantation she heard about from the Guatemalan owner of a fair trade store in Chicago. After recovering from the near-death experience of our Santiaguito volcano expedition we took a chicken bus from Quetzaltenango (or Xelahow the locals call it) to a small town called Colomba.
Chicken bus
Marissa was excited about her first ride in a chicken bus. These are old yellow US school busses that, after getting a more or less fancy paint job, are used as local buses all throughout Central America. The term ‘chicken bus’ stems from the fact that people use them to transport just about anything, including chicken (on our bus there were some chicks, too). From Colomba we hat to take a collectivo to the plantation. Collectivos are another interesting mean of transportation here. It’s basically a driver with a pickup truck that leaves whenever enough passengers have accumulated to fill the back of his truck. You get lot’s of fresh air, it’s almost like driving a cabrio, only that it’s a pickup and you share the car with at least 10 other people standing next to you… on second thought it resembles more an overcrowded subway.
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July1st
The next stop of my Guatemala trip was Flores, a beautiful small and sleepy town on an island in a lake. From there we went to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. If above picture looks somehow familiar to you it might be because George Lucas decided to use Tikal as a filming location for his 1977 movie Star Wars: A new hope. We left Flores at 4:30 AM to avoid the crowds and got to Tikal about two hours later. It’s my second visit there and thanks to the guided tour I got a lot more background info and animals to see this time.
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June29th
Semuc Champey
It’s only my third day in Guatemala and I made it to Semuc Champey, a very beautiful but somewhat remote area of the Cahabòn river in central Guatemala. The place only opened as a tourist destination about a year ago. There is little choice of accomodation here and backpackers seem to be the only visitors. That’s a good thing. Our hostel ‘El Portal’, the Mayan owners and tour guides and even the other travelers are great. Marissa, my temporary travel companion from Chicago, and me decided to book the full package here.
In the morning we went for a steep hike up the mirador, a lookout over-viewing the entire crystal-clear blue river. 
From there we hiked down to the river and across the different terraces, which involved lots of jumping from one level to an other, sliding and diving into a tiny underwater cave. All in all very beautiful and exciting. Back to the hostel for lunch break and then going for some tubing along the river. The descent current and big rocks to avoid made that more fun than I expected.
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