Settling into Sydney

I've been here just over two weeks now and have taken to the place like a UCD team to a train vestibule. Actually the house I'm living in is quite like a vestibule as there are constantly random people coming in and out although it is a little bigger. I'm staying in Bondi Junction, also known as County Bondi due to the large number of GAA shirts being sported by those of the fairer complexion as they hit the happening night spots. Sadly I forgot my favourite Dublin jersey (supported them for years y'know) and my WCBU Ireland shirt has been confined to indoor use only.

For the first week I was staying with Troy from Fire of London who's here with de Google on a permanent transfer. Luckily he had a spare room so I was able to sleep off the horrific jet lag without having hundreds of backpackers milling around.

After a week I moved to the big house near Bondi Junction and about a 15 minute walk to Bondi Beach. The house is a huge 4 living room, 5 bedroom yoke with 5 of us paying rent and a travelling contingent of at least five randomers staying every night. I have my own room with a bit of privacy so it's all good. It does lead to an awful lot of red wine though as there's always a few people having a sip and who am I to refuse?

The job situation here is much like Ireland with very little going on. I've spent the last week contacting recruiters daily, scouring the interweb for potential positions but there's very little out there. The standard line from the recruiters is that if I'd turned up last year I'd have a job within a day. Now who would want that with the beach only a 15 minute walk away!! So it's a little tougher than expected but I'm still hopeful that with year ends coming up there may be some work on the audit side of things. Otherwise it may be al the waiter or floor cleaner for a year which would be a nice little grounding. Needless to say my mum isn't too pleased that I gave up a good job in London but I'm confident what I've experienced in the last 8 months is worth a bit of job pain and sure, the recession can't last forever, right??

Socially I've landed on my feet. I stayed with Troy from Fire for a week when I got here and now I've moved into the aforementioned house with Grace "the face" from Cark, Quentin and Sinead from Waterford, Colette from Sydney and Lopez the afro'd party planner from Paris. Added to that we have Ziggy from London who used to live here staying on the sofa, Damien and Regina on the fold out couch, Caroline and Hayley who are staying with Grace, David who's also staying with Grace and Lisa the Swedish model slash waitress who's staying with Lopez. !

Added to that I've been shown around by Elayna "Phelpsy" from the Green Tortoise bus in America quite a bit. It's been great to have familiar faces to hang out with.


I'm playing frisbee with Manly twice a week which is sweet. I have a few tournaments lined up with them over the next few months as well as summer / autumn / winter league.

So that's the Sydney Story for now. I'm down in my room, about to look for more jobs before heading out to Tropfest, a large outdoor film festival. Heavy hardcore trance is pumping down from the living room upstairs as Lopez and his mate come down from a big night out. Good times really, good time :)

Australia

After a great month in Dublin it's time to move on again. The need for some sun and employment is dragging me kicking and screaming to Sydney. It'll be a great year or two away to experience a "different culture" and learn a new language ("oh yiiaahh?", "g'daiy" etc).

Costa Rica

Puerto Viejo is billed as a party town, a paradise, somewhere you'll go and never want to leave. Sadly it is none of these. The Caribbean storms that had thus far prevented my from seeing that coast were still in full swing. The devastation was everywhere, flattened houses, ruined crops, waterlogged everything.

As a result of this Puerto Viejo was empty. I stayed in Rockin' J's, a hammock based hostel about 500m walk to the town centre. This was hostelling on an industrial scale with hammocks everywhere, countless tents on a raised platform and a few dorm rooms. Sadly it was empty, maybe about 20 tired, wet travellers.

We'd heard that there had been a bit of trouble on the road to town recently with local kids on bikes robbing travellers at gunpoint. With this in mind a group of four of us got together to make the walk to town. We were all over 6ft tall and our group included an Olympic rower (only got a bronze medal but figured he'd still be useful in a fight). As we walked in formation down the dodgy street we were buzzed a few times by the bike kids, they stared at us, we stared at them, each trying to out-menace the other.

We made it to town to find we were pretty much the only people there. A quick dinner and a bottle of $2 beer (Costa Rica is a relative rip off) and we headed back to the safety of the hostel compound.

The next day we heard that 5 of the 20 people staying at the hostel had been robbed on the same road the previous night. This place was hell, it was time to go. In five months of travelling through such places as Mexico City, El Salvador etc I'd never felt so unsafe.

Panama was next with the promise of another paradise, Bocas del Toro, around the corner.

Nicaragua

We arrived in bustling Leon in western Nicaragua around 3pm after a no-sleep-dirty-hangover bus ride from San Salvador. Being in no mood to take crap from anyone we got in an argument with our taxi driver over whether it was €1 each or €1 in total. We threw him a single and walked away into the Big Foot hostel, satisfied that we hadn't been ripped off, victorious.



We checked in, I emptied my entire bag into a laundry sack (things were getting a little grim on that front) and headed back to reception. There at the door, finger pointed right at me, was our taxi driver and a cop straight out of a 70's show, tache proudly tickling his nose. A quick check with the receptionist confirmed that we had in fact ripped off the taxi driver and now he was back, bullied kid with headmaster style, to collect his dues. Not wanting a night in a cell I threw him the extra cash, mumbled an apology in pigeon Spanish, and retreated to the safety of the dorm.

That was pretty much the highlight of leon, we wandered around a bit, checked out the huge cathedral, ate fried chicken and slept.


Next day we were off to Laguna Opoyo, a volcanic crater lake near Granada. This place was paradise with the dorm in an old boat shed looking out on the thermally warmed laguna. After a day and a half of kayaking, tubing and swimming we figured every day here would be identical to the last so moved on.

Granada was next, yet another colonial town where I said goodbye to Mark from Canada and Charlotte from Minnesota.

It was here I first saw the Virgin Mary.

There she was on a float surrounded by palm leaves and cherubic angels spouting water followed by a generator and a band. They sure love the virgin in these parts as I was to find out in San Juan del sur where she was paraded around incessantly with an entourage of big band playing, firework shooting devotees.

The preferred way of honouring the virgin appeared to be to make as loud an explosion as possible. Some of these bombs shook windows and reverberated around the town and they kept going all night. Not quite the relaxed beach atmosphere I'd expected.

A few days of lazing on the beach and a bit too much time online made me sick of the place so I hopped on a chicken bus to la frontera. Dodging ox and carts, chickens roosting in trees and roadside stalls we hoofed it to the border which we were warned was super hectic.

In fact it was a great border. That may have been because I hadn't had much sleep or appetite in the previous few days and was also slightly hungover which fostered a mild delirium where everything was amusing. After a bit of banter with the cambiomen I paid my dollar to get through the small gate which signifies the end of Nicaragua.

After persuading the emigration man to stamp my passport I walked the 10mins to costa rica, found the immigration office tucked behiind the restaurant and got my bus ticket to the capital, San juan.

San juan is a bustling place that looks like it was built in the 50's using the post war brutalist school of thought so popular in the bombed cities if the south of England. Avoiding the over pushy taxi men I decided to risk a walk through town to get to my hostel. It was just like any depressed high street, full of tacky shops, interesting people and litter.

After 20mins I checked into the aptly named hostel tranquilo, parted with my $8, had a freezing shower, hit burger king and went to bed. Up at 6am on account of the early night I set out to discover the historic heart of San jose. Not finding one I headed back to the hostel for the free DIY pancake breakfast. After frying up what was more like a loaf of bread than a pancake and laughing with the other hostellers over their equally inept efforts it was time to walk to the bus station and get the bus to Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast near the panama border. So I'm on the bus, iTouch in hand, listening to Damien Rice, admiring the hilly jungle-esque interior of costa rica and hoping it's not raining on the coast.

El Salvador to Nicaragua

The trip to playa el tunco, el Salvador came off the back of a fun party weekend in Antigua. I was ready for some daytime beach chilling followed by a few nighttime beers, perhaps even some exercise in the form of a boogie or whatever the kids call it these days. To quote Mick jagger: you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get what you need.

To get to el tunco I first had to negociate myself out of bed. A tough call after my first night of couchsurfing. Valerie (see pic above) had promised a quiet night in, it was a Tuesday after all. What I got was a night out with the elite of San Salvador. Carlos picked us up in his super charged 4x4 tank resplendznt with sword on the back seat ("a Halloween prop..."). First stop was the GranVia, a new outdoor mall that was fancier than any I had seem in north America. Typically we went to the only Irish restaurant, Bannigans, for dinner (are there any "Irish" pubs in the world with a common Irish name?!) after that it was a whistlestop tour of posh dollar-a-beer bars culminating in being treated to kareoke until 3am.

We managed to convince Carlos "I know another bar we can go to" Stifler to drop us home after kareoke. Lucky that, as his semi drunken driving was getting a bit hairy. Drink driving doesn't seem to be an issue here. In fact I was proudly shown a picture of a crashed brand new BMW.

Next morning I was up at chicken bus o'clock to head to la libertad and then on to playa el tunco, a famous surf beach (don't worry, jane's been there too..!) I found a tent on a raised platform by the beach for $4. After a night of little sleep I treated myself to a night in a bed in Papayas lodge. El tunco was a bit quiet, the bars were empty by 8, so three of us decided to go back to san Salvador and on to Nicaragua.

So it was back to Valerie´s house in San Salvador with the promise of another quiet night in as she had a big night out planned for the next day.

With unnerving predictability we found ourselves still out at midnight. Instead of kareoke we rocked out at a "Veni U2" gig, intended to raise funds to bring U2 to el Salvador, with a tribute band fronted by a very womanly Bono. For a tribute band they knew very few U2 songs, in fact they just knew Vertigo which they played every few songs in the hope we'd be too drunk to notice.

Notice we did, so it was off to a nightclub that would fit very nicely in the poshest part of any capital city. Suddenly it was 3am, we hadn't had dinner yet and our bus to Nicargua was in two hours. And so we found ourselves packed into a car, eating drive-thru mcdonalds, cruising the streets of el Salvador.

We got to the apartmentst 3.45am, just in time for a quick brush of the fiaclas and to catch our cab. By 4.15am there was still no sign of the cab. I was slowly falling asleep on my backpack on the footpath, mark was trying to drunkenly figure out what to do while michael from holland was chuckling whilst proclaiming: "ishn't did weird".

I was seconds from passing out when a police 4x4 pulled up and four commandos, toting machine guns for good measure, jumped out and surrounded us. Using a jumble of "bus", "5am" and "mucho problema" we got across the gravity of the situation. Either because they were nice people or they didn't want to deal with the headlines the next day ("3 gringos murdered on sidewalk") they threw our backpacks in the back and invited us to ride with them.

And so it was, with two heavily armed, ballaclavad, commandos guarding our bags in the back, that we came to get a police escort through San Salvador to our bus terminal.

My memories of passing through Honduras don´t amount to much, I´m sure it was beautiful etc. but I was fast asleep for all of it (except for the obligatory "welcome to honduras" sign).

Antigua (again) and El Salvador

The original intention was to spend a day in Antigua to re-form my body into it's normal shape after a 9 hour bus journey and to get a wash done. Five days later and I'm finally in el sALvador. I blame Rum, Paul, Jessica and Devon. The hostel was just too much fun to leave.

In the end I'm glad I stayed because it gave me the chance to climb Volcan Pacaya again. The first time round I climbed it in the morning but I later discovered to my horror that Jane had climbed it in the evening. In order to faithfully recreate Jane's journey I would have to climb it again.


Going back gave me a chance to see solid rock where last month I saw flowing lava. Geography teachers worldwide would wet themselves. The lava this time around was a good 20 minute hike further up the volcano on steep, slippery terrain, a mixture between sand and sharp rocks eager to attack your ankles. Thanks to my days of playing frisbee on the beach I found the easiest way up was to run.

The lava snuck up on us this time, we were scrambling over fresh, hollow sounding rock when the guard said softly and with no sense of urgency that we should perhaps not be where we were and instead follow him. A good call as a few metres on we could see that we had been standing on the thin roof of a cave about two metres wide from which flowed a fast moving stream of 2000C liquid magma (dr evil would love this!). At the same time the sun was setting creating an incredible glow as the clouds we were in rushed by.

Having been toasted marshmallow style by the lava we started our descent. The easiest way to do this was to attempt to ski down using feet as skis and my trusty stick as a "jaysus" device to stop a fusion of ass and sharp rock. We made it back in good time using flashlights and a bus. Never was a Burger King cheeseburger and fries more deserved.

This morning I was up to get a shuttle to Guatemala city at 9. First things first though, I needed coffee, bread and to post my latest postcard to Rosie, Queen of Clonskeagh. I was hanging out with Helen (from San pedro / NZ, just back from the rainy caribbean coast and very hungover), Jessica (from Antigua / Oregon and off to semuc champey) and Sophia (from Sofia, off to San pedro again) on this beautiful morning. By 9.15 there was still no shuttle, no big deal in Guatemala to have a delay. I popped my head into the girls at the travel agents to check on it. My appearance was greeted with calm panic followed by some frantic phone calls. I left them to it, I could see I was in good hands.

My trust was well placed as ten minutes later my shuttle, i.e. a volvo estate with three Americans already in the back, duly turned up. After doing a few laps of the city's one way streets trying to find a way out (half of the streets were being dug up and the rest closed due to the presidents imminent arrival) we were on our way.

I was dropped at the tica bus terminal two hours early so I checked my bag and went for a wander. I saw a last chance to experience Guatemalan culture across the motorway and thought what a great way to spend a few hours. I put on my sprinting shoes and ran through the speeding cars to get across to the megamall complete with McDs, BK and joy of joys Taco Bell. I feasted on taco fries and, appropriately, a volcano taco (cultural, no?). I enjoyed a few hours of wandering around shops such as Tommy Hilfiger, Zara, y'know traditional guatemalan fare, before the volcano taco duly lived up to it's name and for the second time that day my sprinting shoes proved themselves to be a lifesaver.

As the grand Tica bus pulled into the Guatemalan side of the border a murder of cambio men came charging towards us waving huge wads of quetzals and dolares. Putting on my best Roy-Keane-talking-about-the-FAI face I pushed through them to get to the border control. As I stood in (the wrong) line I amused myself by observing the tactics of the cambio men. The would stand outside waving their wads as if having the biggest wad was crucial to gaining credibility and business. Some would tap on the glass, others, when they caught your eye, would wave their wads and wink, kindred spirits with old men who hang around primary school gates with bags of fresh candy.

Back on the bus we drove the short distance to the el Salvador side of the border. This time it was all a bit modern with the border guy walking through the bus scanning our passports with a fancy piece of beepy machinery. No stamp in the passport?what's the point incoming here?!


There was time to hop off the bus for a super greasy popoussa and a coke as the guards checked the bags. I swear they only looked at the bags that belonged to locals. I say this because my bag was near the front and they just climbed over it to get to the cheaper looking ones. Either way after about a quarter of the bags they got bored so it was "Vamos" and we were off.

So I'm now sitting on the bus on the way to San Salvador where i'm staying with victoria and her boyfriend, my first couchsurfing experience. Tomorrow I'm off to playa el sumthin to try a bit of surfing and to see what el Salvador is about. It's gotta be good, right? After all it's got "al" in it's name.....

I couldn't take it anymore. I mean, I need my ass right? If it ended
up staying numb forever then how could I ever appreciate a good sofa
again? Nine hours in a hiace van from San pedros to Coban was enough.
I could do the two slow, windy hours to lanquin the next day. I needed
relief.

That's how I ended up in Coban, lovingly described in the lonely
planet ("LP" or "the bible") as "not so much an attraction in
itself...", in the rain. Cold rain at that. May as well have been in
Ireland, at least there I would have a warm bed and a mammy ready with
a roast chicken sandwich and a glass of the latest super value red
wine if the month.

As it was I was alone in coban, slightly damp LP in hand, trying to
find hostel chipi chipi (closed down), followed by hostel jam bamboo
(doesn't exist) before hotel la Paz proved the bible can be right at
least 33% of the time.

I settled into my private room and tried to convince myself that the
mcdonalds I'd spotted on the drive in was a bad idea. It's amazing how
a seemingly intelligent person with all sorts of letters after his
name can have a debate like this with himself and still have no
conclusion after half an hour.

Only thing to do was to go for a wander with the bible and some
quetzals and try sort out a plan for the week. The town itself was
dark, wet and dirty. I was tired and grumpy. We agreed that I'd do my
business as quickly as possible then I'd leave it alone to get on with
being "not so much an attraction"...

Target one: Internet cafe. God forbid I go more than 24 hours without
reading the Irish times. Target two: pollo campero, a guatemalan kfc
which I justified as being a compromise between mcdonalds and
Guatemalan cuisine. It is Guatemalan owned after all. Target three:
bed. Easy.

That was yesterday.

I'm now sitting in a thatched hut beside a fast flowing river,
cappucino in hand, cinnamon roll in belly, listening to the white
noise of Israelis garbling in Hebrew and watching the hens cluck their
way around the garden. It's overcast but not raining, warm and not
cold but at the same time it's cold but not warm. Is there a word for
that temperature? Answers on a postcard please to al c/o el retiro.

The bus here was by definition a chicken bus as there was indeed a
live chicken in a plastic bag one row in front of me. The chicken was
joined by three adults and five kids all in the same row. The bus made
frequent stops to squeeze more people on and to fix the cling film
that passed as a window by the passenger seat. I had the pleasure of
being warmed by a genial hombre gordo to my left and the crotch of a
thinly moustached chico to my right. At one stage I also had a tamale
carrying woman by my feet and another leaning in front of me whose
odour was a skillful mix of a few weeks worth of sweat and fresh
coriander. With companions like these the need for heating was
eliminated.

This is how I justified spending €1.50 on a cinnamon roll and a
coffee. Sometimes I deserve it, right? The plan for today us to
perhaps lie on a hammock, maybe gave a poke online, chill out if you
will. Tomorrow I'm doing a tour of the caves and water pools. That's
the reason I put myself through all those buses. It had better be good!

Until next time....