Stuart's Travel

My final day in the Pacific Ocean was spent mostly hiding from it. The clocks went forward and the only ship activity I wanted to join was at 9am so I headed to the theatre with just four hours sleep, found out that we’re getting just three hours in Cartagena once you allow for rush […]

Guatemala and Nicaragua were outdone by Costa Rica in one aspect. In a tourist town, where nationals of the country holiday, easy access to amenities, likely low unemployment, regular wealthy visitors, everybody lives behind bars. Every single house had bars on the windows, bars on the doors, bars on the patio, bars on the porch. […]

Costa Rica is pretty. That was obvious the moment I stepped off the ship, looked across the bay, saw the clouds on the mountains. That’s a landscape. The ship was scheduled to arrive at 8am but as we left Nicaragua the captain had announced he expected to arrive at 7am. I had a lie-in, only […]

Nicaragua has fewer volcanoes than Guatemala but more of them are active and one of those went pop yesterday. I found this from the guide on the bus, which took us through far more interesting sights than yesterday’s bus. The tour guide kept interrupting himself to look at it through the window, tell us, “That […]

Back at the meeting point, a jade museum, I had a chance to chat with the lady from Bradford. She taught English before moving to Mexico to become a Governess for a former president of Mexico, then moved to Guatemala when she got married. She’s very interested in Mayan history and culture, told me I […]

Coffee, disembarkation, bus. Five minutes later the faint outline of a volcano appears through the dust in the air. An hour after leaving the port we’re still driving towards it. There are several volcanoes visible, out of 38 in Guatemala, four of which are active. This is one of them. Last year it destroyed a […]

Santa Cruz and La Crucesita are both Mexican resort towns, but targeting Mexican holidaymakers not American ones. You can tell the difference: It’s all far more relaxed, the food is better and there aren’t pharmacies every 20 yards selling generics to people living with a broken healthcare system. They also exposed the hidden third side […]

For the third morning in a row I was woken by my alarm, one way to force my body into a new timezone. The ship was still as sea so I had coffee, read my book. 40 minutes later I popped out to check, found us tied to a pier, gangway open. By 8.30 I […]

I chose a good day for a lie-in. Only three things on today’s sea day itinerary that I wanted to do and two of those were talks about ports we’d be visiting. In an interesting twist from the previous cruise we’re docking at a town in Costa Rica rather than the commercial port near it. […]

Back on the ship I stood on the aft deck a while, watching boats enter and leave the harbour, birds sitting watching them too. I found coffee, retrieved my camera and book from my cabin and went to the deck below the aft deck, a secluded balcony, shade and solitude. I read little, my camera […]