Central America 2016

We retrieved our rental car from the airport in the morning and started our journey towards Sahara, a bit slower than I thought we would. Before the sunset we had reached the city of Ouarzazate, having visited an ancient city of Ait Ben Haddou first. The city is an UNESCO world heritage site.

In addition to the cold weather in the evenings the wind is also very strong in here, especially on the top of the mountain at Ait Ben Haddou. And it causes sand storms..

Naturally I just couldn't drive the easy way to the city, but had to take a shortcut through the desert. More challenging roads, just like in Georgia..

Arrived to Morocco in the evening, fell asleep and slept for some 12 hours.. I think I have never been so tired than I was on the last flight. Just entered the aircraft, dug my pillow out from my bag and fell asleep, waking up only just before landing to Marrakech a couple of hours later. :)

It's surprisingly cold in here at night, and even now in the morning it's only 8C. The daytime temperature should climb to some 20-25C though, and it seems to be sunny.

Damn, I didn't remember the downside of these countries.. Already almost missing the relative honesty of Central American taxi drivers. I took a taxi from the airport, and had to haggle the price down from 150 to 50 dinars, a slight 3x difference.. And when we reached the city the asking price was again 70 and a new bargaining session had to be started. :P

Urgh.. I'm sleeeeepy. The long flight was just as miserable as I thought it would be, wasn't able to sleep properly on the plane. I guess I slept an hour or so and that's it. The only good thing was that our gambling was successful again, we had an empty seat in between us which made the flight a bit more comfortable.

Timo got kind of lucky too. He was supposed to fly home via Oslo, but SAS canceled the flight and rebooked him on direct KLM flight to Helsinki. Shortens the trip to home a bit.

We got separated as I'm flying to a non-Schengen destination and Timo inside Schengen area, so I'm spending time in Aspire lounge and waiting for my flight to Marrakech. Booked an exit row window seat on the next flight and committed a minor crime stealing United's disposable pillow and blanket from the previous flight. They will come into good use on the next one, will fall asleep the moment I sit down in the plane..

Morning taxi to the airport, a flight to Houston and we are now sipping gin&tonic with snacks @ KLM crown lounge. We have some three hours to the next boarding, so enough time to stretch legs a bit and prepare for the long and miserable flight to Europe..

This time Houston airport was basically empty, not a trace left of the hours long queues which we had last time.

Last day in San Salvador and we once again had no plans, so we visited swimming pools a bit outside the city. They had some nice pools built under natural waterfalls, with cold water falling from the mountains. That's it pretty much for this day, tomorrow we will depart towards Houston early in the morning.

We have been calculating and sharing our costs during the trip using Splitwise application, and I took some statistics out of the application. This is how the costs per person for this three weeks trip look like, divided by type:

Sports (diving etc): 272.73 EUR
Hostels: 244.41 EUR
Restaurants: 127.90 EUR
Bus/ferry: 91,75 EUR
Beer: 76.70 EUR
Taxi: 48.75 EUR
Other: 46.09 EUR
Groceries: 19.05 EUR

927.38 EUR / person for three weeks, not bad at all. That does not include totally everything though, but probably some 80-90% of the costs are noted on Splitwise and thus on this calculation.

We didn't have a chance to swim in the Pacific Ocean on this trip yet, so we had to fix it and visit Playa La Libertad town on the coastline. The coast is very famous among surfers, but seems like today was not a perfect day for that and we didn't bother trying either.. Just walked around the town a bit burning our skin, had a quick swim in the sea and returned back to San Salvador.

Yesterday we spotted a bowling center near our hostel, so had to go play for an hour or so today in the evening. :)

This day was pretty much spent at the airport. We went to the aeroclub at lunch time and met up with Eduardo, chatting and having our (very slowly served) lunch. Unfortunately Eduardo had to leave early due to family reasons, so the actual flying machines of today were downgraded a bit from his magnificent historical toys.

We took a flight on a six-seat Piper PA-32 Cherokee Six, which a local parachutist girl had just bought as her first aircraft, even if she did not even have the license to fly yet.. We had an ex-army pilot and instructor as the captain, and obviously he quickly noticed that I know how the thing works and let me fly the rest of the trip on the Piper. Well, one more aircraft type flown for me, and one more country. :)

We also met the helicopter guy, Rogelio at the airclub. He actually had found the boat we were searching for two weeks ago on the second searching run, and seems like it was kind of an important find. He had an aerial picture of the boat on the sea as his phone background photo, whatsapp profile photo and so on.. Well, he did good work out there. Everyone on the boat had been scared but safe, and he found the boat just a bit more far out than where we were searching for it.

The old (err, just more experienced as they said) guys were also telling us stories of the wartime in El Salvador. The civil war here ended in 1992, and all through the 12 year war Rogelio was flying helicopter, replacing power line poles blown up by the guerillas. He used to call to Eduardo "hey, let's go plant some poles, skip your work". :)

Today was a day in San Salvador without any previously set plans, so we just walked around the city. Obtained local SIM cards for some $3, tried to visit the aircraft hangar -shaped church El Rosario (which was closed), tried to visit the zoo (which was closed) and so on.

It is really hot in San Salvador now, 31-32C with direct sunshine, and forecast says 35C for the rest of the week. I think we will be heading to the beach for our remaining days in the country, and spending Thursday and Friday somewhere on the Pacific coastline. Tomorrow meeting again with Eduardo at Ilopango airfield for some aviation fun. :)

Sometimes we just have to do things the difficult way. There would have been a tourist shuttle bus from Copan Ruinas to San Salvador for $40 per person. We however felt that it was too highly overpriced, and choose to do the trip a different way.

In the morning we started with a 06:45 bus to Santa Rosa de Copan for 100 lempiras each, got lost there a bit and finally found the next bus to Ocotepeque close to El Salvador border for another 90 lempiras. 10 lempiras more and we were at the border by a minibus, crossed it by walking and took a long and sweaty $2.5 bus to San Salvador where we arrived around 17:00 for the combined price of mere $11 for the entire trip. Not bad at all. $5 taxi for the rest of the trip, and we had arrived to Hostel Cumbres del Volcan (the same one as last time).

Seems like we were a bit of an oddity on the local bus, the highschool kids were giggling and staring at us. :)

By the way, now I regret calling Timo "Los Baños Rapidos" for a couple of days.. Guess who had also buy antibiotics in a pharmacy in Santa Rosa.. Well, they seem to help fast. Guess my chicken burrito yesterday was not so well cooked, it tasted a bit raw.

Obviously we are still out of water, have been the entire day. The hostel staff took me and some other people on a pickup truck to have shower in another hostel, so at least I got the mineral water salts washed out before our long travel towards San Salvador tomorrow..