Central America

We ended our time in Costa Rica with an action-packed couple of days in La Fortuna where we hiked to a volcano and a waterfall and admired the countless hummingbirds!

Manuel Antonio is Costa Rica’s most popular National Park – even though it is the smallest one in the country! Often listed as one of the most beautiful National Parks …

Seeing a turtle arribada, the mass nesting phenomenon of the olive ridley sea turtles, in Ostional, a small beach in Costa Rica, was an unforgettable experience!

We were greeted by ‘tropical depression’ Matthew within 12 hours of our arrival to San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, a small island off the coast of Belize. This was our first severe storm since setting off on our trip.

An amazing year is coming to an end – our first as full-time travelers! Rather than rattle off a list of everywhere we’ve been, check out our year in pictures, from the pre-trip ‘planning’ phase to our current location of Honduras.

One of the things we were most excited about for Costa Rica was the wildlife roaming freely through the forests. Check out this adorable little spider monkey in Manuel Antonio! So cute!

It is amazing how much life you can squeeze into 100 days. It seems like forever ago that we wrote our first 100 days on the road post from Mazunte, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Between then and where we are now, in San Salvador, we have visited four countries, explored caves with Mayan skeletons, climbed volcanoes, swam with sharks and sting rays in the Caribbean, lived for a month in a beach front apartment in Playa del Carmen, had two fairly major illnesses, almost got robbed, traveled to places almost completely off the beaten path, met loads of people, worked full time, even took on extra work, blogged more, and we are nearly finished with a globetrottergirls.com website redesign.

Check out these colorful chicks! An Easter custom in the Middle East and Asia, we found baskets filled with multi-colored chicks here in Copan, Honduras in celebration of Christmas.

On 2 November or Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), there are big kite festivals all over Guatemala. We were lucky to take part in a kite festival in Chichicastenango where the kids are kite crazy.

Crossing from Guatemala into Honduras, the first thing we noticed is that we had left the Mayan culture behind. Immediately gone were the colorful indigenous trajes. The Honduran women dress fairly similar to women in the U.S. or Europe. Many of the men, however, wear a stereotypical cowboy outfit – leather cowboy boots, jeans, a fancy leather belt, button down shirt and of course the indispensable cowboy hat.