Central America

Following our reflections on 200 days of travel, here are the tops and flops of our last 100 days on the road:

We met Frank walking through the jungle on Little Corn Island. For $1.50, he offered to climb up the tree and cut two coconuts open with his machete for us. You don’t turn down coconuts, and you sure don’t turn down a man with a machete in a jungle.

Antigua’s Central Park is home to a quite unusual fountain – four mermaids on each side of the fountain are spraying streams of water out of their breasts. The fountain, ‘Fuente de las Sirenas’ in Spanish, was built by Diego de Porres in 1738, who took his inspiration for the fountain from the Neptune Fountain in Bologna, Italy.

Antigua, the former capital of Guatemala, has frequently been hit by earthquakes, but especially the earthquake in 1773 left severe damages, and up to today, dozens of ruins of churches and convents can be seen throughout the city.

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 …

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.