Ramble, Roam & Feast

Isolating in Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico April – July 2020   Before leaving San Miguel de Allende, I make a list of cities not too many hours away and compare prices for groceries, eating out and accommodation. I tabulate the differences in internet speed, safety (not yet completely accepting that Mexico is as safe as […]

Guanajuato & The Magic of San Miguel de Allende Mexico, February 2020   By no reasonable measure can we truly be called tourists – we don’t stay in hotels, we don’t rent cars, we barely buy curios and with very few exceptions, we walk wide circles around tourist attractions. No, ours is more of an […]

The 4th of July and Falling in Love with The American Man July 2020   American Independence Day. I’ve wanted to write about my falling in love with the American Man (and the USA by extension) since our little 4th of July party in the States, but I have never quite gotten to it. In […]

Landing in Mexico & Guadalajara February 2020   One of the very best things about travelling is the surprise of arriving in a new place. Actually, it is more than surprise, it is as if there’s an anchor being set tying that time to future nostalgias and melancholies, a novel implosion of time. Mexico is […]

Granada, Nicaragua   From the very minute we set foot on the paved roads of Granada, we were in love. I have always had the impression that every place has an emotional thumbprint, that every town or city has a district feeling (the only place I have ever been to that had been difficult to […]

Nicaraguan Chocolate (and the cake)   I may never have known what chocolate really is, if we never went to Granada or if I never bopped into the chocolate museum on the main road. As a rule, we avoided places that advertised their prices in U$D rather than in Cordobas (in a – possibly misguided […]

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua November 2019 Even though I knew that it was probably silly to jump straight from one coastal tourist trap to the next, I loved the look of San Juan del Sur with its hills and promises of breezes. The little pueblo has the added advantage of being close to the […]

The Border Crossing (between Costa Rica & Nicaragua) February 2020 By the second time we take the bus between San José and the border, we feel like old hands, comfortably slotting into the melee of border crossers that stream down Central America on various adventures. One could easily feel oneself a late 1800’s explorer looking […]

Xmas Day in Nicaragua 2019   If I am unable to spend Xmas in the warm and hairy bosom of my family, I have a long-standing personal tradition of spending Xmas Day in the most washed out and depressing manner conceivable. It probably started years ago in a way that was unwanted and unavoidable and […]

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica and Where It All Began September 2019   Whereas Japan made me feel raunchy and India made me feel brave (maybe even reckless), Costa Rica made me feel drunk. Not stupid, inviting-strangers-home drunk, just happy-tipsy-friendly drunk. Salsa and Latin American pop greeted us on the way from the airport and never […]

Cheesecake on the Caribbean Coast (Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica)   It took me forever to figure out exactly how to approach making a cheesecake. For some reason, it had been the thing that we were craving most (in my case probably because of watching too many cooking videos on the bus). It was obvious quite […]

A Night in La Zona Roja (San José, Costa Rica) November 2019   It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that booking the almost-cheapest lodgings closest to the bus terminals in San José (the Mepe line to the Caribbean coast and Transportes Deldu line to Peñas Blancas on the Nicaraguan border) was a bad plan. […]