Graham Williams & Louise Jones Travel Blog This is our journal logging our trip through Central and Latin America from July 2005 to the present date. We update it and add new pictures every two to three weeks. At the moment Will is travelling in South Africa, while Lou is living in Buenos Aires.For more background reading on our travels go to - http://journals.worldnomads.com/will/

Over the last couple of weeks we have traveled through Nicaragua and have now arrived in Costa Rica. Nicaragua was a great country to travel in, some really outstanding and accessible sights and lovely towns. It was also very relaxed, hardly a pump action shotgun in sight, quite a contrast to El Salvador and Guatemala. After Leon we traveled up into the coffee growing hills and visited a plantation, where the coffee harvest was under way. Most of these farms were set up by German immigrants in the 19th Century, and are still owned by the same families. The one we went to had created a German village which you could stay in, called the The Black Forest. We then passed quickly through Managua to Granada, a lovely colonial town where we spent a week. It is on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, the tenth largest lake in the world and is surrounded by volcanoes, a couple of which we went to top of. Volcan Mombacho which is permanently covered in cloud, has evolved a dripping tropical cloud forest around its crater. At Volcan Masaya which is active you could look directly into the crater through clouds of sulfurous steam. The Spanish thought it was the entrance to hell, so they erected a cross on its lip. We also swam in lake formed by a caldera, the water warmed by the hot springs that feed into it. From Granada went to the Pacific coast for a couple of days at the beach at San Juan del Sur. This area has been discovered by Americans who are buying up land and building sea view holiday homes as fast as they can find the people to put them up. A few years ago their government was spending billons feeding a civil war here; now theyre falling over themselves to invest their money, but Americans never understand irony. We crossed over to the island of Ometepe which is in Lake Nicaragua for a few days. The weather was bad while we were there so we moved south, across the border to Liberia in Costa Rica. Our next move will be back to the Pacific coast for some more beach.