Archive for the ‘My life & thoughts’ Category
Our Central America tour (9): Granada and environs
February 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It was Sunday but for us it was no day of rest as we spent all day in and around the city of Grenada accompanied by local guide Gustavo as well as Eduardo. Granada – nicknamed the Great Sultan after its Moorish counterpart in Spain – is the oldest colonial city in Nicaragua, having been […]
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Our Central America tour (8): Lago de Nicaragua
February 2nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Today (Saturday) we began and ended the programme on or around islands on Lago de Nicaragua. Overnight on Isla de Ometepe, we had shared our chalet with two tiny gekos and two large spiders which added some local flavour and then, in the morning, none of the chalets had hot water so it was an […]
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Our Central America tour (7): Isla de Ometepe
February 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Today (Friday), we were leaving Costa Rica and entering our second country of the tour Nicaragua, so essentially it was a travelling day. We left the hotel towards 8 am, took the Pan American Highway north, and reached the Costa Rican border an hour later. Crossing any Central American border can be problematic, even for […]
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Our Central America tour (5): monkeys and fumaroles
January 31st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
During the night of Wednesday/Thursday, it crashed with rain so that, in the morning, effectively the Arenal volcano had disappeared inside a low cloud base. Clearly we had been very fortunate with the weather yesterday. At 8 am, we left the Arenal Paraiso Hotel after two nights stay to head further north-east, starting by skirting […]
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Our Central America tour (4): another sloth, another volcano – and a zip wire!
January 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
On Wednesday, the group was asked to congregate in the hotel car park at 8.30 am, but we did not leave immediately because someone spotted a sloth in a nearby tree in the hotel grounds. You might think that, see one sloth and you’ve seen them all, but this was different from that of yesterday. […]
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Our Central America tour (3): first volcano and coffee plantation
January 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
On yet another cold and wet morning (appropriately enough a Monday) in this miserable British winter, Roger and Vee set the alarm for 6 am to commence their Central American tour. It took two American Airlines flights to reach the starting point in Costa Rica: one of nine and half hours from London to Dallas/Fort […]
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Our Central America tour (1): introduction
January 27th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
In our life-long quest to see as much of the world as possible, our latest holiday is in Central America, having already visited North America many times (most recently in 2013) and South America (in 2001). As this is a region with which we are totally unfamiliar, before setting off we struggled to recall which […]
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How to travel wisely
January 26th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I love travelling to other countries because I learn so much about other places and cultures. But there is an art to getting the most out of a trip and avoiding problems in new locations. So years ago I wrote a piece for the Life Skills section of my web site called “How To Travel […]
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The London street called Crutched Friars
January 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have lived in London now for over 40 years and one of the many reasons I love the city is because it is so old and so saturated in history. This week I visited a street in Central London that I have never even heard of before, the wonderfully named Crutched Friars. The explanation […]
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Beware the holiday destination of the Darlingtons
January 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The joke among our family and friends is that, when we choose to visit a particular part of the world for our holiday, something dramatic often happens there. I suppose it started when we made our first visit to what was then Czechoslovakia in 1988. The following year the country overthrew Communism in its ‘velvet […]
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