New Year derring-do

Tomorrow we’ll sing auld lang Syne, which isn’t an obvious time to go trail riding around Chichester, but there you go. It could’ve been different, but family got fraught, enough for me to head for the hills.

Cristo de la Misericordia

The weekend started with everyone piling onto a crowded bus to Rivas. We had just finished teaching at the centre Friday afternoon and ran to catch the last bus. After a two hour standing journey over increasingly bumpy roads, we arrived in San Juan del Sur; a focus of tourism in Nicaragua, famous for its beach,…

The dancing in Masaya

Last Sunday I went to a city called Masaya with another volunteer, a friend from the same house. We were looking for ceramics classes because Masaya is famous for its pottery, but when we arrived we discovered nearly all the schools were in a nearby town called San Juan de Oriente. After exploring the locally…

Getting there

The plan was to fly to India, buy a new Enfield, and ride it back, holding tea parties along the way. But that changed when Rob, the dad of one of Theo’s mates, invited me to the Adventure Travel Film Festival – where I was smitten by motocross. Now an old Suzuki scrambler, that just qualifies as…

Noise and personal space

Can an entire country be quiet? I think it can certainly be quieter than another. After having been in Nicaragua for about a month, I think England is a pretty quiet country. I’ve mentioned how I think the language you speak profoundly influences the way you think and act, so on a larger scale surely the…

Teaching in La Sabaneta

I’m volunteering at a learning centre in a southern district of Granada called La Sabaneta. Away from the cheerfully painted colonial centre of the city, here the roads turn to dirt tracks and skinny horses roam about eating the grass that grows from cracks in the stone. The walk to the centre is about twenty…