theboonedoggle

After Oaxaca, we grabbed seats on an overnight bus to San Cristobal de las Casas. As we mentioned previously, the bus system in Mexico is highly functional, with many brand new buses outfitted with private lights, deep-recline seats, and televisions for hours and hours of Spanish-dubbed blockbusters. For these western luxuries one must of course pay a western price, with fares similar to those applied to transit on your typical greyhound bus. Before departing our luggage we dutifully inspected and an officer with a video camera filmed every last passenger (Mexican overnight buses, especially in the south, have a long, rich history of being hijacked along remote stretches of highway, for purpose of robbery and kidnapping. Very exciting.). Our bus arrived in San Cristobal at 6am, which was actually nice, as it gave us an hour or two to wander this quaint mountain hamlet in solitude before waking up guesthouse staffers for a room. We skipped the first two we came across, as they were

Ok, yeah, so we took off again. To make a short story shorter, we decided that we can look for the 'next thing' while we check out just a few more countries. Just a few more, we promise. With only February and March to work with, we decided to keep our trip a bit more local this time. So, in the next seven weeks we will do our very best to squeeze the very most out of Central America. As we have already been to Costa Rica and Nicaragua, we will focus our efforts this time on Mexico (south of the capital), Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. We kicked off our little adventure with a short road trip to San Diego, stopping along the way to visit friends, swapping stories for meals and a beer or two. After seven years, I finally got to meet up with my old buddy Troy, who had not yet met Tatyana. We made a long weekend of football and trips to local watering holes... tons of fun. Troy was good enough to watch our car for us so we could cash in some miles and jump a flight t

It has now been 2 months since we returned from our trip around Africa and Asia. During this trip we met many amazing people who are doing wonderful things for their communities. One of these was Mr. B.P. Lama, a Tibetan refugee and an English school teacher at Shree Lok Priya School in Chame, Nepal. Chame is located in the Annapurna mountain range, 8,760 feet above sea level and it is reached by a strenuous 5 day trek from the nearest road. We met Mr. B.P. Lama and his students on our way up to Chame and were invited to visit their school. The school was a small gray brick building with 5 tiny classrooms and a tiny library. Chame is a major village along the Annapurna Circuit and this school supports kids from smaller villages in the area. Some of these children have to leave their homes and work at a guesthouse at night in exchange for lodging while they attend school. Right now the school has 18 such “orphan” students, aged 9 to 14 and attending grades 2 through 8. We met some of th