Phase One Complete

So this is my weapon. This is the bike that I bought to ride to Nicaragua. Shes a beast, weve already done a few epic adventures. The grandest of which would include a trip to a place called Motericco, on the pacific ocean some 150km south of here. And we (a few other volunteers and I) rode there. A pretty wicked time. Above: One of many fishing boats waiting to head out off of the beach in between waves. Waves were a little smaller in the morning, and it was the only time they could forseeably go out.. around 11am the waves got huge.. bigger than Ive ever seen, anywhere. What a crazy adventure to go swimming in them.. they beat the crap out of the waves at Tofino.

Above: The shack we lived out of for four days. For free. So sunny and warm.
This was similar to a shack we were to stay in the night before we got to Monterrico, in a place called Puerto San Jose´. We arrived into town just as the sun was setting, and on our way in we met a guy on a bike who said he had a friend with a cheap hotel on the beach. We followed him, and soon we were pushing our pack-laden bikes though a sandy beach, with the pacific ocean right infront of us. In front of us aswell were some of these shacks, and he told us that hed only charge us Q30 a person (CDN$6). This is fairly expensive as far as Guatemalan prices go, for a shack on the beach.. we decided that if we were going to sleep on the beach, we wouldnt be paying for it. So we walked away.. then noticing the huge half empty drinking stalls that surrounded the place we were thinking of sleeping in. The time was around 7pm, plenty of time for them to fill up.. As we were walking off the beach, wondering where we were going to go to maybe find a hotel, we were approached by a man who immidiately started speaking french to one of the volunteers. The particular volunteer (named Matt) was from Montreal, so they picked up a happening conversation.
It turned out that the particular town we were in, at that particular day of the year (but not yet quite the particular hour), was one of the more dangerous places we could have put ourselves in, in Guatemala anyways. There were huge parties lined up to happen that night around were we were thinking of sleeping, and people had travelled from all around central america to come to this town for the parties. The troublesome part was that none of them were white (which meant that we appeared like walking sacks of money to most, with bikes). The man who spoke french turned out to have a friend who lived close by, and we were quickly ushered away from the growing crowds. We ended up sleeping in a tent with a rooster directly behind us, in the walled-in yard of the friend of the man who came and rescued us.

Above: A very large pelican, that was pretty pissed off.. was blocking traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian.

So a recap of the timeline of our trip: Wensday morning of April 12th we left on bike, heading south from Itzapa and Antigua, passing through Esquintla. We took a longer route as to avoid the large highway heading to the coast, and after nine hours of travelling (we had several long and drawn out breaks), and 120km, we arrived at San Jose´. The next morning we rode the 30-40 km East to Monterrico. We stayed the entire time on the beach, leaving only to buy food, and spending most of the day in the very warm ocean. We left and rode back on the following Sunday, via the very-long-and-incredibly-hot open highway, about 130km or so.

Economy boat storage.