During my trip I have had plenty of good experiences and days but I think that I chose a really bad time to go visiting. From the very first country of my tour being Holland, I think that with only a couple of exceptions I have been rained on in every single country I have visited and I have lost count of the amount of days that it has prevented or at lest very hampered a days activities.
For this reason alone, I think that it is worth picking the right time of year to visit a place, and even if the high season costs a little more the fact that you can actually leave your hotel or hostel and go out and about sight seing makes all the difference and should not be lightly dismissed.
I am also thinking that package holidays with an organised tour guide is also not as bad as I first thought, as they will not only have all the information but will have things arranged and ready to go the second you arrive in a place, whereas on my trip often I have missed many of the areas big attractions through either ignorance or the inability to get anyone nearby to understand what I want or how to get it.
For much the same reason hostels and cheap hotels are not always the best route, even for trips on a shoestring, as I have lost count of the times I have been speaking to people in hostels and when I mention that I have gone somewhere they say "Oh and did you visit ..." or "What did you think of ..." only for me to shrug and admit that I did not have the opportunity to see it.
If you can't speak the language of the locals then plenty of research and organising excursions is often better than arriving at a hostel and hoping that you can find lots of activities and find how to get there as well. For this tour guides can be great, as they often not only tell you what you can do, but how to get in contact with the people there in order to do it in advance, and often how much you can expect to pay in order to budget accordingly.
However all things considered, it is not entirely my piss poor planning that has meant I have been rained on as heavily as I have, as according to other tourists and hostel owners the Central and South American region is currently experiencing its worst ever prolonged period of torrential rain since records began. And not only this, but I am also experiencing extremely bad luck, as I keep arriving in places that have had days of sunshine before I arrive but as soon as I turn up the have a week long downpour.
Judging from the conversations with other backpackers and the hostel owners much of Central America has had floods, bridges collapsed, mud slides and road closures from the extended rainy season, that by all rights should have finished in early November, so this being the last day of November it should have stopped weeks ago.
Global warming! Well I am no scientist, but the worse ever rainy season in terms of both daily rainfall and duration from start to finish ( which of course it hasn't done yet ) and everywhere I go the locals say that it is getting harder and harder to predict with any certainty the weather these last few years, to my mind at least all point that something is going wrong and I am pretty sure that Global warming isn't helping the situation.
Last week David City experienced an earth quake measuring over 6.2, which is pretty strong let me tell you, and he locals are only just beginning to get over that, but many are blaming that for the increased duration of the rains.
No comments:
Post a Comment