Baggot’s on Tour 2025

We arrive in Leon, another pretty typical Central American colonial style city.  Initial impressions are of a poorer city as compared to those in El Salvador, with obvious scars of recent troubles, the most recent in 2018. The countries seem to be getting poorer as we travel down through Central America, and OMG it’s certainly getting hotter. We all slept in starfish positions last night with nothing but swimmers / bikinis on, and with a fan on each of us (no AC available), and it was the hottest night of our lives (oh actually, the tent was a close tie!). Once again, we are amazingly proud of how the boys are coping with all of this, as despite the massive excitements, there are many challenging situations and I definitely struggle with the heat the most.  We spend a few days exploring the city, including a walking tour and also a visit to a local waterpark (slight safety issues here and many live interests for the boys but we didn’t die and the boys weren’t quite held t...

An early morning start to get a boat across to Nicaragua to avoid Honduras, as us Brits are not easily allowed to visit without a separate VISA. A very exciting start to the boat trip as we have to wade out a good 400m away from land through muddy waters up to the boys mid thighs (no moans at all 😂). We are all huddled onto a little boat packed full of people, but thank goodness the crossing across is very gentle, with a lovely view of many volcanoes, small islands and three countries…El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.  After a few hours, we arrive at the Nicaraguan ‘border’, and we honestly feel like refugees arriving on a deserted beach! There are no signs of border control, apart from a small wooden table with ‘dodgy’ looking characters sitting behind it 😳. The dodgies hand us a form which we nervously complete, and then the dodgy-doods indicate that they want us to open our backpacks which they then proceed to rummage through! How funny border crossings are as you feel comp...

A very long, hot bus ride with multiple stops from Santa Ana via the capital San Salvador. The final leg of the journey included a slight hiccup when we realised we’d missed the last bus to our beach ‘resort’ 😳.  After a few moments of panic  (standing by a big main road with people burning plastic bottles next to where we were standing), we decided to hitch-hike and within a couple minutes,  a lovely family had scooped up a bewildered looking Baggot family from the side of the road and put us in their pick-up truck to take us to our accommodation half an hour away! The kindness of people has frequently amazed us on this journey, and I will definitely remember this. This kindness is even more impressive given the absolute poverty that many people in Central America live with and the boys have certainly witnessed this a lot on our trip. So many of the people we have seen are living in wooden shacks, and lying on the dusty ground with only an open fire to co...