Alice and Jonathan
Love circle

Majorie and Alice working hard!
Tova and Jordan

The puppies (which will be sadly put down soon!)
Justo, Tova's 12 year old boyfriend
The ducks with the fros

At "Matilda's" the local "bar" .... basically, its just Matilda's living room
Majorie and Tova
Alice and Tova doing the Hatchery shift with Rocky the dog

Making Lunch
In Parasmina, 3 hours walking distance from the Turtle Project
Just chillin before shift

The Hatchery

Our dinning area
Boat ride to the Turtle Project

Tova Suntanning

Turtles!

Hey everyone,

We come home this Saturday! It is so hard to believe that our eight month journey is finally coming to an end, but we are so excited to see everyone at home and to be back in Toronto.

We have spent the last two weeks volunteering for a project located on the Carribean coast of Costa Rica that saves endangered turtles. The project is located in the middle of nowhere, on a small island where less than thirty other locals live. We had to take a bus three hours out of San Jose (and had to stand the entire time) and then a 20 minute car ride, followed by another 20 minutes by boat just to get there!

The project consists of a few cabins with bunk beds, a kitchen and several outdoor communal areas. There is no electricity and no hot water. Everyone in the project works patrolling the beaches to search for turtle eggs so we can bring them to the "hatchery" (a safe area where they are protected from poachers until they hatch). Also, we guard the "hatchery" all day and night to make sure that poachers don't steal the eggs and to help the baby turtles to the ocean when they hatch. There is a big problem on the island because many locals, especaially those who don't even live on the island, steal the eggs to eat or sell. We actually had a few incidents with poachers while we were at the project, some even turning vilent!

We also help around the project to build, repair, cook and clean. It really is a little community. There are no motorized vehicles on the island, so we often had to carry things like huge bags of sand or rocks from one area of the island to another by hand, which was exhausting. One day several of us volunteers decided to walk to the nearest town for burgers and ice cream (we were desperate!). It took three hours to walk there in the blazing sun and three hours back in the pitch back... but totally worth it! And we actually had to cross the river by foot because the town is on the next island!

We were pretty much given rice and beans three times a day to eat, with some vegetable and perhaps a bit of meat every few days. And we only drank water. Because we were working so hard and the portions were small, we were really hungry all the time. Fortunatley, there was an "bar" on the island. It was just a woman´s house down the road, but she had transformed it into a bar for the volunteers from the project and the locals to hang out at. She had coke, beer, chips and snacks, which were heaven. We went there a lot to hang out with her four children, who were so cute and a lot of fun to play with.

When we weren't working we chatted with the other volunteers, who were mostly young travellers like ourselves, read in the hammocks or hung out on the beach. Rainy days were awful because there was nothing to do and EVERYTHING got absolutely soaked, but we were lucky to have mostly sunny days.

Probably the most amazing part was actually watching the turlte lay her eggs. These turltes are as big as us and they lay about a 100 eggs at a time. They actually kind of look like dinosaurs... Also, they dig these elaborate holes in which to hide the eggs and then cover it up carefully after. And you can really get close and watch the turtle lay the eggs. It was so amazing. We also made a lot of really good friends who we were sad to leave.

Now we are hanging out in San Jose for one day. Tomorrow we fly to Miami where we will spend the night in the airport and then fly to Toronto the next afternoon. We are looking forward to seeing you all when we get back.

love

Alice and Tova

In San Jose

So, we just arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica. Tomorrow morning we are going to take a three hour bus to the Carribean coast, where we will be working with the project to save the turtles for two weeks. We return home April 29th.

Just minutes after we posted our last blog entry in Havana, we met this guy named Sam. He is from London, England and just happened to be using the internet at the same time as us. We started talking and decided to explore the city together, as he was by himself for the day. However, our first stop was the bank, as Tova and I had almost no money left. MAJOR CRISIS: no banks in Havana accept debit cards without a Visa or Mastercard symbol (which includes BOTH of our debit cards) and our credit cards were both maxed out for the month because we had used them to pay for the plane tickets to Cuba and Costa Rica! We were freaking out, running around the city from bank to bank, trying to figure out how we cuold get money. Plus it was a riday, and no banks in Havana are open Saturday or Sunday. We tried calling our parents, but the line to Canada wasn't working for several hours (we didn't even know this was possible). Finally, after several hours (with poor Sam sticking by our side) we sorted everything out and were able to enjoy the rest of the day.

We walked aroud the ols part of the city and found the Rum Museum. We went on thr tour, which was led by this guy named Piero, who was really fun. Also, there were these three guys from Colombia on the tour who asked Tova and I to take all these photos with them by the rum bottles to show their friends at home, but they didn't even know us and we had nothing to do with the museum and aren't even Cuban! It was pretty funny. Piero, the tour guide ended up going for drinks with Tova, Sam and I after the tour. He was such an interesting guy and was so open about the Communist regime and how he feels about it. He is dying to get out and even had a boat ready a few years ago to escape in. Piero ended up inviting Tova and I to his house for dinner. Tova and I actually ended preparing the dinner and we ate with his family. After, we went out to a local Cuban art show in his neighbourhood, and after there was a performace of local young musicians, rappers and singers, which was really amazing. We met a lot of really interesting local artists there. Piero himself is actually an amazing photographer and has an amazing collection of pictures he has taken of the people and places of Havana.

On Saturday we went to the beach with our friend Miguel, who we met at the "Casa de la Musica". It took so long to get there because we took the local Cuban transport. Plus, when we got there, because it was a beach for locals and not for the foreigers who stay at resorts and hotels, the beach was rocky and small, with dirty water, and absoutely packed with people. Still, we had a good time and came back into the city in the evening to meet Sam at the movies. We saw "Flight Plan", which is about a year old! Plus it was an old theatre that is now used as a cinema and the screen was horrible. But it cost about 15 cents Canadian to see the movie! We noticed that Cubans are really noisy during movies, always making noises and yelling at the screen.

On Sunday we met Sam and his Cuban friend, Danieski at the Aquarium. The aquarium itself was so bad: there were anly a few tanks of fish, ad the tanks were tiny and dirty. Plus, most of the fish didn't even have signs saying what type of fish they were! But the dolphin show was really amazing. The funniest part was seeing the dolphins dance and do all their tricks to reggaeton (the music they are obsessed with here... we have already bought several CDs!).

Unfortunately we have to go because the internet cafe is closing. e will try to finish the update soon, but it might be impossible until we are dine with the turtles. Our love to everyone reading this.

Tova and Alice

In Cuba

Hey everyone!

We have been in Havana, Cuba for three days now. The weather is perfect, but we are not sure if our experiences so far could be described as that... interesting is probably a better word....

We got really lucky and were bumped up to first class on our flight to Cuba because we were two of the last people to board, and the airline had overbooked the plane. We were treated like queens: huge leather seats and tons of leg room, plus snacks, drinks, an edible meal (rare on planes!) with china plates, cloth napkins and silverware!

However, once we arrived in Cuba, we were no longer given the royal treatment. We had to buy a special Cuban visa before we entered Cuba, which cost $20US. We bought it in the Ecuador airport from our airline (a Latin American airline no one will have heard of). First, when we arrived in Cuba, we had to go through questioning by the Cuban customs officers so they could stamp the visa and let us enter the country. Tova was immediately rejected because her visa was a fake. However, I was questioned in rapid Spanish about every detail of my life for over fifteen minutes. The officer was suspicious of every answer I gave and was really starting to scare me. Finally, my visa was approved. However, I was soon pulled back into the holding area where Tova was being detained because the officer realized that my visa was fake too! We both had to buy new visas and were finally allowed to enter the country.

We didn't have a place to stay in Havana because the only places we could book over the internet were expensive hotels, so we ended up staying in the house of a friend of the taxi driver who picked us up from the airport. We are staying with a family, but we have our own room and bathroom. We haven't met the father or the son yet, but the mother, Maria, is always around, hanging out gossiping with all the neighbours in tiny, tight clothes and blasting salsa so loud you can hear it down the street. We couldn't believe it when she told us she is a scientist for the Cuban government! But our room is fine. We even have a television. However, we have no way of changing the channel, even though we seem to have a satelite cable selection. Someone else, somehwere else, changes the channels for us (we haven't asked Maira about it yet). We can see this person go to the channel selection screen and see all the options he or she has to choose from, but he or she always chooses cheesy Mexican soap operas (which are hilarious to watch), or horrible movies that we have never heard of dubbed into Spanish.

Our first impressions of Havana were a little surprizing. We could never have imagined how run-down everything is. The streets are lined with huge colonial buildings, but they haven't been repaired in over fifty years, so they are falling apart. All the streets need repair. There are lots of signs promoting the communist regime and Castro, with repeated slogans about Cuban solidarity etc... Also, there are very few restaurants, and almost no shops. The first afternoon, we went out for a walk through the city and met two Cuban girls, Akemi and Yanet. We started talking and ended up going for mojitos together. They gave us a lot of advice about how to do things in Havana like locals so we could save money.

That night we went out to one of the local restaruants the girls had suggested. The first one wouldn't serve us (they said they were "out of food" and were really rude about it), but we eventually found a place. It wasn't a restaurant, but more like someone's kitchen, and we ate out in the street. Our neighbourhood (because we live in a residential area and not where all the fancy hotels are), is not well lit at night and some streets are absolutely pitch black, plus most of the streets (including the one we live on) don't have street signs.

Yesterday we went to the Cuban Art Museum and the Museum of the Cuban Revolution. The first was incredible, both the art itself and the modern, impecably maintained building. The art was extremely nationalistic and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were often featured in the works. The Museum of the Revolution was extremely detailed and interesting, and rather obviously anti-American and anti-Capitalism.

In the evening, we decided to go to Chinatown for dinner. It was so strange to see a Chinatown in Havana, Cuba, but there weren't any Chinese people and they played more reggaeton and salsa in the streets than Chinese music. In the night we went to the "Casa de la Musica" to see a salsa show. The show itself wasn't particularily good, but we met a guy named Miguel, who is a promoter for the place, and we ended up hanging out with him all night. We are going to the beach with him on Saturday, to the beach where all the Cubans, not the tourists, go and we are even going to take the Cuban public transport there (which we have seen on the streets: it is kind of like huge trucks filled with people). We are also going to do some day excursions out of Havana, and might even return to Trinidad, where we went last February.

Alice and Tova

The Middle of the World

The monument situated in the middle of the world

Cuba tomorrow!!!

Hey everyone,

This is just a quick update, the entry below is much more detailed. Yesterday was our first day in Quito. And we..... went to the middle of the earth! Ok, that needs some explaining. Quito is practically on the equator, but if you go about 15 kilometres north or Quito, you can actually stand on the equator. So we took the bus out to the point of the equator. There was a huge monument that showed you where the equator lies and tells you that you are at a latitude of zero, which is pretty cool. We didn't have a compass with us, but I guess if we did it would have been even better. We crossed hemispheres a few times just for fun and then left because there really wasn't that much to do.

Okay, a few funny things about Ecuador. First of all, their currency is the US dollar, they got rid of their own currency about five years ago because they were in such economic crisis. Also, they really aren't so big on local food here. To be honest, we have only eaten Chinese and Shawarma since we got here! Also, everyone (especially men) has a crazy long nail on just one finger. It is really strange, we notice it every time someone is counting out change for us or pointing us in the direction of something. It is weird, and we aren't sure why they have it. I mean, we have a good guess....

We are going to Cuba tomorrow morning. We have no idea what the internet situation is there, so we might not be able to update for a while. We are still trying to arrange some accomodation in Havana for the next week, so if anyone reading this has friends or family in Havana who would be willing to help us out, let us know! We are then flying from Cuba to Costa Rica where we will begin our work with the "La Tortuga Feliz" project for saving the Costa Rican Sea Turtles. We will be there for two weeks. We will almost certainly have no internet there, as we will be working out in the rainforest and along the beaches of Costa Rica. If anyone is interested in what kind of work we will be doing with "La Tortuga Feliz", they have a really great website in English with pictures. Check it out: www.latortugafeliz.com

Only three weeks 'till Toronto!

Alice and Tova

In Quito!

hey!

So we made it out of Peru! We are currently in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. But, as usual, there is a long and crazy story of how we got here, so I will begin:

Friday arrived and we were still in Peru. The fisherman were still on strike along the border of Ecuador and Peru and we were unable to leave the country. We checked with every bus company in the city and not one was going to Ecuador until the strike ended. We were starting to get worried, as no one really seemed to know when the strike would end. Some of the locals we spoke to told us that a resolution might not be reached until well into the next week! We were dying to get on with our journey, but had no choice but to stay in Peru. Plus we still hadn't seen one travelver in the entire city, which was a little strange. We really didn't have anything else to do with ourselves, so we went for another day at the beach! We spent the day in the sun, collecting shells, swimming and chatting with some locals. We started asked some of them if they knew any alternative ways out of the country, but we were told that, other than taking a bus for twenty hours to Lima and then a plane (no thanks) or trying to cross the border on foot with all our bags (not only legally, but physically dangerous as the fisherman protesting would attack us), we had no choice but to stay in Peru.

Also, one of the monkeys that lived in the reception area of our hotel in Peru attacked Alice. The one in the picture...well, she is fine now, but don't be fooled by its appearance, that thing is crazy!

On Saturday morning we got up and prepeared for another long, hard day at the beach. We decided to call the bus company just to see if the strike was over, but we didn't have too much hope. However, to our surprize, the strike had ended and we could get a bus to Ecuador that day! We were so happy we were dancing around the room. We felt like prisoners who had been set free. We packed up all our stuff, paid tha hotel and raced down to the bus station in one of the little motorkars in the picture (with our luggage hanging on for dear life).

We took a bus to Guyayquil, Ecuador. Though I am sure most of you have never heard of Guayaquil, it is actually the biggest city in Ecuador! The bus ride took about six hours, but it was really only a three hour journey. It was made so slow by two factors: The first was the fact that the customs at the border were the slowest we have ever seen (mostly due to the fact that their computers were from the 1980s and only a handful of people were actually working... the rest were just wandering around chatting). Also, the bus itself drove at about 40km an hour with the door open, picking up passangers from the side of the road along the way. It was so weird, even though this was not a public transportation bus, locals kept getting on, paying a few coins and then getting off a few minutes down the road. People selling everything from pastries to drinks to fruits to sticks of meat kept climbing on and off. Also, there was a guy with a gun standing by the door the entire journey. We weren't really sure why he was there....

The ride itself was actually quite interesting. We saw fields of tropical plants, palm trees, small fruit stands by the side of the road and lots of houses, mostly built up on stilts to avoid flooding during the rainy season.

We arrived in Guayaquil in the early evening to discover that it really wasn't such a nice city. Nothing was open (it was a Saturday night), and we were told that nothing would be open the next day, Sunday. We walked into the downtown, which seemed to lack the character of cities like La Paz or Salta. There were just a lot of modern, tall, but run-down buildings, empty streets and fast food restaurants. They actually had KFC, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut and this thing calld "On the Run", that Tova claims is Canadian but I have never heard of. We were freaking out, as we hadn't seen a McDonalds since Buenos Aires, and even Buenos Aires didn't have any of these other chains. We went to McDonalds and then went to the internet cafe to update the blog. But as we were in the internet cafe we heard a loud explosion and then all the lights in the city went out. It was pretty scary, we thought it was a bomb. A few minutes later the lights came back on and we learned that it was just a power outage. The explosion was all the fuse boxes exploding. I was upset because I was halfway through writing the blog and I lost everything, but I started again. About ten minutes later the same thing happened. This time the lights remained off, and the man running the internet cafe told us to leave. Before we left he told us to be careful, that Guayaquil was very dangerous at night. We stated walking, but it was pitch black and we didn't really know where we were going. After about five minutes of wandering around in the dark, the man from the internet cafe appeared behind us and asked us if we needed help fniding our hotel. To be honest, he was starting to creep us out a bit, but we let him guide us to our hotel. When we got there, we couldn't even go in because everythng was pitch black, so we had to wait outside another ten minutes until the power finally returned for good.

The next morning we got a bus out of Guayaquil and arrived in Quito late at night. We found a hostel (we hadn't been able to book anything in advance, but a local we met on the bus took us around to find something). We are now in Quito. We are currently deciding whether we should fly to Cuba in a few days to spend a week there before heading to Costa Rica to work with the turtles, or whether we should head by land to Colombia (though this seems rather dangerous). We are trying to arrange a paragliding expedition for tomorrow, which we are really excited about.

Talk to you all soon,

Alice and Tova

Motokar
half monkey half bat!

Zorritos, the beach in Tumbes
Little hut on the beach in Tumbes (Peru)
¨ Sabor de Oro!¨ (Flavour of Gold)

And.... Still in Peru

So, here is the news: The Peruvian fisherman are on strike and are blocking all the borders of northern Peru, so we are unable to go to Ecuador until this is resolved, most likely the day after tomorrow.
Until then, we are in the small city of Tumbes, which has a very interesting mix of Latin and Carribean culture. The streets are filled with little fruit stands and markets, and everything is so colourful with such a vibrant and tropical feel. You can buy freshly squeezed pineapple or orange juice on every corner. It is autumn here right now, but you would never know it: there are palm trees everywhere, with sunny skies and over 30° everyday. We spent all day at the beach, swimming, reading our Peruvian "Cosmo" magazine and eating the fruits we bought from the market. The beach is deserted because it is not summer, which is heaven for us. The ocean is really warm and the waves are high. Funnily enough, we did see some fisherman out today (I guess no one told them about the strike). It was amazing to watch them fish, they were standing up rowing these little rafts around and actually catching the fish by spearing them!

Tumbes is really beautiful and fun, but also really dangerous. This guy we know had his shoes stolen at knife point the other day in the middle of the day right down the street from where we are staying. Everyone tells us not to carry anyting valuable around with us and not to wear any jewelery. For this reason, we are unable to post photos on the blog, as we are only carrying a disposable camera with us (that Vanessa gave us in Toronto) to take the occasional picture. We are the only tourists, or even light skinned people, in the entire city, so we already stand out enough!

So, funny story. We wanted to get our laundry done yesterday, so we asked the man at our hotel where we could go. He suggested the place next door, so we went over to check it out. When we got there there was no one there, so we waited. Some guy who was passing by came in and said that he knew the guy who worked there: he was on his luch break and would be back later. So we came back a few hours later and.... still no one there. This time a lady came in off the street and said that she knew the guy: he had just stepped out for a few mnutes and would be back shortly. So we waited... Eventually the guy arrived. To be honest, he looked about 19 years old, and more like a drug dealer than someone running a laundry place. He told us he needed about 24 hours to do the laundry, which we thought sounded a bit long, but we agreed anyways. The next day, when we came to pick up the laundry, the guy wasn't there AGAIN, so we went into our hotel to shower, as we had just returned from the beach. To our surprize, the guy from the laundry place was sitting in the reception area with the monkeys that live there (they really seem like a combination of bat and monkey and scream so loud we can hear them from our room!) and the mentally ill kid that owns the monkeys. So we told him we needed our laundry and he walked next dor and finally gave us our clothes. The clothes didn't exactly smell mountain-fresh or anything, but they seemed clean enough!

We have found a really good Chinese restaurant that serves dinner, and we have obviously found a place with internet. (However, the keyboards are impossible to type on - every other key is busted- and the place smells like cat pee or something, and no wonder, we have seen many cats wandering around and even a monkey!). There is an election coming up in Peru and the streets sre absolutely littered with signs for all the candidates. Also, there are people riding through the streets in rickshaws screaming slogans through megaphones. We are wondering if we will be allowed to vote if we end up having to say here on account of the strike!

well, we will let you know of any news with the strike.

love,

Alice and Tova