Four Backpacks

What is the difference between New Zealand and Central America . When we were travelling around Central America. I noticed a lot of things about the different lifestyles that we have. Here are some examples.

Soccer 🥅 ⚽️

Soccer is extremely popular in Central America. In the FIFA WORLD CUP 2018 three teams qualified; Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica! The soccer fields in New Zealand are usually well maintained and usually have a club that uses the grounds. Normally there are about five to ten fields in one complex. Over in Central America there are usually just one soccer field in a place instead of ten. But the futsal courts are so much better over in Central America than New Zealand’s. Most of the futsal courts over here have nets all around them and a mini grandstand. They usually have massive paintings on the wall of there favourite teams and players. In my opinion soccer fields are better in New Zealand and futsal courts are better in Central America!

Transportation 🚘🚖

In New Zealand most people have a car. In Central America the most common way of transport is buses or tuk tuks. The buses are usually old American school buses with lots of bright paint and lights on them! Public transport is not popular in New Zealand. Because most people have cars. The buses are usually crowded, on one bus ride there were two people sitting on my lap!!

Rubbish

In New Zealand we put our rubbish in bin which then gets taken away and disposed correctly. In Central America people just chuck the rubbish out of bus windows or onto the street! Most days when we are on a bus the roads are usually lined with rubbish in the drains. It’s pretty sad that they just think it’s okay to chuck rubbish out the window and sayoh it’s not our problem. When you walk into a supermarket over here everything is wrapped in plastic. Even some cereal boxes are wrapped in a layer of glad wrap. You can also buy water in plastic bags. Plus everything you buy comes with a plastic bag, even if you are just buying one lollipop the cashier will put it in a plastic bag.

In New Zealand I don’t think we realise how lucky we are to have food, water and a house. Overall the difference between a developing country and a developed country is massive. But it is only really notable when you travel through those areas

By JAKE

Beep, beep, beep the alarm went at 1:15am. We slowly woke up and got ready for our 2:00 shuttle to El Salvador 🇸🇻. We waited on the street for about 30 minutes before the owner of hostel said it was un safe on the streets, because someone got murdered two blocks away from our hostel that night!! So we waited until the shuttle arrived at 3:00(one hour delay).

In our shuttle for our 3:00 photo

In the shuttle there wasn’t many people so I could lie down and have a sleep 😴. We arrived at the Nicaragua 🇳🇮 – Honduras 🇭🇳 border at around 6am. It only took us 30 minutes to get across the border. With our passports stamped we got back on the shuttle and headed into dangerous Honduras 🇭🇳. At about 7:30am we changed drivers and continued to El Salvador 🇸🇻. At about 8am we arrived at the Honduras 🇭🇳 x El Salvador 🇸🇻 border. We got out of the shuttle and got our Honduras 🇭🇳 exit stamp.

The driver drove the shuttle across the border bridge and talked to a policeman with a machine gun for a long time. The driver then said we could not go across the border. We tried 4 more times but the guard would not let us go across in to El Salvador 🇸🇻 (so I have basically been to El Salvador 5 times!!) After a long time discussion there were three choices; 1. We could either drive another 4 hours to get to another border 2. We could walk across the border and wait for him to come over 3. To take a “chicken” bus to our destination. We chose number 2 so we walked across the border and got our El Salvador 🇸🇻 entry stamp. We waited on the other side of the border.

FINALLY after FOUR HOURS of waiting the driver came and picked us up!!!!!

Walking across the border !!

We drove on for another 3 hours to drop some people off.we got there at about 4pm. Our destination was another 1 hour away. We got to our place at 5 and spent 2 hours looking for a hostel. Finally we made the choice to go to Antigua Guatemala 🇬🇹 (Which was 5 hours away)because the shuttle was going there anyway, and the place we were going was a gang place. We decided to check one last hostel. It was the grossest place ever. But we stayed there anyway.

A total of 17 HOURS!!!!,

JAKE

Biodiversity. A big part of our life. Costa Rica, for example, has 0.1% of the worlds surface but 4% of the worlds wildlife. With this in mind, what are some ways that we can protect biodiversity? Right now our family is travelling around Costa Rica. It is a unique country due to all the wildlife that surrounds it.

What is biodiversity? Biodiversity basically means the variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem. For example, when we were in Costa Rica we saw, Monkeys, Caimans, Crocodiles, Scarlet Macaws, a Toucan and many more types of animals.

Costa Rica’s main source of income. Ecotourism. Tourisum in Costa Rica began to develop in the 1980’s and thirty years later it is now the country’s main source of money contributing more than US$1.7 billion per year. It is estimated that up to 80% of all visitors to the country come to do eco-tourism related activities. Ecotourism started out slowly, but by 1995 there were more than one hundred and twenty five government protected sites.

Costa Rica’s government is big on biodiversity. For example, when our family was in Jaco, we saw a turtle on the beach. Beside the turtle were two policemen. When the turtle looked like it was struggling to dig its hole, the policeman helped it. When the turtle started to lay its eggs, the policeman gathered them into a bag and took them away to a hatchery. If the policeman hadn’t of done this, most likely dogs would of sniffed out the eggs or people may of come and got them to cook up.

Costa Rica is a great example of protecting biodiversity. Almost one third of the country is under some sort of environmental protection with thirty five national parks, covering eleven percent of the country. That is one way to protect biodiversity, making national parks so people don’t come down cut cut all the trees and do other dumb stuff like that.

Coming to the end, I think it’s about time that we realise that at the end of the day heaps of habitats and ecosystems are being destroyed by humans and that we should think of more solutions to try and help protect our biodiversity such as protecting the land with national parks, protecting the young endanger species. Also, Costa Rica for example is making money out of there mindset to protect there wildlife.

By Mia

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The air rushed against my face as we sped down the roads. We had hired scooters for the day and was circumnavigating Ometepe!

The first stop we did was this sand thing called Jesus something. On the way there we saw some monkeys on the road!! We then went around the island on a gravel road to this festival thing. We ate out for lunch Dad had these disgusting looking vegetable meat things but they were actually really nice. It was a traditional nicaraguan food called baho.

After we drove around the other volcano we stopped at this bar place. I learnt how to drive and drift on a scooter it was so so so fun!!!!

After dad and I went to A mineral spring. We saw a turtle and some fish!!

Jake😜

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One of the worlds biggest modern day problems… Plastic. Plastic in our ocean is a major environmental problem. Today I am going to talk about ways to eliminate plastic from our ocean. In Costa Rica we were on holiday and saw a sign saying beach cleanup. We went and did the beach clean up and picked up 40 bags of plastic in 1 hour!!

Plastic is a major problem because; it takes a long time to decompose, there is so much plastic and most people don’t know what impact plastic has on the environment. Plastic bottles, plastic straws and plastic bags are the most common uses of plastic. These are really bad for the environment because they are usually single use items. Many of these end up in our ocean NOT in landfills!!

Here are some ways we can get the plastic out of the ocean. The simple way to get rid of plastic is to stop making it completely. But another idea is to invent a “plastic detector” that can detect plastic and suck it up. When the plastic is picked up you could burn it in power stations or melt it in to new things. So we could reuse the plastic and melt them in to bricks or fence posts.

I think the two best ways to get rid of plastic is to… one way is to put a ransom on plastic for example 1 kilo of plastic is worth $1. They are starting to do that already in other country’s, with plastic bottles. In Australia plastic bottles are worth 10c each. So that gets people wanting to recycle ♻️. The second idea is to burn it in power stations. They heat it to a really hot temperature and put the plastic in the furnace and burn the plastic. The reason why they heat it so hot is because so the plastic does not create smoke.

Do you want all the worlds fish species to die, do you want the ocean to be so toxic that we can’t swim in it.. the answer is NO. Start helping the environment, if everyone picked up 1piece of plastic a day for a year we would get rid of 8 billion pieces of plastic a day!!

Jake

We woke up early in the morning and had a quick breakfast. At about 9:00 AM we head east for a beach called Playa Grande. We saw some cool sites along the way. We passed about four of the beaches to get to Playa Grande. It took at least one hour.

Just before Playa Grande, we were waiting for Mum and Jake.Uncle Ross spotted some White Capuchin monkeys. We looked closer and there were heaps of them, all in the same area. They were swinging from tree to tree. When the monkeys saw us cutting open a coconut, they all came down around us, bearing their fangs. We managed to get away before any of the monkeys pounced on us!! Anyway the swim at Playa Grande was cool. The waves were really dumpy though.

On the way back we found a stream the lead up to a waterfall and waterhole. That was pretty cool too. When we got back we chilled and had Uncle Ross’s pasta for dinner. Also known as Mia’s favourite camping meal dinner so far on this trip!!

From Mia

After an amazing wild life day yesterday hopes were high for today!

We hired a Sanyoung car and headed down the Osa Peninsula. We were 4wd most of the time because we had to cross heaps of rivers. When we were driving down the gravel roads a family of coatis ran in front of us (Coatis are like anteaters). We continued driving until we got to the end of the road. Suddenly a couple of spider monkeys climbed up the tree in front of us!!

The next day we drove up some dodgey jungle roads to a little town. There wasn’t much to see apart from a soccer field and some houses so we turned back.

We were driving really slowly when Mum yelled out “go back I think I saw something ” So dad reversed the car and we saw a TOCAN!!! It was a yellow beaked tocan it was amazingly bright.

By Jake

We spent the morning driving from Uvita to to Dominical. When we got there we made the most of the weather and went for a long swim. It felt so good to be in the surf and go body surfing. After our long swim we settled into our hostel and then decided to explore the market while it wasn’t raining. As we were walking out we came across a big lizard and a baby lizard hiding in a log. I took heaps of pictures. We finally decided to walk the streets. It was funny because everything was so was $20. Costa Rica is a beautiful country but it’s just too expensive. At 12 PM/lunch time, it started pouring down and continuously rained for hours. I sat down and read my book.

Driving from Dominica to Jaco: We left bright and early this morning. We got into silver sloth (our rental car) and hit the road. As we drove towards Jaco we passed heaps of palm oil farms. We finally made it to Jaco after about an hour of driving. We put our bags near a seat on the beach and dad left to go back to Uvita. (He had to drop off the rental car and then he caught a bus back to Jaco and arrived at about 4 PM.) We found a cheap hostel with a pool and played in there for hours. Later we explored the streets and souvenir shops. When dad came back, we went down to the beach and watched the sunset. We had a great dinner back at the hotel and then set off to bed.

By Mia

It was 3:00 and I was in our hostel pool jumping of the railing when Mum yelled “there is a turtle on the beach!” I sprinted down to the beach and ran towards the turtle. It was a Green turtle.

The turtle was digging a hole for her eggs.The police were there to help her dig the hole. When she finally started laying her eggs tears started to come out of her eyes. The police were taking the eggs and putting them in a bag so no one stole them. The turtle laid about 100 eggs before she started covering up the hole.

When she had finished covering up the hole, you wouldn’t even know the hole was there as it was well covered up! The police then left. The turtle started walking down to the water. She was actually pretty fast at walking down to the water. When she finally got to the water a massive wave swept her away never to be seen again!

We were so lucky to see it in the middle of the day ,what a magical experience.

Jake