Commuting
To get around as economically as possible, and to mix with the locals, travelling is almost exclusively achieved by public bus. The bus network is fairly good in most Latin American countries (no one has a car), there is a regular service through every town. In Venezuela it was even better, there was some kind of public transport running along virtually every road in the country. In Central, public transport only seems to run between towns, not within them and around the local area.
In Central America (excluding Costa Rica of course - which is like the 51st US state), the poor man's buses are the 'chicken buses', which are the old US school buses - the big yellow things which look more like army trucks with bad camouflage, than vehicles for transporting school children. And true to their name, its not unusual to see live chickens being transported, you can expect to see anything from birds in cages, big sacks of flour and rice, piles of wood...
Spiced-up Chicken bus, Nicaragua
The passengers are always entertained with music, usually at an annoyingly and inappropriately high volume. If you are lucky, then its Reggaeton, if you are unlucky then its some cheesy Latin guitar pop (Gustavo Leyton should be shot). And if you are really unlucky, then the driver has taped an old TV to the ceiling at the front, and the passengers are subjected to the music videos of these terrible songs (I don't mean Reggaeton of course).
The buses often double as markets, at every opportunity local sellers get on to try and tempt you with their wonderful products on offer, whether it be the quite useful chilled water in a plastic bag, or the usually poor and tasteless local street food, to any other random selection of items available in the world - gin-seng, foot fungus cream, sex education books, English dictionaries, or of course super glue.
Food
Life can get fairly simple out here, and there's usually one thing dominating your thoughts - food. To keep things as cheap as possible and to try and follow the local cuisine where ever you are, the best way to do this is to stick with the street food and whats available in the markets. The problem with this is the poor quality and taste of local food. If its meat its generally been deep fried, in a frying pan of one week-old oil, slapped on a plate with no sauce, and accompanied by rice, beans, an excuse for salad and vile tasting tortilla-looking things.
A plate of the usual - chicken, rice, beans
Other street food is equally uninviting, pastries or biscuit type things tend to be dry and pretty much inedible. A pastry we keep running into in Central, consists of some kind of disgusting cheese and sugar mix inside - cheese and sugar??
So its not really possible to stay happy and healthy on solely local food. Breakfast now consists of a trip to the local market for fruit - pineapples, mangoes, avocados, melons, oranges, coconuts, bananas, watermelons - whatever is the cheapest and most popular in the current location. In El Salvador avocados suddenly got really cheap for some reason, on the Caribbean, coconuts are fee of course, in Honduras bananas are literally given away, and in Nicaragua pineapples were a good deal.
The jackpot is to find a hostel with a kitchen so we can prepare our own food, then not only do the meals become cheaper, but also full of taste, vitamins and goodness. Every place we stayed at in El Salvador had a kitchen, one even had an oven!, and coriander, Cinnamon, and fresh cream started to appear in the markets, aah, great memories...
When we haven't found a hostel with a kitchen for guests to use, the next best option is to find a cheap hotel that has its own restaurant included, then we tell the owners we are professional chefs and love to cook, and ask if we can use their kitchen - its worked a couple of times, but not every time.
Choosing the route
The route is kind of made up as I go along, any kind of serious planning and I tend to come out in a rash. There are plenty of travellers on the road out here - much more in Central America than in Venezuela, so often the best information can be gathered by asking them, but also a lot of information on places you can get from guide books and the Internet.
Crime
If you have a high level of common sense, and keep your whits about you, especially in the most risky places such as markets, bus stations, airports and border crossings, then crime isn't a huge problem. I've been robbed 3 times so far - all in Venezuela. The first time was within a few days of arriving, the police for some reason were not happy with my passport and documents, and so felt the need to dissect every part of my rucksack. A few days later I realised I no longer had my head torch - Venezuela police are scum! The second time I had my shorts stolen from the beach whilst I was busy swimming in the sea. The third time must have been at Caracas airport when a customs official or baggage handler took my penknife from my rucksack. All school boy errors that I have now learnt from.
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