My Nomad Diary, Week 15: Hikes, Hammocks, and Heart-Stopping Travel Days

Moments from the week:

Getting on a flight to Colombia
Finding a really nice hostel in El Salvador, probably one of the best I’ve seen

My favourite places this week:

It’s a new week and I’m spending most of my Monday on the road. Feeling well and truly refreshed after my hotel stay last night, I’m awaiting my transfer to El Salvador – unsurprisingly it was late.
Five hours on the road in a cramped colectivo, we crossed the Guatemala – El Salvador border in about 20 minutes, jackpot. Oh and the tour company forgot to charge me for the transfer, you win some you lose some.
I’m back in a hostel again but this time I’m staying in a private room and it is soooo nice. $50 a night for a massive double room with a balcony overlooking the pool and a rainfall shower. I’m laughing. Breakfast is included too!
I socialised with a few people in the common area but frankly couldn’t be arsed and headed to bed – the joy of being on the road solo.

Tuesday is my first full day in Santa Ana and I’m ready to socialise with other humans once more. I started the day with a walking tour exploring the sights of Santa Ana and trying local food at the market – it was really enjoyable. Afterwards a handful of us went for a swim at some natural pools, followed by a big group dinner at a pizza place and then spent the evening yapping by the hostel pool. Probably the busiest full day out I’ve had since I started all this and I was understandably exhausted!

Mid-week and my social battery is kaput. Today I’m buckling down and getting a full day of work done, I had a morning of back-to-back calls for about 2.5hrs and then got to work finishing the charity initiative I’ve been working on and wrote some more LinkedIn content – damn productive day if I say so myself!
At the end of the day I finally committed, I’ve extended my stay here by an extra day and at the weekend I’m headed back to the motherland that is Colombia. Reasons?
Central America is a bit difficult for remote work and I’m at a crucial stage of building my business, if I was more in flow this wouldn’t matter too much.
The biggest draw of Central America is undoubtedly the hiking and the volcanoes, I’m still not healed after my surgery (could be up to a year), so I can’t enjoy them.
At the moment I’m craving modern city life, I’ll revisit Central America at a later date.
Lastly, Brits can’t cross through Honduras to Nicaragua without a visa, which meant some convoluted border crossing by boat and multiple buses and it admittedly sounds like an absolute ball-ache.
Absolutely stoked to be heading back to Colombia, I’m celebrating with a burrito.
And mid-Burrito I met somebody backpacking through Central America and just like that I made a new friend, we spent the rest of the evening in deep talks about life and all that jazz and then I called it a night, positively fried!

In a bid to continue to recharge my social batteries, I spent all of Thursday working from my studio, with a few breaks on the hammock in the sunshine, the perfect day really! Nothing much else to report for today, but it was just what I needed.

Friday is my final full day in Santa Ana and I have an action-packed day exploring the nearby towns. With two others, we hired a private driver for the day ($23 each!) who took us to the Seven Waterfalls hike, which was equally stunning and ridiculously dangerous at the same time. Not to mention that it wasn’t part of the brief and I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. As we approached the fourth waterfall, our guide shimmied up the rocks in a pair of, what can only be described as, slippers and tied a rope around a tree and summoned us up. Once we reached the top, we were all convinced that this was the end of the trail and we would turn back, but no, we would continue climbing this waterfall, without any equipment. I honestly cannot put into words how terrified I was, one wrong step and I would’ve undoubtedly hurtled to my death, it will haunt me for the rest of my days.
After the traumatic experience of the waterfalls hike, we headed back to our driver and he took us along the picturesque Ruta de las Flores and we visited the famous Café Albania, an adventure park in El Salvador. Having not had enough adrenaline for one day, I plonked myself in a rubber ring and sent myself hurtling down a massive slide. Much safer than the morning’s activity and I’m pleased to announce I survived unscathed.
Closing up the end of the working week, I packed my bags for tomorrow’s flight, tried some local pupusas (for $1 each!) and called it a day.

Aaaand it’s travel day today. I’ve learnt from previous mistakes and I make sure to switch cities at weekends now, Saturday for travelling and Sunday for bedding in, before getting back to normality on the following Monday.
I’m sure I’ve said it a million times, but the travel part of travelling is my worst nightmare and airports take the top spot.

My transfer was 50 minutes late but thankfully my flight was delayed, I finally arrived at the airport at 15.30 (instead of 12.30) and I started the rigmarole of the airport. After queuing for an hour, at which point I thought I was going to miss my flight, I finally made it through and boarded my flight to Colombia. Central America has been fun, but what I realised was, is that a lot of the countries are very similar (colonial towns, volcanoes, similar food) and doing them in succession gets very tiresome. I’ll absolutely visit El Salvador again, and visit Nicaragua, but I’ll do them as individual trips.
I finally landed in Colombia at about 10pm, where I spent over an hour (again!) queuing for passport control. As I made it past the gates, I was granted a 90-day stay and I made my way to my accommodation.
After one of the most turbulent Uber rides of my life (where my driver tried to ram another car off the road, twice), I finally made it to my accommodation at about midnight and hit the day. A thirteen-hour travel day, done and dusted.

Final day of the week and my first day on the ground in Colombia. I’m in Bogota for the next week before heading to other cities in Colombia to find some more liveable cities for my eventual relocation. Colombia’s visa-scheme is great: they’re one of the only countries that explicitly state you can work remotely as part of your visa-free allowance, and you can even extend it to 180 days. Their Digital Nomad Visa is even better, granting up to two years and only requires a minimum monthly income of about £750, versus Mexico’s which stands at £3,500.
Starting off the day following my cardinal rule of nomadding in a new city – a free walking tour. I visited lots of interesting spots throughout the city, made a new friend and we grabbed lunch afterwards.
I tucked into the standard local dish that is Carne Asada (marinated & grilled steak, normally served with rice) – happy days.
Finished up the day with dinner at a Japanese restaurant, tried sushi for the first time (yes, you read that right) and then polished off a few Aperols in an Irish bar.
Culture, my dears, is my middle name.

See you next week 👋