ENCA Member James Watson explores the advantages and disadvantages of flightless travel by embarking on a journey to Central America without a plane ticket.
James was also able to raise £550 for ENCA through donations made in support of his endeavour. His blog below outlines the process of planning and undertaking the trip as well as detailing visits to many communities and organisations with whom ENCA has worked.
I hope that my blog, or at least some parts of it, has been interesting to those who’ve read it! Travelling as a sponsored journey for ENCA – with an overall purpose of avoiding planes and with this blog to record the most interesting parts – has for me made the whole year a lot more interesting, and given it a sense of purpose.
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It’s been a while since I put any albums on the internet. Here is the final article of my blog, a selection of photos of my trip from Mexico, back through Guatemala and Honduras to Nicaragua, and then the last bits of my journey home to England.
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It has been some time since I last wrote the last article of this blog, and my year travelling is now coming to an end. I’m now back on dry land in Europe, after another (excellent) 2 week journey back by cargo ship from Central America.
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After two weeks with the Zapatista indigenous rebels in Southern Mexico (see the last article – here), I then had a week’s rest being a tourist in Guatemala, before arriving in Honduras. There, as an ENCA representative, I was able to visit several environmental and social justice organisations working in a country wracked by violence and political repression since the military coup of 2009.
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I am just leaving Mexico after two months here, and on now on my way back to Guatemala, from where I will head further into Central America for the last two months of my trip. In Mexico I spent one month as a tourist heading around Cancun and the Yucatan Peninsular, and then up through the key state capitals of Oaxaca, Puebla and Mexico City.
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Back in January I visited El Salvador to deliver an ENCA donation of US$500 for emergency office expenses to the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador (“IPES”, by its Spanish initials). I dropped the money off at their office in the beautiful colonial town of Suchitito, but then they were kind enough to invite me to spend a day and night on their Demonstration Centre a little further into the countryside.
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OK, so it’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to update my blog – I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy as I found myself in Nicaragua, which I left 2 weeks ago to start travelling Central America.
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Things have been pretty hectic since getting to Nicaragua – there’s a lot going on here, and I feel right in the thick of it living with Edilbertha, the director of the clinic, as she gets herself involved in a different good cause every day.
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Hello from Nicaragua! I got here a month and a half ago on the 19th of November and have been rushed off my feet since then. But now I’ve finally found the time to update my blog and let people know what I’ve been doing.
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Now I’m firmly settled in Nicaragua and not moving from day to day, I finally want to write an article going into more detail about the environmental impacts of travelling the way I have. I’m hoping to see whether the time and effort has made a difference in terms of my carbon footprint – really the most important point of hitch-hiking and travelling by cargo ship.
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