... being civilised, for once.

With a name that has always hinted at a heady mix of fun and danger, Nicaragua was one of the countries I was most looking forward to visiting.
Partly it was because of half-remembered news reports from the 1980s.
I didn't understand them at the time but the mention of guerrillas, guns and Ronnie Reagan doing sneaky things left an indelible impression on my seven-year-old self.
Even the way it rolled off the newsreaders' tongues - Ni-ca-ra-gua - made it sound like a crazy, lawlwess and exciting place.
Obviously, I wasn't still expecting to touch down in Managua to find men in huge sombreros smoking cigars and firing pistols in the street but it still felt like I was doing something really cool just by going there.
At first glance, Nicaragua is fairly similar to other countries I've visited in the region. It's perhaps a little better developed, with sturdier-looking rural housing, good roads and the US-influence evident through the number of malls and chain retailers.
However, one quite startling thing no visitor to its capital could fail to notice is that it's Christmas every day - and by presidential decree. (Or at least the word of his missus)
You cannot arrive at a roundabout without finding a large steel cone, decorated with metal snowflakes, fairy lights in the shape of reindeer and topped by an illuminated star.
It has been thus for at least two-and-a-half years after President Daniel Ortega's wife, Rosario Murillo, decided to put a smile on citizens' faces year-round.
Personally, I can't imagine anything worse.
I'm one of those committed atheists who comes over all pious at Christmas, moaning about the festival's true meaning being lost amid a headlong rush to go shopping and get trolleyed.
(Actually, I'd support any cause that would help me avoid having to listen to that awful Mariah Carey Christmas tune in Sainsbury's in mid-September).
So, having to celebrate Christmas every time I approached a major traffic junction would probably lead me to plough straight into the tree and end it all there and then.
This is one of the more loony policies of the leftist Sandinistas, who still have wide support among many Nicaraguans.
Despite complaints about corruption and too strong a hold over the judiciary and police, they appear set to be in power for a while.
There's a lack of coherent opposition on the right, whose most powerful figure is the disgraced ex-leader Arnoldo Aleman (previously jailed for corruption).
Years of right wing dictators, hard-left revolutionaries and US interference must leave many ordinary Nicaraguans wishing they had some wishy-washy British-style moderate.
Mind you, there could be a few Lib-Dems looking for a seat in a year or two - and I fancy Vince Cable could salsa and merengue with the best of them.

Our primary reason for visiting this part of the world was to catch up with an old friend.
Antonio had studied for a year in Manchester with the One With The Common Sense.
The last time I saw him was to drop him off at the airport on his way home and in such situations you wonder if you'll see each other again.
So it was really great for us to find him waiting at the airport, together with his lovely wife Alina and their six-month-old "bump" - already named Maria-Victoria.
We stayed at their very smart condominium for the weekend. I'm still not sure exactly what defines a condominium but I've at least stopped having a schoolboy snigger at the word.
Antonio works incredibly hard in finance at a geothermal power plant, while Alina is covering for a colleague on top of her work at the US embassy while coping with the demands of pregnancy.
So we were doubly grateful for the lengths they went to in showing us around their country by car.
First stop was a fascinating tour of Antonio's workplace, where the power company drills for water which has been trapped 1km underground and vapourised by the region's volcanoes.
The steam is transported through miles of pipework, separated from any water in a kind of giant salad strainer and then used to power a turbine to generate electricity.
The waste water is sent back underground to repeat the process.
It was great to see this relatively new green energy process up close - and get an experience unavailable on the tourist trail - led by the plant's manager, Juan.
Afterwards, he took us to a great locals' restaurant in the beautiful colonial city of Leon where we ate probably the best beef fillet I've tasted since we began our journey.

Eating in nice restaurants, as opposed to our usual cheap comedors, was one of the nicest aspects of our stay with Antonio and Alina.
Their local knowledge meant we enjoyed top-notch paella, great barbecued meat and fantastic filling breakfasts.
It felt nice to be civilised, like normal folk, for a change.
Of course, I couldn't make it through the weekend without making a fool of myself in some way.
We ate the local delicacy of quesillos - fresh tortillas wrapped around thick slabs of cheese and laden with sour cream and onions.
They are served in a plastic bag and the trick is to nip a corner of the bag, suck out the juices and then carefully ease out the delicious and filling contents.
I was feeling rather pleased with myself for not spilling any down my front when I realised that the melted sour cream had saturated my beard and was dripping all over my shorts.
I took me half a minute to notice and left me with dubious-looking stains all over my crotch.
After a Saturday night working our way though a bottle of the local Flor de Cana rum - deliciously refreshing with soda - the perfect relaxation on Sunday was a swim in Laguna de Apoyo.
It was a beautiful spot and taking a dip was the perfect way to find relief from the humidity, especially as the water was warm enough to allow you to stay in a while.
We rounded off the weekend by watching a film together - again, nice to do something "normal".
The only drawback to seeing how well Antonio was doing was that it reminded us that we were both jobless, homeless and that we own pretty much nothing of any value.
We moaned that the prospect of us renting a flat (or even condominium) anything like as nice as theirs on our return home was practically nil.
However, Alina pointed out that few Nicaraguans would have the opportunity to take as long out of work as we have - so we'll thank our lucky stars for that. 

After Managua, beach time beckoned and our next stop was the little town of San Juan del Sur.
It's one of those places that's full of foreigners but still manages to retain some charm and a degree of authenticity.
A great place to relax, we both spent plenty of time reading in the wooden rocking chairs on the hospedaje's verandah.
When not buried in a book, we were in the water with huge dinosaur-like frigatebirds gliding above us.
And the big pacific waves gave us another chance to try a bit of surfing. Feeling more confident, we asked the instructor to skip the basic lesson and just help us out in the water and we had a brilliant morning.
One snag, however.
Five months of travelling has caused us both to shed a few pounds and it has got to the stage where, if I don't wear a belt, my shorts end up around my ankles.
Thankfully the waist tie of my boardies normally prevents any such disaster in the water.
However, not having surfed without a wetsuit before, I wasn't expecting the roughing up my shorts got on the board.
Consequently, the joy of my longest, fastest and most thrilling ride was tempered by the knowledge that I was exposing a good two inches of bumcrack from the moment I caught the wave.
It might look cool if you're a bronzed Adonis from California but not when you're a pasty, spotty-buttocked lad from the north of England.
I worried that my half-moon, shining brightly out to sea, might constitute a danger to shipping. Perhaps they might mistake it for a lighthouse.

I stick by my theory that most travellers are nice people, no matter where they are from.
But the longer you get into a trip, the harder it is to remember that everyone has their own opinions or foibles, and to appreciate the differences in the people you meet.
By the time we reached Panama, we had got to the stage where we thought pretty much everyone in our hostel was a pain.
Sometimes it's the creepy older guys that get to you.
These perpetual travellers claim to have seen and done everything, yet seem to spend their days doing little other than loitering around the hostel, getting to the pans minutes before you want to cook.
Often it's the younger crowd that annoys me, claiming to always be getting away from the "Gringo trail" while seeing little but the inside of bars.
(Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I'm just too old and uncool to hang around with the second group, while I'm probably in danger of joining the former.)
We gave ourselves a little pep talk to start being more tolerant of our fellow backpackers - so now we're having a go at expats instead.
In San Juan, we spent one night in an American bar.
Not usually my kind of place, especially given the whooping and hollering caused by some basketball final, but they were having a quiz and it had been a while since I'd had a chance to display my ineptitude at acquiring general knowledge.
We did terribly but were still having a good laugh with the friendly bar staff when a middle-aged American guy came in and started chatting to us.
He had moved to Nicaragua three years earlier, opening a guest house on a nearby beach.
He told us he smoked pork, which seemed like a thoroughly healthy sideline until later on, when I began wondering if it was some sort of euphemism.
It was when he invited us to dinner the next night that I began to feel a little uneasy.
For a start he was fairly drunk, meaning he might not even remember the invitation come morning.
Secondly, he just looked a bit weird. His soon-to-be wife was half his age and their two friends looked like they'd been kidnapped by aliens from a trailer park and then returned to Earth a few hundred kilometers too far south.
You shouldn't judge but it's hard not to when they look like a group you'd see on some late-night TV show about unsavoury goings-on in Las Vegas.
All his male friends also had odd beards. (I realise the irony in that statement coming from someone who has twice been called Osama bin Laden in the street but at least I know my facial hair looks daft.)
With his insistence that we should spend the night at his place, I began to think they might be swingers.
This view was backed up when his enthusiasm was coupled with the look of horror his missus wore when she realised I'd been invited.
But what were we supposed to do? We agreed to the invitation and swapped emails before leaving, praying he'd have forgotten the whole thing by the morning.

My next encounter was with another kind of expat - this time a middle-aged German.
He told me he ran a property in neighbouring Costa Rica and immediately annoyed me by launching a tirade against the country's "lazy and untrustworthy" workers.
Few things rile me more than people criticising the very folk from whom they make a living.
In this case, the guy then revealed he was working illegally, therefore contributing nothing through the tax system of this developing country in which he enjoys his new-found happiness.
He had only come to Nicaragua so as not to outstay his Costa Rican tourist visa but was saying how much cheaper medication was this side of the border when I remarked that I needed ibuprofen for my back.
At this point, he uttered those fateful words: "Do you want to hear an alternative theory about back pain?"
My heart sank. I knew I was going to be subjected to a long talk.
He explained that my sciatica was caused by bad experiences in my past and that it could be cured through positive thinking.
I thought about explaining how positive thinking did not come naturally to Everton supporters but I couldn't get a word in edgeways.
Apparently, I just needed to say something along the lines of "life is getting better" three times every morning and my back would be pain-free within three months.
I reckon that's probably about the length of time it will right itself with the help of painkillers and exercise.
However, it was when he started on the conspiracy theories about world domination that I could no longer keep feigning interest.
After 45 minutes, I had heard all I could take and made my excuses, saying I "had to get out of the heat" and headed for our room.
"Perhaps it's just that I talk too much," he replied.
There was no answer to that and I vowed to check into a dorm at our next stop.
I was missing the company of travellers.