We woke up at 5am to a dog yowling and barking. After investigating, it turned out the the dog was just in his kennel and wanted to get out. Since we were already awake, we decided to try catching the early bus out of town. Since it was a public holiday, no-one could tell us whether or not the buses might be running, but fortunately one turned up at 6am. We changed buses at Liberia and got to Peñas Blancas on the Nicaraguan border. Going throught the border was pretty simple, - as usual there was a kid there who made money by showing the gringos where to go. One we were in Nicaragua, we caught the bus to Rivas. After the cram-packed, cooking hot buses and crappy roads of Costa Rica, the bus was a ... read more

More beach time... Trish rented a surfboard and played around in the waves for a few hours. I wandered around taking some photos. We spent some time working out where in Nicaragua that we wanted to go.... read more

We were really motivated in the morning and went out for a run along the beach at 7:30am - despite the time, it was cooking hot already and we came back dripping. After a swim, we went and exchanged our books and had a look around. The real estate industry is booming with a lot of americans buying up land and developing condos, etc. After a delicious lunch we went for a surf lesson at the Iguana surf school - it was fun and Trish had been looking forward to it for ages. After catching her first wave, she was lucky enough to pop out of the water just in time to be hit on the forehead by her falling surfboard and was left with a big goose-egg bump. We caught some good waves. We watched ... read more

We caught the Interbus to Tamarindo, a touristy beach town on the pacific coast. It is the most commercialized place we have been so far - they even have Burger King/Pizza Hut/Subway/etc. However, the beach is good for swimming and surfing. We checked into Cabinas Zullymar, which was close to the beach and also had a nice pool. We spent the day swimming and watched the sunset.... read more

In the morning we headed out to do the Sky Trek zip-line, which is one of the popular activities here in Costa Rica. A zipline is a series of cables high in the jungle that you slide down in a harness attached to a pulley (also known as a flying fox). The cables go through and above the canopy of the cloud forest and you fly past the trees at high speed. This was a lot of fun. The longest cable was over 700m long - quite impressive. After that we did the Sky Walk, which is a hike through a series of suspension bridges that go about the cloud forest. This was about the time that it starting heavily raining in true tropical style. By now we had learned that you don´t go anywhere without ... read more

Once again it was time to move on, and we decided to take the "jeep-boat-jeep" option to get to Santa Elena. The trip across Lake Arenal in the boat was the most relaxing and pleasant part of the trip. It turned out (not too suprisingly) that this was actually a minivan-boat-minivan trip, and not quite as exciting as doing a 4x4 road trip, although the road to Santa Elena were among the roughest we had seen. When we got to Santa Elena we were caked in a layer of dust. We had lunch in the very cool Tree House Cafe in Santa Elena, which is a cafe built around a large tree, with branches going right past tables. A very cool and innovative idea. Trish took some timeout to relax while I headed out to see ... read more

In the morning we swapped rooms from our dungeon on the botton floor with one window, up to another room upstairs - this one was a lot brighter with several windows and a balcony with a view of the volcano. After breakfast we headed out to Vedano caves, where we were given rubber boots, helmets and flashlights. We hiked down a path and explored the cave system there for a couple of hours. It was pretty cool and there were a lot of little gaps that we had to squeeze through. At one point I got to lead a group through a little tunnel with about 30cm of headroom above the water. There were bats, some pretty big tarantulas and other spiders. The guide also pointed out a fish that was supposedly living in the stream ... read more

After taking a few crappy local buses, we decided to try out one of the "turismo" minvans to get to our next destination: the town of La Fortuna, next to Volcano Arenal in the northern part of Costa Rica. It probably would have taken us about 9 hours to get there via local buses - on the turismo minivan, it only took 5. Worth the extra cost, although Trish was still feeling motion sick and needed to lie down when we got here. In the evening we took a quick tour up to the north side of the volcano to watch the lava flow down the side. It was pouring with rain and most of the volcano was hidden in cloud, so I was pretty skeptical whether or not we would see anything much at all. ... read more

After my sunburn from the previous day, I decided I would hide from the big burning ball as much as possible. We headed out and wandered through the national park. I had already been impressed by the amount of wildlife in the town - there were large lizards, everywhere (I had even seen one raiding a dog food bowl). There were gangs of little capuchin monkeys that ran across the trees above and across the ropes strung across the road. In the park there was even more to see, including some critters that I don't know the names of. We got to see the monkeys up close, since they are not shy at all. There were more sloths, lizards, big crabs, etc to see. The beaches in the park were great - more peaceful than the ... read more

Trish had been pining for some surfing action so we rented a surf board (for Trish) and a boogie board (for me). We spent the entire day on the beach, and stuck around long after everyone ran to hide from the thunderstorm - the waves are a great place to watch the lightning. Despite layering on litres of sunscreen, I still ended up being a bright pink colour at the end of the day - doh!... read more