We had bought a two bus-one boat combo ticket in the capital to take us into the depths of Costa Rica’s Caribbean jungle: A the end of our first bus ride we arrived at the tour company office to discover that our second bus to the river had already left? So the manager squeezed us and our luggage into the back of a typical white van on top of a huge fridge freezer to make the bumpy journey through the banana plantations to the river. On route a car traveling in the opposite direction stopped to advise our driver of potential [View Full Entry]

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We left the Rainsong Wildlife Sanctuary in the making to continue on a quest to see more of Costa Rica’s celebrated wildlife and less of its ex-pats. Santa Elena was our destination - a small town at the end of a beautiful bus ride up into the highlands. We arrived just as the sun was setting behind the hills and we headed straight to our hostel of choice - Pension Santa Elena - where we hoped to meet up again with Joe, who had left Rainsong only a few days before us. As fate would have it Joe was sat just [View Full Entry]

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We didn’t go far after our surf bumming; or at least it doesn’t look it on a map, in true Central American style the direct route down the coast was not passable unless you happened to be driving a tank or a boat so we had to go round the long way inland and then back out again! We eventually arrived in Montezuma in the early evening, which was a much nicer, smaller coastal town than Tamarindo, there were even some Costa Rican people actually living and working there!! We stayed at a small hotel right on the sand on the [View Full Entry]

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Crossing the border into Costa Rica was a culture shock to say the least. The Latin American language, indigenous villagers, beautiful old colonial towns, small local ‘tiendas’ (shops), locally owned hospedajes (hotels) and intriguing cultural differences were instantly replaced by the North American language, sprawling rapidly growing towns and developments of condos only affordable to foreigners, billboards advertising further condos or land for sale, supermarkets stocking world tastes, shopping malls, and modern hotels. Our initial reaction to Costa Rica was of disgust a [View Full Entry]

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Ometepe is a small island in a huge lake; Nicaragua’s biggest lake. It was formed when two neighbouring volcanoes erupted and joined themselves together. We had planned to go to stay and possibly work on a small organic farm on the smaller half of the island. The ferry docks on the larger island so we needed to catch a couple of buses to get across to where we wanted to be; we ended up spending the whole day waiting for the second bus playing cards and drinking beer with the locals and were just about to give up and get a [View Full Entry]

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San Juan del Sur is all about surfing, it is the town most frequently mentioned by fellow travellers in Nicaragua as the place to ride some waves, so we headed there to see if we could actually get upright on a board. Our mission in San Juan del Sur was to learn how to surf (or at least try!), so as soon as we had found a place to stay we were out on the streets hunting down the best surf deal. The beach in Suan Juan del Sur itself is more like a port full of fishing boats; the more [View Full Entry]

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We have bumped into so many people again and again on our trip through Central America and Granada was no different. As soon as we checked into the Bearded Monkey hostel we bumped into Blake, an aussie we met and worked with on our turtle project in Guatemala. Funny thing was we were just about to email him to see where he had got to on his trip and he was right behind us! Later on our first evening, as we sat down to order dinner, in walks Stan and Prisca, a couple we met while diving in Utila and had [View Full Entry]

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After spending a few extra days on Utila snorkelling after we finished our diving we had to head straight for the border and on to Nicaragua. This was a little too far to go in one day, even for us so we had a stop over in Tegucigalpa (the Honduran capital). We arrived late and left early the following morning so not much to say about that really! On our way to the Honduran border we wanted to stop off and buy some cigars as we had heard that the best place to do this was from the factories, these were [View Full Entry]

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That´s the number one rule of diving as we found out in our first class of our open water dive course. We arrived in Utila with numerous recommendations for a dive shop called Alton´s, this was good as it saved us having to wander round with all our stuff checking out what everyone was offering! Alton´s was right at the end of a long sweeping bay that comprised the main town of Utila, a little out of the way but that turned out to be a good thing as the shop and its accomodation were right on the water. We could [View Full Entry]

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The next stop on our trip was Gracias and from there a hike out to the Celaque National Park and Honduras' highest peak at 2894m. We only spent a night in Gracias, trying to organise ourselves for our trip. We had been told that a lot of the hotels rented camping equipment so we went round to have a look. The first two places we went to didn't have anything and then we saw a pricelist for equipment in our hotel but despite having all the prices they had nothing as well! Undeterred we just took our hammock and some warm [View Full Entry]

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