My first experience of life in Quito is looking straight into the living rooms of its inhabitants from the window of my plane as it comes into land. It´s quite alarming when you´re so close you can see the glow of a television set, never mind that for them they have to put up with Boeing 747s coming into land just yards away from their homes. Slightly unnerving landing over I´m taken to meet the family I will be staying with for the next 5 weeks. All I can say is it´s a relief. After the accomodation in Guatemala (they were [View Full Entry]

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So next on the list after volcano watching is spending a few days in and around the cloudforest of Monteverde. I leave La Fortuna with Amanda, Emily and Rachel (two Scottish sisters from the dorm) and Miyka (a garrulous Canadian woman in her fifties). The little town of Monteverde is just as overrun by tourists as La Fortuna but has a much nicer atmosphere and our hostel is cool. Run by a hippie brother and sister combo it´s got an incredibly laidback feel. That evening Amanda and I go on a night time tour of the cloudforest. As most of the [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so what follows is a bit of a rant about hostel living and I'll start, as all stories should, at the beginning..... 0530 - Another early bus and it's evident straightaway that I'm heading into the tourist heartland of Costa Rica, there's barely a local in sight. I'm planning to spend a few days exploring cloudforests and an active volcano. After 5 hours on a hot bus I dump my stuff in the hostel dorm and head out for the rest of the day to explore the little and not very lovely town of La Fortuna. When I return in [View Full Entry]

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0500 - I get the public bus from San Jose to Palmar in the south-west, 5 hours away. Amazingly the bus gets there slightly early. I'd heard the public buses were pretty bad; sweatboxes, full of thieves and with drivers who stop every two minutes to pick up passengers. But the whole journey is extremely tame. Not at all what I was expecting from a Latin American country. Although, from what I've seen of it so far, that's pretty much Costa Rica all over. It feels like a much more developed country. There are well stocked, clean supermarkets, the whole range [View Full Entry]

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0630 - This morning I´m making the journey to Tortuguero, a rainforest in the north east of Costa rica. It´s a four hour bus journey, followed by a two hour river trip, as the little village and the beach are only accessible by boat. I´ve booked onto a tour as it´s by far the easiest way to do the only thing I want to do there, which is watch turtles nesting. Unfortunately, the group I´m with aren´t that great. It's mainly families with kids and they're all different nationalities, so there's a bit of a language barrier too. There are two [View Full Entry]

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On Thursday we head back to Habana to spend the weekend in the capital...well one day at Santa Maria, the nearest beach, but in the city for the nights. We return to our first casa for two days and then Ben treats me to a final two nights in the Hotel Nacional, the most famous hotel in Habana and five star luxury! The hotel was used by Castro as his HQ just before the revolution and it also boasts a long list of famous guests. I highly appreciate it given some of the places I have stayed in and will be [View Full Entry]

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The town of Vinales and the surrounding valley is a big tourist attraction in Cuba, mainly because of the slightly bizarre but very pretty mogotes which are basically ancient boulder-like hills that are dotted around the valley. On Tuesday we do a walking tour of the valley....an incredibly, incredibly hot place. However, our guide doesn´t mind being questioned on all aspects of Cuban life- Fidel, communism in general etc etc, so despite us both sweltering rather unattractively it´s an extremely interesting as well as picturesque tour. We spend the afternoon lounging by the pool of a posh hotel overlooking the valley. [View Full Entry]

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It´s not hard to see why Trinidad was declared a world heritage site, it has a charm which is unique. The cobbled streets, beautiful colonial houses and the lack of people on the streets give it a very sleepy feel. The inital impression is of little more than a village it´s so quiet. Once again our casa is delightful and the three women who live there are fantastic cooks so we eat our breakfasts and dinners here for the two nights we stay. We also have our lunches in people´s homes, by far the best way we´ve discovered by now to [View Full Entry]

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1530 - I´m waiting for Ben at Habana Airport. I expect him to be a long time getting through immigration. Two days earlier I´d spent a couple of hours waiting to get through the locked doors at Cuba airport and had faced a barrage of questions from 3 different officials. Cuba it seems is tough to get into and (if you´re Cuban) tough to get out of. Surprisingly, he gets through pretty quickly (obviously people on the Virgin flight from London are a lot less suspicious than those flying in from Central America!) and after a reunion among the masses waiting [View Full Entry]

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So I hadn´t planned to write anything in my blog for the day and a half that I´m in Costa Rica before travelling to Cuba, but my arrival in San Jose was pretty bizarre so I thought I´d share it with you. I arrived this afternoon at about 2.30 and headed out of the airport to try to find the guy from my hostel (they run a cheap shuttle which is highly convenient). Coming through the exit though I was faced by a wall of paparazzi and camera crews - flashing bulbs and journos straining to get their mics in as [View Full Entry]

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