The only thing we want to do in Panama is see the canal and fortunately that’s pretty easy to do from Panama City as it’s only 5km from the main bus station to the Miraflores lock visitor centre. In order to see something interesting we need to hang around for a couple of hours, but are then rewarded by the bulk carrier “Pretty Sight” and the car transporter “Courageous Ace” heading south through the locks towards the Pacific. The viewing platform is next to the original locks built in 1913, but there are now a new and larger set about 1km west of where we are built to take longer and wider vessels. Panama City is quite unlike anywhere else we have been in Central America with an impressive skyline of modern tower blocks. There is ... read more

San Gerardo is the base for hiking Chirripo, at 3820m Costa Rica’s highest mountain, though that’s not the only reason we’ve come here. Our guidebook makes it sounds like a scenic small village nestled in the hills with a few good accommodation options, and while we’re here I’ll see if I can be tempted to climb the mountain The decision on Chirripo turns to be easy. J isn’t interested in the hike and I’m not keen to do this by myself as it is a fairly tough walk, but there aren’t any permits to stay in the park available for the next 4 days (a Dutch girl at our hostel gets the last one). It seems quite odd given this is low season and the village is all but deserted. Instead we find that there is ... read more

People don’t really come to Santa Elena/Monteverde to see bats, but it turns out there is an excellent live bat display just outside town. The connection is that there are plenty of bats native to the Monteverde area, there’s not a huge amount to see, but it’s the sheer enthusiasm of the folk who run it that makes this a great place to visit. I’m surprised but we can take pictures of the bats, though it is very hard to get good ones as the bats aren’t keen to stay still for too long. The main attraction here though (excluding the adventure parks which might well be the main reason for some to come) are the cloud forest reserves. There are actually 3 separate reserves you can visit, we do 2 of them, both on self-guided ... read more

For us the answer to this question is via Volaris, a Mexican budget airline, this being the cheapest way to make the short journey from San Salvador to the Costa Rican capital. Despite a few glitches with their booking website and it taking a couple of goes before we successfully managed to check-in on line, generally everything with the Volaris flight goes smoothly. As we don’t have access to a printer I download the boarding passes to my tablet which works fine for all the baggage, security and boarding checks. The bag drop turns out to be one of the simplest I’ve encountered and there is zero queue, immigration is also strangely deserted, which means we are early for the flight departure. The plane departs on time and arrives early. San Jose airport is only 20km ... read more

Santa Ana was our pick of places to stay in El Salvador, it’s a medium size town and the trip to volcano Santa Ana looks to be one of the best things to do in the country, if you’re not into surfing that is. We take the local bus from the town to the volcano park, known as Cerro Verde. Our guide book didn’t detail this in detail, so it’s a good thing we check this out beforehand as there are only 3 buses a day. We need to take the early one which we are told leaves at 07:30am (turns out to be 7:40) and takes the best part of 2 hours to cover the 30 or so km to the park entrance. On the way we are entertained by a local guy giving us ... read more