Costa Rica

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Following on from Nicaragua was the 10 hour bus journey to Playa Del Coco in Costa Rica, which included one of the craziest border crossings so far. There seemed to be 100s of people and about 2 members of staff processing everyone, not fun at all particularly given we had been up from 4.30am to make the first bus in Nicaragua.

Playa Del Coco is a small town on the pacific coast almost entirely populated by American tourists and souvenir shops, so not exactly the ideal place to soak up Costa Rican culture however it is somewhere famed for huge fish when diving and was a great place to get our last dive of the trip in. I know Honduras was supposed to be the last dive but we couldn’t resist just one more and we weren’t disappointed. Two great dives with huge puffer fish, massive rays and eels (the biggest one I have ever seen) and plenty of white tip reef sharks and nurse sharks. In the evening Michael Anne, Babs and I went out for a few quiet drinks which turned into a crazy night of drinking, karaoke and dodgy pictures with security guards uniforms (if you see the pictures you will understand!).

Not feeling too clever the next day we were lucky as we took local buses and all our connections worked out to reach Samara a much quieter town further down the coast that only has a tiny section in the lonely planet so is generally not too spoilt by tourism. A perfect place to relax before heading home (via Panama and Miami) and that’s just what we have done, sat on the beach soaked up the sun (although me and Michael have struggled to sit still all day instead just throwing ourselves into the huge waves and getting dumped all over the beach!) as well as some surfing and boogie boarding. As well as enjoying staying in a cheap but also very nice room with a good TV and some English channels (the advantage of traveling off season) and hence the photo of Babs looking very pleased watching a marathon of new episodes of Lost and 24, unfortunately I had no idea what was going on in any of them!

Our final stop was San Jose which was as smoggy dirty and seedy as Lonely Planet suggested but a necessary evil as we flew out of the airport here. The only noteworthy thing to report was that I picked up a great pair of addidas football boots for next to nothing and so am very excited about returning home and playing 5-a-side again (although I doubt new boots can do anything to improve my playing performances!)

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