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Chicken buses (The local buses)....I don´t know why some travelers try to convince everyone it´s the best way to travel. They are uncomfortable, jam packed, so hot you´re completely soaked with sweat after 10 minutes, they stop every couple of metres to pick someone up and if you´re very unlucky you sit on the floor! (which unfortunately happened to Mark for quite some time of the journey)
This is how we entered Nicaragua, after one day of 12 hours and a second day of 6 hours in those lovely buses... This was the first time in our trip we were seriously considering taking a flight home....
Our only bit of distraction on our bus ride into the country was about an hour after crossing the border. We were stopped by the police, who all of a sudden out of nowhere seem to appear on the road. Everyone had to get out of the bus and after five minutes they started taking out big garbage bags full of shoes...This was probably not very amusing for one other person on the bus, who probably lost his/her whole trade, but the police were very calm, didn´t question anyone and let us get on
with our travel.
Nicaragua was originally not on our to do list, but as we heard some good stories about it, and it was on our way to Costa Rica, we decided to make a couple of stops on the way. We spent two days each in Leon and Granada, two colonial cities in the north west of the country. They are two beautiful cities, although we enjoyed Leon much more then Granada (which is overrun by tourists) and the days we spent in both cities were sooo hot, we were hardly able to enjoy a nice city walk. Instead we just took it easy and thankfully used the swimming pools in both hostels.
Our third stop on the way down was Ometepe, an Island made out of two volcanoes in Lago de Nicaragua. It´s an absolutely beautiful Island, and I even managed to climb back on the bike again for a bit of sightseeing.
Costa Rica This is probably one of the countries we were looking forward to the most, but probably because of that ended up being a bit of a disappointment. Yes, the country is beautiful with nature reserves everywhere and perfectly formed
beaches and bays along the coast (I can only imagine how this country must have looked like ten years ago), but it is shocking to see how big areas of the coast have been taken over by high builds, second homes and resorts. Some parts have been completely taken over by Americans and what we found very hard to understand was that, why they (whilst coming here to enjoy such a beautiful environment) created a little America to live in. It is therefore also a very expensive country and quite weird for a country with so much money floating around the public transport and the roads are probably among the worst in central America. One day it even took us over five hours and 3 bus changes to conquer a distance of a dazzling 20 km. Our conclusion was that this country is probably most enjoyable on a three week holiday (when you´re not on a budget) and driving your own car.
But again, it has to be said, it is a beautiful country and the couple of moments we got away from the main drags were absolutely memorable.
We started still with diving in our mind, and
although not known for the best diving in the world...after a promise of finding some sharks we decided to sign up for two dives. The dive centre did warn us about the bad visability, but seeing only 3m. ahead was still quite a challange. Especially because this meant we could only see a two and half metre wide stingray on the moment it was almost bumping into us and we lost our guide (who wasn´t paying such great attention) twice. Unfortunatly we didn´t find any sharks as our guide also got lost on the end of our second dive , but we saw some great rays (one beautiful and very elegant eagle ray) gliding by and besides some other little schools of fish even encountered a little seahorse.
´Ok'.., we thought, ´maybe we shouldn´t focus on the diving in this country, but try something it´s a bit more famous for......Surfing!´. We both did a bit of surfing in the past, but we´re definitely still in the, Yeah I´m standing up, level. Therefore you don´t want the surf to be too good, but to be fair, we still need SOME waves. We visited some amazingly scenic bays and beaches (with
Samara beach as our favorite) but after a week of travelling along the coast we only managed to sqeeze a couple hours of surfing in....as the ocean was mostly FLAT!
We seem to be hearing the phrase: ´Sorry you´re just outside the season´ rather a lot during our trip. So much for planning :-)
After chasing the waves for a while we decided to go and visit the Manuel Antonio national park, to see some of Costa Ricas nature. And here we were definitely reminded of the beauty and abundance of wildlife of this country. We paid for a guide to show us around and every minute he would stop and point something out that sometimes was hardly visible for our untrained eyes. We saw sloths (both 2 and 3 toes species for you sloth enthusiasts out there) lazying around in the tops of the trees, several types of iguanas with their amazing camouflage, beautiful irridescent moths and butterflies, a very friendly deer who seemed in love with Mark (may be because he was carrying he usual packet of biscuits) a row of mini bats hanging upside down in the trees and most excitingly all three types of
monkeys that live here; The howler monkey, the Capuchin monkey and the Squirrel monkey.
The howler monkeys seemed to have a bit of a battle going on between two groups, the group of Capuchin monkeys were just crossing our path on the move and the little squirrelmonkeys were just very excited to see a bunch of tourists and came to check us out. The squirrel monkeys are absolutely the cutest things, but are unfortunately very endangered in the wild and are only found in a few places on earth, so we felt very lucky to have seen them.
The last place we visited in Costa Rica was close to the capital San Jose, so we could arrange a ticket to fly from here to Ecuador, South America. We stayed in a little city outside the capital in one of our favourite hostals uptill now. The hostal itself wasn´t too exciting, but it was run by such a friendly guy, we felt like we were visiting him in his home. Eduardo is an artist and has his workshop in the hostal he runs. There was a lovely garden at the back where, at night, he joined us for a drink
and a chat. It was a great way to finish our trip through central america and we were almost tempted to stay a bit longer.
We had one full day to spare, before we were flying out and decided to visit the nearby volcano Poas and its nature reserve. A good way to finish central America, as this continent is absolutely scattered by volcano´s and nature parks. There wasn´t much to see on the top, as the crater itself was covered with clouds (wrong season perhaps?), but the walk through the cloudforest was magical and even managed to keep us in a quiet trance for quite some time!
And then it was time to leave central America and fly out to Ecuador. We loved the time we spent in Central America with the people we met and places we visited and hope to see again someday. But we were also looking forward to the next part. Especially as we decided to start this part of the trip by visiting the Galapagos Islands, of the coast of Ecuador.
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Meertje
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a little message
Hey Guys, Every time I read your blog it's also a journey for me... =D Spend the last 10 minutes finding out how to leave you a message... :-S Yeah, -unfortunatelly- I'm not so bright... Still very happy to see you both healthy and happy on pictures. Hope that's really how both of you are doing. Big superkiss fot both of you!