The Caribbean Coast

After a somewhat disappointing time in the central area of CRica, it was with great hopes that we headed over to the Caribbean coast and a beach town called Puerto Viejo. Oh dear, even greater disappointment met us there with a really scuzzy little town with extremely overpriced accommodation, including one utterly unfabulous place called Jordan's Jacuzzi Suites. I had no idea that Jordan had branched out to Costa Rica.

Anyway, we finally found somewhere to stay up the coast a way in Cahuita, which was a much nicer little town. For "town" read "several streets". Still, it was only nice enough to make us stay 2 nights before we hot-footed it back to the Pacific coast and the lovely Playa Samara. Tomorrow we are moving further up the coast as we start the journey towards Honduras.

'ello, 'ello, 'ello

Guess who got pulled over by the police yesterday for overtaking on two solid lines? Not me, of course, cos I'm not keen on driving in foreign parts (plus am also a goody goody when it comes to driving and would never do anything so naughty). Yes, it was hubby. Tsk tsk. We were rather fortunate that the police man couldn't be bothered to write out a ticket for pesky gringos who claimed (quite truthfully) not to speak Spanish. Phew. And no bribes needed either.

PS Have added photos to the two postings below, including a distant shot of me frolicking in the surf...

Monteverde, paradise lost for sure

Tuesday morning we dragged ourselves away from the beach in Samara to drive to Monteverde, in the middle of Costa Rica. We were looking forward to visiting this fabled place which is reknowned for its cloud forest and for its dreadful roads.

It's true, the roads are absolutely appalling. Luckily we had a 4WD car or there is no way on earth we would ever have got there. Admittedly we did take the absolute worse of all the roads that it is possible to take, although we didn't know it at the time. So, we (meaning hubby, who did all of the driving) slogged our way up there through jaw-shattering potholes and over what may have been boulders at approx 15km/hr. The reason the roads are so bad is because the people who live in Monteverde (and Santa Elena, the other town up there) want to keep this little piece of paradise as Eden-like as possible by discouraging visitors. Imagine our surprise when we got to Santa Elena itself to find that the townsfolk are living it up with fully tarmacked roads. No potholes and boulders for them, oh no. And, even worse, the town is probably the most touristy place we've been to since Las Vegas. It was awful. Full of tour parties (mostly consisting of American school kids on spring break - great), hotels and expensive restaurants.

The reason most people visit Monteverde is for the cloud forest, where you can take canopy tours which involve zip-lining through the trees or walking across suspension bridges. Hubby and I did this, along with a gazillion other people - so much for keeping the area pristine and discouraging visitors. If that's what you want to do, then why supply all these activities, hotels and restaurants? Very odd and somewhat hypocritical methinks. As you can probably tell, I didn't think much of Monteverde.

Thursday morning we gladly left Monteverde and its crappy roads and headed to Lake Arenal and its volcano. Lake Arenal is very pretty and we drove all the way round the shore, after having our 2 punctured tyres repaired in a Costa Rican fashion (involving blu-tack and spit). We came across a German bakery where hubby was pleased to find a bag of Haribo jellies and I was even more pleased to find a bar of Ritter chocolate. Yum in my tum.

We spent the night in a hotel with views of the volcano which regularly rumbles and throws out lava streams - quite impressive, but not as violent as we'd hoped. I was more impressed by my first ever sighting of fireflies!

Costa Rica, the story so far

Crossing the border
Well, that was an adventure in itself. All started pretty well, we got a taxi from San Juan to the border at Pinas Blancas without any trouble (unless you count having your teeth shaken from your skull on the appalling Nicaraguan roads.) We even managed to negotiate the 'leave Nicaragua, enter no-mans-land' part of the journey without too much back-tracking - we've noticed that border crossings in this part of the world are amazingly bereft of signposts, hence it is very easy to walk across a border without getting the necessary stamps and paying the necessary fees for who knows what. Anyway, we finally found the Costa Rican immigration post due to the length of the queue outside the building. This was a bit of a shock as until now we have pretty much breezed across all borders (which probably means we did something wrong somewhere, no doubt we'll find out what when we try to board the plane home.) It turns out that there was a power cut at the immigration office (hello, get a generator), hence things were going somewhat slowly. And all the tour buses that turned up were getting priority ahead of any independent travellers. Great. Still, with our limited Spanglish we weren't exactly in a position to argue with anyone and we always follow the advice of the Lonely Planet (stupid damn book) to "dress smartly and be polite" at border crossings. Well, we can manage polite, but smart clothes are a thing of the past. Anyway, finally we were forced to just give our passports over to someone and trust in their promise that we would get them back. EEEK. Well, we did get them back, and all in all we were probably only at the border for a couple of hours, which wasn't too bad I suppose.

Liberia
The town in CR, not the African country. We shared a taxi from the border to Liberia with an American chap called Mike. The taxi drivers at the border had told us there were no buses, which is an age-old scam, but one which actually turned out to be true in this instance. You see we had foolishly chosen to travel on Holy Thursday. Holy what? Yes, Holy Bleedin Thursday when CR shuts down. Hence, when we got to Liberia it was like a ghost town and, true enough, there was not a bus to be seen. We managed to find a Chinese restaurant which was open (you can always guarantee on a Chinese restaurant to not be observing the holidays) and I looked forward to tucking in to my 'arozzo y verduras'. Now, even with limited Spanish, I was confident of tucking into a plate of rice and vegetables, so imagine my surprise when a plate of rice and various off-cuts of meat along the lines of Spam, turned up. But, who was I to argue?

Our room at the hostel in Liberia was really horrid so we wanted to spend as much time out of it as possible, which was tricky since everything in town was shut. Mike suggested a walk to the Best Western which has a casino. He was going to gamble while we sat in comfort and sipped drinks. So, off we toddled to the BW and, guess what, the casino was closed. Even worse than that, when we did find a bar, Mike & hubby were distraught to discover that Holy Thursday means NO BEER! In fact, no alcohol at all. We had a walk round the supermarket (which, miraculously, was open) and all of the alcohol was shrouded in black plastic, and the fridge doors all had official looking stickers across to prevent them being opened. All except for a fridge with some Guinness in it...

Playa Samara
We had a room booked at this lovely beach town (more like village, or even hamlet) for Easter Friday through til Sunday. Silly us. Holy Friday also means no buses! So we were forced to shell out $100 for a taxi from Liberia - ouch, that hurt. Although the blow was cushioned somewhat when we realised that the somewhat pricey hotel we'd treated ourselves to in San Juan, had only charged us for 3 nights instead of 4. Result.

Playa Samara was lovely but, OMG, was it ever hot. And our room only had a fan, no a/c! Sweaty betty. We liked it so much we decided to stay an extra night. On Monday we hired a car (for the duration of our visit to CR); we drove approx 7km along the coast to Playa Carrillo which was a huge, extremely shallow beach. And it was pretty much deserted - there must have been no more than 10 of us there. I'll post photos soon.

I hope you are all sitting down cos this might come as a shock to those of you who know me
I went boogie boarding. Twice! I loved it! I might go again! Enough exclamation marks.

Happy Easter from Costa Rica (ooo, it rhymes!)

Hope you all have a lovely easter with lots of yummy chocolate eggs. I'll be thinking of you all, and I'll be jealous, especially if any of you is enjoying a Chocolate Buttons egg which is my fave. Today hubby went to the supermarket and, in true hunter-gatherer mode, brought me back a bar of Dairy Milk, which is only the second bar I've had on this entire trip - which is quite a miracle for me since I'm a total chocaholic.

Anyway, that's it for now, I'll leave a proper blog of our Costa Rican adventures so far at some other time.

Topsy & Tim go to the Post Office

If you were to write a Topsy & Tim book about visiting the Post Office (or 'correos' as it is called) in Nicaragua the book would have to be about 3 times longer than one for visiting the PO in the UK (even taking in to account that there is no queue at the PO here, compared to the usual half-mile long queue in the UK.)

This morning we went to the correos in San Juan del Sur. We would have missed it were it not for the friendly (and armed) guard standing outside who must have spotted the wedge of postcards we were clutching, since it is very approximately the size of a cupboard-under-the stairs - I'm not kidding. With our pigeon Spanglish we were able to communicate our need for 12 stamps for Ingleterra. Not a problem. We were told they would cost 14 cordobas each. Fine, so we started counting out our money and the lady
started hunting through her desk drawer for some stamps. Yes, this is the Post Office... Eventually, she managed to cobble together 12 sets of stamps which added up to 14 cordobas each. One of our postcards is decorated with 7 (yes, SEVEN) stamps. Silly us; when we had written our postcards we'd left room at the top for a couple of little English-sized stamps, but we should have learned our lesson - in Central America they like to make stamps as big as possible. I think the largest stamps we've seen so far were in Mexico where they were about 2" square. So, if you are the lucky recipient of one of our cards from Nicaragua, you may not be able to read what we have written and you may not be able to admire the pretty picture, but at least you'll be able to start your very own stamp collection!

BTW, if you do get one of the cards, would you please drop us an email as we'd be intrigued to know if they do actually make it to the UK.

OMG it is HOT here!

Many apologies to those of you who are suffering chilblains in good old Blighty. I know I shouldn't complain, but it is sooooooooooooo hot here in Nicaragua, somewhere in the 30s, quite possibly the high 30s.

So, after three nights in the lovely Granada, today we took two buses down to the coast. Public transport is such a bargain here - for nearly 4 hours of bus journeys, it cost us just over 1GBP each. Remeber in the good old days when buses in England had conductors as well as drivers? Well, it's like that here, plus they have another person whose job it is to get up on the roof to load/unload all the bags, boxes and kitchen sinks that are part of the luggage that everyone likes to carry. Nicaragua is apparently the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere behind Haiti, and yet each bus employs 3 people. And yet in the UK (definitely not the poorest country in any hemisphere) our buses have the all-in-one driver/conductor in order to cut costs, and give the drunks more opportunity to annoy the rest of the passengers. How does that work?

Anyway, enough economics for today. We are now down on the coast of Nicaragua in a small town called San Juan del Sur. We only got here about 4.30pm so we haven't had much chance to look round yet, what with having to take cold showers and worship the god of air-con for quite a while. Hopefully tomorrow we'll get to have a gad about and also spend some time on the beach to top up our tans. Sorry, I'll go now before you start getting annoyed with me!