Livin' la Vida Coco

After bidding more emotional farewells, this time to the Caribbean family that had hosted us for the last 3 nights, it was back across the water to the bus station.  We'd upgraded to a single bus (so much for roughing it to the heart of darkness) but given that the upgrade got us a single bus for our next 3 stops, rather than travel on 4 local buses just to get to the next stop, it was an easy decision to make.

The next stop was in Boquete, about 4000 feet above sea-level although, given that we had to swap into a truck to make it up to our hotel, we had to be quite a bit higher than that.

The hotel was by far the nicest one we've stayed in on this trip.  Our Intrepid tour companions were delighted and with some of them having been travelling for 60 days, I can imagine how good it feels to hit some luxury!

The hotel had great rooms and showers and a large deck looking out onto the mountainous vista.

View from our hotel's deck

Apparently this area is (or was) the number one retirement place in the world.  I'm not quite sure how that's worked out - certainly not by the number of old people walking around the town.  I guess we needed a guide to be able to see them, although Paul, using those sloth-detection super-powers, was able to spot one up on a balcony...





There was the option to make a midnight climb to the rim of the local volcano to see the sun rise (so we're talking a several hour climb here) but we decided to go on a coffee tour instead.

It was high-risk - we were going to be drinking coffee in the afternoon, after all.  Call me crazy but sometimes you've just got to be out there!

The coffee plantation had been set up by a guy, Tito, who having driven back from seeing a working plantation, promptly started to cannibalise his jeep to make the relevant parts.

What's left of Tito's Jeep

Some beans

As well as being taken through the harvesting process, we were also shown how the beans are dried, graded and roasted.

Some roasted beans

The light, medium and dark roasts are commonly known as American, French and Italian.  Strangely enough, those dark more flavoursome beans actually have less caffeine in them than the lighter ones.

But obviously the most important thing is the skill of the roaster.  Fortunately, this guy really looked like he knew what he was doing:

   

Starfish Starfish Beach

The original plan had been to go snorkelling but half the group came down with the Latin equivalent of the Bali Belly, the cause of which was hard to pin down, as we'd all eaten at various locations without there being any common element.  Incidentally, you can't really call it the Central American Belly, because that could only refer to the way guys cool themselves down here which involves them rolling their t-shirt upwards so that their stomachs can get some air.   As cool as you might feel, it's not a look to try at home unless you really want to be the man from uncool.

Instead, those that were still walking, decided to go to Starfish Beach.  After a boat-ride and a surprisingly (to everyone but our guide) long bus trip, we reached the beach.  I should say "a beach" because we then had to walk round a couple more bays before reaching our destination.

The place had a great vibe to it: lots of families enjoying a day at the beach, music playing, barbecues and lots of swimming.  And, most importantly,  for us whiteys, plenty of shade!


Amazingly, there were even starfish.  This is when I'd like to tell you more about starfish but actually I've got nothing other than that they're 5-pronged pointy things that sit on the bottom of the ocean.

The "main drag" in Colon

After the beach we headed back to Colon where we decided to grab a bite to eat, while we were in "the big city".

We found a bar/cafe called La Buga which our guide tells us means The Boogie.  Nobody believes this.  The place looked across the water back to "our island".

The view back to Bastimentos Island

It also had a parrot there that could wolf-whistle.  That's amusing for about 2 minutes.

"Waiter!' - La Buga

Having taken everybody's order, the waitress gets to me and, to everybody's astonishment, wants to know if I'd like the special beer promotion that gave me 2 beers for $3.  This was in spite of several people before me ordering beers.  It's that thirsty face again, I tell you.

Darkness fell and it was time to head back.  There's no taxi-ride quite like a speeding water taxi in the dark, the tillerman also holding a torch so that any other boats can see him.  With a (literal) show-boating, last high-speed swerve, we were back at our hotel.

On the Waterfront

After our border crossing caper, it was a short minibus ride followed by a 30 minute speedboat ride out to our hotel, the Caribbean View hotel on Bastimentos Island.  Run by a really great Caribbean family, you were made to feel very welcome.

And you couldn't say that it was unreasonably named.  This was from the front deck of the hotel where you had your meals and took your "taxis" from.

Once we'd got sorted, the initial plan (for a few of us) was to go for a short walk and a climb up the hill to a cafe that grew its own coco and made its own chocolate and coffee.

It was some climb mind you, our guide being somewhat notorious for underestimating distances and times.  Once we got there though, it was a pleasant relief from that scorching day that even had had the locals talking about 'heatwaves".

TYou could have an ice coffee or a nice coffee  and chocolate truffles.  Not sure how you grow chocolate truffles but I think it's something I might look into with my green-finger skills.

Bastimentos Waterfront

Frontiers With Games

Crossing land borders is rarely fun and the Costa Rica-Panama one was no exception.

A bus trip of only about 45 minutes gave us a false sense of progress.  First we had to clear Costa Rican immigration.  Having got to the gate, we were informed that while we had to pay $US 7, we couldn't pay in cash at the gate.  Apparently, not that there was a sign or anything, there was a pharmacy a couple of hundred metres back down the road that would take cash payments - I'd love to be able to tell Australian customs and immigration, "Don't worry about me - I went to Priceline on the way here".   Otherwise, you could pay using a credit card (and watch your bank take as much for processing the transaction).  Given that it was approaching 38 degrees, most of us just opted to pay by credit card.

The immigration office was air-conditioned but we weren't allowed to queue inside it.  Instead we had to to queue in the sun but that was okay because there was a sign, in the finest of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy traditions, saying "Stay calm". 

Approach to the bridge to Panama

From here it was a walk across a long, ramshackle rail bridge to the Panamanian side with many people offering to carry your luggage with no doubt an obligatory fee to be payable on the other side.

Having crossed the bridge, we were pointed to a very nondescript office, where we paid another $US 3 and had a sticker stuck into the passport.  Now having paid some money and had a guy stick something in your passport, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were now legally in Panama but you'd be wrong.  Around the corner from this office was a much bigger office (still partly under construction) where your passport was properly stamped.  That's where a guide is really useful.  I'd have happily strolled on into Panama only to be picked up at the first checkpoint, which we passed about 10 minutes later in the bus.

Border difficulties notwithstanding, we were in Panama!

Iguana Break Free

We took a day to go sight-seeing.  First stop was the Jaguar Rescue Centre where, inevitably, there were no jaguars but then perhaps the guy named it after his car.  It was however, a really interesting place with the tour guide giving us a very entertaining and impassioned explanation of what each of the animals were doing there, sometimes as the result of calamitous human intervention but often just accidents in the wild.

This little guy (or maybe gal) really liked licking people because apparently we're just walking salt licks...

And these sloths were pretty cool.  In addition to these big guys, they'd just taken in a brand new baby who was being hand-fed.

You were also allowed into a very enclosed cage with young spider monkeys but no cameras allowed in there and, having once had a pair of glasses whipped off my face by a monkey (and then just snapped in front of me for good measure), you get no complaints from me about that policy.

It;s hard to beat toucans though.  This one just tore about the place!  You could touch his beak but seeing as what I saw him doing mostly was biting stuff, I declined that offer.

Most animals and birds here are being trained to leave their cages and hunt for release back to the wild but some, they know, will never hunt again, so they have to come up with alternative plans.  An old ocelot was going to be released back into a specially acquired reserve so that he could die as a free animal - this is tougher than watching a lassie movie!

After the rescue centre, we took a walk through the rain-forest, which runs right up to the sea.  You really need to do these walks with a guide because these guys see everything.  We'd only walked two metres and he stopped us to see if we could spot 3 iguanas in the trees nearby.  It took us about 5 minutes to find them and that was only because we knew we were looking for something.  In a two hour walk, we saw snakes, sloths, monkeys and ate some termites (because lunch was included).  Actually I wasn't crazy about the termites - they tasted rather like wood, unstrangely enough.  And Paul, by the way, was remarkably adept at spotting sloths.  I'm not sure if this is some secret middle-management talent...

Last stop on the wildlife front was an Iguana farm.  Now, these things really do look amazing.  Literally, relics from a different age.

The females lay about 75 eggs, of which, in the wild only about 5% survive, but on the farm, they were rearing about 40% of them and from there, they were being reintroduced to habitats in which they were endangered.

Mind you, I kept calling them goannas, so despite all those facts and figures I just quoted, I couldn't have been paying enough attention.

And that'll do fauna.

Deadlock Holiday

Another night, another town and another gate we couldn't open.  Shame it was 1.00 am!   The gate was bolted, padlocked and we only had one key.  But guess what?  It was a trick gate - all you had to do was turn the lock and pull open the other gate.  We had to be shown this by the American guy we'd woken up, having been shouting "Ola!" for 5 minutes.  Did someone mention idiots abroad?

We had left San Jose around 10.00 am in a local bus.  And it had been stifling.  The air-conditioning didn't work and the bus rarely got up to enough speed to have air coming through the windows.  Nonetheless, there is something exhilarating, something liberating about travelling down bumpy roads through those unfamiliar tropical landscapes.  It really gives you the sense of being somewhere else.  As for the non-existent air-con, well, you can hardly travel into the heart of darkness in luxury now, can you?

From San Jose we travelled down to Limon on the Caribbean Coast and from there on to Puerto Vieja (de Talamanca), which is a sleepy coastal town, the kind of backpacker place you used to find a lot more often than you do now.   As such, there is still a sizable, shall we say, counter-culture here and the devotees take it quite seriously.  We were in a shop selling T-shirts that promoted the benefits of weed but when I turned round to ask about the price, the shop assistant was on her way outside to share a spliff with someone...

The Limon area is quite different to the rest of Costa Rica because of the African influences.  Brought as slaves by the Spanish, the Africans were originally not permitted to travel outside the region and their descendants generally still live in this region.  When they speak English, it's with a West Indian accent, which always sounds amazing!  Funnily enough, when we mentioned to a mango seller that we were from Australia, he said "Ah, cricket!" and then went on to lament the decline of the West Indies team.

We found ourselves gravitating to a bar on the beach and why would you not?

Other people were clearly there for things other than the view or the beer though.  As night fell and the reggae beats sounded, people at neighbouring tables lit up and it wasn't the scent of tobacco that drifted over.  

But passive smoking of that kind is enough for me, so instead I pored over the beer list (i.e. all four of them) to see if anything interesting could be found.  Now, I must just have one of those thirsty faces because the waitress suddenly asked me "Would you like a good beer?"  I had heard that there were one or two better beers in Costa Rica, one of which was one called Segua, so I asked her "Do you have Segua?" to which she replied "The very one I had in mind!"  I'd actually given up hope of ever seeing it, let alone drinking it, so this was a very nice surprise in our last Costa Rican stop.


The legend of La Segua tells the tale of a woman, who, after being abandoned by her Spanish soldier lover, turned into a monster who still takes the form of a beautiful woman  to lure men, siren-like, to their deaths.  She turns back into the monster just before killing them (so that's woman-monster-woman-monster for those who weren't paying attention).  Now that's all very sad for unfaithful men to be sure, but I did enjoy the beer!

Show Me the Way (Back) to San Jose

Rather than double back the way we came, we planned to do a loop back to San Jose via the volcano-side town of La Fortuna.  On doing some reading (i.e. more of that research stuff), we discovered this was a little more involved than we first thought.  It turns out that there is a way of getting from St Helena to La Fortuna called Jeep-Boat-Jeep, which, of course, doesn't involve any jeeps but that sounds way more exciting than Bus-Boat-Bus, although I reckon something called "Triple B" could catch on...

I should have mentioned, in moving from Brazil to Central America, we had also moved from Portuguese to Spanish. At least now, when people asked, "Hablas Espanol" , I could now say "No".  This was a big improvement over my Portuguese where I'd found 3 ways to say "Two" and, trust me, I still have several more variations up my sleeve to try. 

Our hotel in St Helena was managed by a really cool old Cuban guy who spoke about two more words of English than we spoke Spanish but we battled through our breakfast orders, which actually just  meant that we said "Si' to everything and were duly brought mountains of fruit, rice and beans, scrambled eggs, toast and coffee.  

He also offered me rum (I think) one night but there was only a little left in the bottle so I declined - well that was my excuse anyway.  We were sad to say goodbye to him and he shook our hands profusely as we set off. 

The Jeep-Boat-Jeep trip basically cuts across the mountain and down to the far end of the lake at the foot of the Arenal Volcano and from there another bus gets you into La Fortuna.  On the way, the bus has to make it's way past cattle being led by moustachio'd guys on horse-back - you really feel you're in El Rancho territory and I don't mean that big pub in North Ryde.still

The trip is worth doing just for the water views:

Volcan Arenal (as I and the locals call it) is still an active volcano, but disappointingly, although not unusually, the volcano's peak was obscured by cloud cover.  So it was just the misty mountain hop for us but not a whole lot of lava...

La Fortuna was blazingly hot after the cool mountain temperatures in St Helena so we took refuge in a cafe and had a couple of drinks while waiting for our connecting bus, which was due in an hour. 

Amazingly, all of our connections, hastily cobbled together as they were, came off with the bus arriving to the minute at the hotel we'd nominated as a pick-up point and we were shortly on our way back to San Jose.

From there we were going to hook up with our Intrepid tour and who knows how that was going to pan out!