Em and John's Travels: April 2008

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Em on Nicoya Peninsula

We came straight from the border to Tamarindo, a seaside town on the Nicoya Peninsula (John has covered this with affection I believe, so I will leave it except to say they have the best sushi restaurant in Central America – and I do mean that as a compliment!)

If you want to travel all the way down the Nicoya Peninsula there are two ways to do it: by obscenely expensive private shuttle buses ($40 each to get 30k down the road!!), or by 4x4. We decided to hire a jeep, given that the buses don't even cover the whole peninsula (there are weird gaps between towns, and hitching on these 'roads' isn't possible because nothing less than a 4x4 can do them and no one in their right mind is driving down them anyway). Good old Lonely Planet describes this drive as for the 'adventurous', and given that it's the end of the dry season and the rivers are currently at their lowest level, therefore ford-able, we thought it'd be a really really good idea. According to the Planet, 'For very good reason, the Costa Rican tourist agency recommends against undertaking this journey.'

Five river crossings later – one involving driving 100 yards upriver to find the way out of the river – and four hours of bonecrunching three-metre wide dirt tracks ruttted so badly we might as well have been driving up and down stairs (the hills were vertiginous altitude-sickness inducing rollercoaster inclines with killer bends), we reached the first of the towns on our list, Samara. It was touted as the next-most developed tourist destination after Tamarindo, but as John pointed out, they still had horses on the town football pitch (they still had a football pitch, which obviously obstructs prime beachfront real estate) and the beach was practically empty.

We spent 2 days in Samara, then headed down the coast with no real plan but to end up in Montezuma, praised highly by LP. They must have been on something because we found it expensive, tacky, LOUD (one dodgy disco pounds out crap music at incredible volume all night) and full of crackheads. Plus the beach was little more than a rocky patio and you have to go up or down the coast to surf.

So we set off in the long-suffering 4x4, enjoying the gorgeous countryside (cattle and ranch country, lush with trees on rolling hills, yellow meadows and full of baby horses we had to stop to coo over every few minutes – I could have got two on the backseat but John wouldn't let me). There are no road signs but there's only one road so that's ok. And after a few succesful river fordings we decided it was time for me to have fun with the 4x4 so I did some driving and sploshed through a few rivers myself, which was so much fun!

When we arrived in Tambor, another town given very bad press by the Lonely Planet Fun Police, we were not surprised to find that it was a lovely town with a mile-long empty beach set in a pretty bay. There is one large resort set back in (what used to be) the mangrove swamp, which through ruthless development did a lot of damage to the local ecosystem, and this is why LP bitches about the place, but we didn't even notice the resort until we drove out of town and passed some large gates on the highway, while the 'town' itself has a football pitch and two bars. We hiked down by a waterfall on the beach, walked through the woods to see the howler monkey colony that lives in town and saw the purple and orange crab population explosion.

But what I will always remember about Tambor is that it was where I met Isaac. He was gorgeous; six and a half foot of lean muscle and long legs, with huge brown eyes and dark glossy hair. He was sweet, funny, could wiggle both ears at the same time and would have done absolutely anything to make me happy. He also loved bananas. We spent two perfect mornings together while John waited for me on the beach, and leaving him was tough. But there's no place for a horse his size in my backpack, and I don't think he would have liked aeroplanes.
But seriously, we found a stable at a hotel in Tambor and my knee held up for a couple of treks along the beach and woods with Isaac, and his trainer Elizabeth, a really fun German woman who chainsmoked while we rode and introduced me to the pleasures of drink-driving a horse.

Nicoya Pics

Howler monkeys just hanging about in Tambor. Em found them while out riding.

Tambor beach. Busy.

Em's new love in her life - Isaac

San Miguel beach, even busier

We drove through this on the way to Montezuma, as in upstream 500m to find an exit

Em with Isaac and Trainer Elizabeth in Tambor, before encountering thousands and thosands of migrating crabs.

Yet more empty, idyllic Costa Rican coastline.

Cow balancing is the Costa Rican national sport,

Samara - the 'upmarket' Costa Rican resort still has horses and cows on the main street.

This is Em, driving a car, in a river. No tow trucks were hurt in the making of this photograph.

The main road from Samara to Montezuma

John finding a route through the river.

John learning to surf!

More 'main' roads - you can't quite see the hill as we did but I think you get the idea!

Corillo International Airport.

Samara beach.

Tamarindo beach. Tacky and overcrowded? What do you think?!

Sunset football at Tamarindo.

Smug shot of the year.

I learns to surf (ok, bodyboard on a surfboard, but my knee wasn't up to it!)

John posing with a surfboard at Tamarindo.

Nicoya Peninsula

jb/Costa Rica – Tamarindo/April 15/Eco backpacking snobbery
Backpacking eco-snobbery can really get on your tits. If you read the Lonely Planet guides you'd think Tamarindo was the commercialised armpit of the universe. A sort of super Costa del Sol packed to the gills with fat Yanks and their grim offspring oppressing the few remaining locals who aren't prostitutes or car thieves. 'Some people do manage to have a good time in Tamarindo', the guide grudgingly concedes, before going to to slate just about everything about the place. You know what? They're talking absolute bollocks.

The beach is quiet, gorgeous and endless. The water is warm and easy to swim or surf in, and you can't even see the beach-front hotels because they're set well back in the trees, and there's no music pounding out of sea front tavernas. We've sat without anyone within a hundred yards of us every day so far. And for once that's not because we smell.

Admittedly the town does have a huge AF factor (Asshole Footprint, an international standard measurement of how annoying Americans can be if they ever leave their home state). However it is neither crowded nor obscenely overdeveloped, and the nightlife is hardly 'pounding'. If anything, it's a bit dull.

Based on the Planet, we arrived here expecting the Costa del Sol or Cancun's hotel zone, but it's nothing like that at all. It is expensive and shiny and sterile, and there's a lot of construction going on, but the bottom line is that it's got all the facilities and none of the crowds. I can sympathise with the locals who've seen a sleepy fishing village turned into a pricey resort in less than a decade and are trying to fight further highrises. But that doesn't stop me appreciating a few creature comforts alongside some natural beauty.

Is it so wrong to want a break from bugs, cold showers and second hand toilet paper every now and then? To have a fan in the room or even, heaven forbid, air-con? And not have to kiss your ass goodbye every time you order the local 'special' in some stagnant cafe?

The rest of the Nicoya Peninsula (where we are) is largely inaccessible without a 4x4 and a deathwish - and thoroughly unspoilt as a result - so there's plenty of authenticity to go round. So what if Tamarindo is nothing like the 'real Costa Rica'? We can go there next week.

For now we're having a holiday from all this hard, hard travelling.

jb/Costa Rica – Tamarindo/April 14/They seek him here...
The elusive Quetzal remains just that despite Em's best efforts. This may be because she's looking for 'something cat-like and really cute', as opposed to something that's really like a, um, bird. I'd tell her, but she's having so much fun looking I haven't the heart.

jb/Costa Rica – Tamarindo/April 11/Spanglish Part 2...
Imodium is the same in any language

jb/Costa Rica – Tamarindo/April 15/AF overload
I take it all back, we're leaving. Ok, finding food for less than London prices is tough, but that's nothing compared to a Tamarindo AF that's just totally off the scale. If you stay in for the evening, or refuse to talk to anyone and wear ear plugs it's just about bearable. Just. Otherwise a good evening starts with this observation on Pacific coast geography, “Gee, this music's not, like, very Caribbean, is it?” and goes downhill from there. Quite why the locals haven't formed an Al Quaeda chapter before now is beyond me. Even the town's token Canadian is deeply offensive., and if I have to listen to Bob Bloody Marley, La Sodding Bamba, the Girl from Ipanena, or One Tonne of Mary one more time, I swear there will be blood. Eject! Eject!

jb/Costa Rica – Tamarindo/April 15/Surf's up
Oh yeah, forgot to mention but in keeping with my new found affection for all things watery, I've been learning to surf. And it's fun. And I can stand up on the board (although not for very long). Dude.

jb/Costa Rica – Samara/April 15/Cows and beaches
Costa Rica really is lovely. I never thought I'd see mile long beaches utterly devoid of people, deckchair salesmen or Greek tavernas. However it is really, really unfair on an amiable drunk to have cows with handlebar horns wandering the road on a Saturday night after closing time. It's asking for trouble.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Ometepe pics

Look at the angle of the shore and the boat!! That is
not trick photography. Ferry tickets cost 30p each, so the 'ferry' was a bit wobbly.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Granada pics

Nicaragua by Em

After our series of flights into Nicaragua we stayed one night in Managua, which was not fun! Really not a nice town, smoggy, dirty, shady and as usual we get a taxi driver who swears blind he knows where our hostel is, drives into the grotty burbs and then starts crawling around telling me my directions are crap and he can't find the hostel. Sadly my Spanish, though much improved (as John has already mentioned) is not up to calling him a lying git. We told him to keep driving, having agreed the price beforehand, and eventually he found us A hostel, a pretty grotty one but we were so tired we flopped down for the night and swore we'd leave for Granada in the morning. Whose bright idea was it to spend a few days in the capital anyway!?! (oops...)

So we got a local bus to Granada from the mad and hectic central marketplace (local buses in Central America are usually old yellow schoolbuses from the USA), because it was only a short trip of an hour and a half, and I really wanted to take more local buses because they're hilarious. John hates them because he gets squashed in, but it wasn't too bad because it wasn't unbearably hot.

The bus station is usually in a dodgy area, so we didn't think Granada was lovely at first, but after asking for some directions to the hostel we wanted we found ourselves wandering into a pretty, quiet suburb. After dumping our packs in the nice hostel (though hot – the fan was older than me and probably John too) we walked three or so more blocks to the central park and discovered the really nice part of town, with all the multicoloured churches, horse drawn cabs, colonial architecture, tat stalls and cafes you could want, as well as a healthy restaurant and bar community.

The food in Granada really was great too – the first day I had gorgeous grilled chorizo for lunch (dinner will be covered by John) and the next night we went to a restaurant run by an American, called Three-Finger Jimmy's (okay, not hugely authentic Central American, but obviously all local produce and local staff except the owner/chef). My steak was delicious, John's rack of ribs (ribs of what, we were not sure) was enormous and it was SO good to tuck into a big green salad after avoiding raw veg like the plague in most places.

With Mombacho Volcano in the background it was a great place to stay for three days, although we didn't make it up that volcano (we're climbing Concepcion on the island of Ometepe tomorrow, which is live, because we feel like living dangerously!! Seriously though, it hasn't erupted properly since the 50s and it only rumbles every few months, with no activity currently). We met some Americans in Granada who very kindly gave us their book on Costa Rica, as they were going north and we south, so we've got loads of ideas about the next leg too...

Em/Ometepe
We took the ferry from south of Granada to the island of Ometepe, a small bit of land formed of two volcanoes, Concepcion and Maderas. We had a go at climbing Concepcion (which is an active volcano and smokes constantly), but I didn't make it any further than the flat bit at the bottom before my knee gave up! We stayed for a couple of days in a hostel near Concepcion, and although the view of the volcano was impressive, the lake was an ominous brown and there wasn't a lot to do unless you were hiking up one of the volcanoes, which we couldn't.

We went from Ometepe to Liberia in Costa Rica, and really, getting into Costa Rica from Nicaragua involves THE dodgiest border crossing I've EVER seen!! There's a chicken-wire fence complete with hand-painted signs, which is in fact the exit from Nicaragua. We had no idea where our taxi driver had brought us, and we spent several minutes with him asking where the hell we were (which degenerated into me going 'That. Is. The. Border.?' in Spanish and him replying 'Yes. That. Is. The. Border.' a few times. ). There are guys trying to sell you the forms for immigration (and yes, they are giving them out for free at the IMMIGRATION DESK, but good luck finding that in the dirt-packed lorry park/prison compound that is the border zone), there are dozens of money-changers (a legitimate and useful border feature in Central America, but they can be pretty pushy, and they always tell you there is no ATM on the other side even when there is so you will buy currency from them at crap rates), and the whole time you can feel ghost fingers at your pockets and backpack so you're pretty frazzled anyway. We met some Canadians who had done it before and followed them through the gauntlet of gates, scams, dirt roads, fake signs and queues, for which we were hugely grateful.

Rio Cangrejal pics

On the drive (in the back of a three million year old tin can of some kind with high roll potential!!) to Rio Cangrejal

The road to Rio Cangrejal. Dusty.

Honduran countryside.

John on the rocks. (We rafted that bit of the river you can see roaring in the background. It's scarier when you're on it).

Em enjoying a (very rare) beer ;)

We rafted this bit too. Wish we could've got a pic of the Class IV five-foot drop we went/fell over, but strangely I did not have the camera.

Football in the shadow of the cloudforest.

Honduran forest and plans for Nicaragua

jb/Honduras – La Ceiba/April 4/Ugly as sin
Spent a night in downtown La Ceiba (not so hot unless you like chunky hookers and miniature drug dealers).

***************

jb/Honduras - Jungle River Lodge/April 5/A beautiful thing
We've driven up into the Pico Bonito cloud forest (a mountainous National Park overlooking La Ceiba and the western Honduran coastline). It's breathtaking. More varied than the Guatemalan landscape we came through, it's staggeringly green and fertile, sharply undulating and disappears into mist and clouds.

We've come to stay in a jungle lodge perched on rocks overlooking the cascading Rio Cangrejal. Hemmed in by dense jungle, much of it shrouded in clouds, the water roars through the canyon and on towards the coast. There are rocks to bask on, natural pools to paddle in and the water is warm and crystal clear, a joy to swim in. I hand washed my clothes in a river and enjoyed it. Strange but true.

The photos just don't (read 'can't' because the autofocus is shot on the Canon, that's my excuse) do justice to the sheer scale of the cloud forest and the variety of the wildlife. Kingfishers compete with flycatchers on the river while vultures make circles over the jungle. Monstrous, bumbling insects bounce off you as you sit watching the sunset. Two huge tame macaws commentate on pool matches (seriously, a pool table in the middle of the jungle), and the owner plays trance or banging techno way into the night. It's wierd, but it makes for an amazing and delightfully incongruous night.

We rafted down the Cangrejal today and what a blast that is – terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. There's a really addictive quality to the physical effort and teamwork needed to steer through the rapids. Looking back at one of the five foot drops in particular I still can't believe we came over that in a glorified rubber ring.

We almost skipped this place and went straight to the capital, but I'm so glad we didn't. It's not cheap (about $80 of add-on costs mysteriously appear), but worth every penny. In fact, I'm already regretting that we didn't stay longer.

****************

jb/Honduras to Nicaragua/April 5/Chicken out...
We're going to catch a flight to Managua (via El Salvador) on the grounds that it's only $30 each more expensive and saves 17 hours bus travel with an overnight in Tegicigalpa. That's the good news, the bad is an overnight there and then a chicken bus (oh, joy) takes us to Granada.