Rolo on Tour

The time intervals between my posts get longer and longer, so one short update on what I did the last 2 weeks:

After having relaxed enough in Liberia I made my way to the national park of Monteverde without actually going to visit the park. Instead I went to another canopy tour and it was not quite comparable with the one I went to in Nicaragua. This one was called ‚Extremo‘ and that name was justified as they had crazy long and high cables, the last one being a 1 km long so-called superman cable, where you were basically flying over a valley, 180 metres high. Awesome!

Next I spent two nights in the capital of Costa Rica, San José. It is supposed to be a bit dangerous there, but nevertheless I was quite surprised that when I got off my bus at 7pm on the main road and only had to walk 200 metres to my hostel, everybody advised me to take a cab there. I still walked and it was fine.
San José was quite fun, in the hostel with some creative dinner and drinks and later watching a full lunar eclipse in the middle of the night and the day I left in front of it, where I met some street artists juggling for tips, so I could not help but helping them earning some money ;-).

Those guys were pros, here one of them got an indoor surfboard on his chin 😉

I also found a german book in the book exchange and it was so cool to once again understand everything you read which for me is not the case reading in english.

The days of Christmas and New Year’s I planned to stay at the caribbean coast and Puerto Viejo de Talamanca was first on the list. The hostel I was in there was quite huge, there was a countless number of tents and hammocks plus some dorm rooms. The first time during this trip I slept in a tent and it was quite comfortable.

The area, where all the tents were set up; mine is next to the bucket

Christmas was spent ruining my feet playing soccer in the woods with locals and having tacos for dinner. Quite different than normal!

Next day I had enough of Costa Rica and went to Bocas del Toro, Panama, where I met my friend Mack again. Unluckily it turned out that the day I arrived was the only one for a long time with sunshine, which prevented all beach plans and made us leave there after 3 nights.

This was as close to sunny as it got…

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Managed to cross the border (more on that below) as planned and am now in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica.

It is normal around Central America to have a central square with a cathedral/church next to it, but this one, situated in the town of Liberia, looked quite unusual:

What is different here in Costa Rica? Many things… First of all, it is more expensive (I dont know if it is for that reason called the Switzerland of Central America) and travellers complain about that all the time. But the higher prices usually have a reason as it is probably generally more safe, clean, developed etc..

You also meet different people than usual here, many of them being americans who just spend their 1 or 2 weeks of vacation around here. Of course that results in quite a different way of travelling, trying to do as much as they can in that short amount of time.

People like to speak english here. I still cannot understand how the ticket of a bus company can end up looking like that:

Keep this thicket, is your passage. Have a nive trip! 😉

Coming back to crossing the border: Having made 4 border crossings so far on this trip, I can tell that this is not always easy. Especially the last two (from Honduras to Nicaragua and from Nicaragua to Costa Rica) where a little bit adventurous.

Going from Nicaragua to Costa Rica and having passed the 10km-line of trucks waiting to pass the border, we had to walk from office to office receiving all the necessary stamps. At one of those offices you have to fill out some form to get a stamp. Well what do some clever people do? They steal all the forms in the morning and sell them on the streets to all the people wanting to cross the border. I don’t know how they are allowed to do that or if the officials even get some money for closing their eyes. Anyway, we were walking around there and rejecting the offers to buy the forms for 1 Dollar ¨“Hay mas en la oficina“ (There are more in the office). At the point that was said all the kids started to laugh at the same time, as they knew that there were just no more ;-). Later we came across some boys who offered us the forms for free, we could tip them „voluntarily“, so naturally we accepted. The voluntary contribution was then of course demanded 5 metres afterwards, but as I did not want to support this kind of business I just kept walking and amazingly enough reached the office without getting beaten up.

Going from Honduras to Nicaragua I crossed the border on the backseat of a Tuk-Tuk, getting stamps and paying all the fees at all the different kind of offices which happened to be on the way. There I paid the voluntary tip of 10 dollars, which is probably a good hourly rate for riding a bicycle, but my chauffeur was really nice and he told me that all the nice tourists give him that amount, so I wanted to be nice as well. Also you probably don´t want to upset anybody in a spot where you are the only foreigner around….

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