Which way to San Jose?

Our two week visit to Nicaragua ended with a couple of nights in Santo Domingo, a 4km long stretch of beach that joins the two volcanoes of Ometepe together, plus a night back on the mainland in San Jorge ready for our next Central American border crossing to Costa Rica.

We decided to take the easy six hour route by booking the International Tica Bus which apart from the obligatory mind numbing immigration bit on the border, took us directly to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica.

The sole reason for going to San Jose was to re-stock, mainly to replace my busted camera, Vanessa's hiking boots which died of old age, and various amounts of her undercrackers which were virtually destroyed by a Belizean tumble dryer. Amazingly we managed to replace everything despite having to suffer the only thing worse than listening to Chritmas music in all the shops, and that's listening to Christmas music in all the shops.......in Spanish.

Costa Rica was never going to be a major part of our travels mainly because its the most expensive of all the Central American countries. Basically its been Americanised. Subsequently, after a couple of nights in the non-descript capital city and with our mission accomplished, we caught the local bus to Cahuita, a small town on the Caribbean coast just an hour away from the Panamanian border.

They were having a festival of rain when we arrived but undeterred and with our backpacks on, we trudged through the deluge to a very cheap and very damp room, right next to the ocean. We wondered why it was cheap but then we noticed the lack of a toilet seat but we couldn't be bothered to venture back out in the rain. We may have had to squat but we were happy.