Finally an escape from the Caribbean Ibiza!

For the past 10 days we have been residing in a surfer's paradise in Panama called Bocas del Toro (Mouths of the bull?). Since our last post, we moved into another hostel on the main street of Bocas Town. We really had no choice in choosing it as thousands of tourists and Panamanians decent upon this area for New years. We became close friends with people in the hostel and the nights leading up to and including new years consisted of quite a bit of drinking. (When the severe downpours hit there was really not a lot else you could do). Rum was obviously the drink of choice being in Central America.

 New Year's Eve at the infamous Aqua Lounge. Ron y piña, por favor?

The days when the sun came out were spent at one of the beaches on the main island (Isla de Colon) or on the close island of Bastimentos. A short water taxi ride would get us to any of the other islands, just make sure they come back for you because its a long swim. The beaches are ridden with coconut trees and at one beach we saw starfish and even a wild dolphin!

We became used to the way things work in central America, that is, incredibly slowly. Waiting 50 minutes for 2 drinks at a bar was clearly normal as well as waiting 40 minutes for 4 people to make a sandwich at a local deli. Queues do not exist and people are always trying to scam you out of as much money as physically possible rather than rely on repeat customers. This is to be expected though as people here are a lot poorer than most of the tourists and travellers who come through.

Food can be found for cheap here and the common dish in the local joints is meat, rice and beans. Everything you need for $4. After new years we had to escape as money still seemed to go very quickly here and so we would head for the border of Costa Rica.

Us at Red Frog Beach

A sloth chilling out. These guys only come down from the tree once a week to poop!

Our hike down to starfish beach

Attempting to harvest coconuts off a palm tree using a big log

Romantic beach picture

A 30 minute water taxi ride got us to the mainland and then we had to get to the bus terminal. The bus left at 10am and so we had 25 minutes to do a 30 minute journey. Luckily we had the most mental taxi driver who decided he would get us to the bus no matter if it cost all our lives on the way. Double overtakes on a blind bend at 120km/h was really fun. He did get us there on time though :). We threw our bags on and were able to pay the $14 each on board.

An hour or so on a non-air conditioned bus and we were at the border and told to leave the bus. We had to get stamped out of Panama. True Central American style there was no queue and no one knew what was going on with hundreds of people everywhere and only one guy stamping passports. We got the stamp after 2hr of waiting and made our way walking across the old railway bridge that was the crossing. The Costa Rican side was less hassle with an actual queue and an official looking building. Was glad to see our bus was there to greet us and hadn't disappeared.

Getting some fresh juice on the Panama/Costa Rica border

The bus got us to San Jose which was just going to be a stop-over for us before heading up the Granada, Nicaragua. San Jose was not the nicest place and after a couple of nights there we eventually got an 'executive' bus up to Granada. The bus company helped with this border crossing and all went pretty smoothly. We even got fed on the bus and got to watch horrible Spanish dubbed movies. We are now in Granada and all is well......except we left a bag on the bus and it will have ended up in Managua 1hr away.....oops!