Entering Costa Rica

Today we finally moved from our chilled little island of Bastimentos.

And it is again a day with a lot of transportation (so for photos, you’re gonna have to wait a bit more). We took a boat to Bocas, followed by another boat to Almirante, on the coast, than a minivan to the border and finally a bus to San Jose.

As if it wasn’t long enough, the minivan to the border actually went the other way at first to drop off some of the passengers at a military camp in the mountains above Almirante. At first we did wonder why we were going the wrong way, but at least we gone some nice view on the sea and Bocas from the heights.

The border crossing was easier than expected. We though we might have some trouble entering Costa Rica as we don’t have a bus or plane ticket out of the country, but our (very worn out) plane tickets from the States to France where apparently enough to prove we weren’t planing on living too long here.

Once at the bus station in Sixaola, Costa Rica, we were told the next bus to San Jose was at noon and would last 5h. The watch showed 11:30pm, so we thought half an hour of waiting wasn’t so bad. After a couple minutes of reading we suddenly remembered here it’s GMT – 6hrs, so it was actually an hour and a half of waiting ! For those of you wondering, no, there is no daylight saving time here, so we are still at a 7hrs offset from the french time.

Otherwise, the bus to San Jose lasted a little over 6 hours (no surprise there, we’re kind of getting use to the discrepancy between theoretical travel time and real travel time 😉 ). At first we followed the shoreline closely, next to Puerto Viejo and its strange but nice black sand beaches. We won’t stop there because we’ve already spent a week in the Carribean, on the Panamanian side, so we prefer to get some fresher air more to the center of the country. After the port town of Limon, the road goes full west towards San Jose, and once the many container stocks passed, we went through very dense looking forests with once again impressively huge bamboos looking as if they were gonna fall on the road like a tsunami.

So tonight we’re in San Jose, a bit higher up and fresher than the coast (well, it’s still pretty warm, you only need a light jacket at night). We have 67 dollar cents left in our pocket (yes, we might have been a bit tight on budget to leave Panama 😉 ) and haven’t gotten an ATM to work yet, so we still don’t have any Colons. right now we’re chilling at the hostel bar, pretty neat (and we just had a flaming juggling demonstration!). So we get the blog up to date (who said we were late ?! :p ).

That’s all for today. We probably won’t stay in San Jose for too long, but we’ll tell you that tomorrow !