To get to Santa Teresa we drove an hour and a half from San Jose, jumped on the ferry for an hour and a half, then drove across dusty bumpy roads for a hour and a half.And conversely, just the opposite for the way back.So here's a few shots of the ferry and Puntarenas, the city where you begin your ferry ride across the Golf of Nicoya.

Snaking thin along the coast sit lots of dusty beach towns--towns only in the loosest sense. More accurately, they're a string of restaurants, mini markets and bikini shops with a soccer field and school thrown in for the locals.But Santa Teresa on the Nicoya Peninsula doesn't disappoint, all the same.At the peak of the tourist season it's hot, dusty, expensive and vibrant. It ROCKS.  The guys are buff, the girls fit and everyone’s in bikinis....

Some countries never fulfill the promises made by their slick marketing campaigns. Costa Rica does. It has magnificent places of immense natural beauty and an enviable social consciousness. It's savvy enough to pass on having an army so it can spend huge resources on it's remarkable health care and the best education system in Central America.But as with any country, when you live here you see the warts. The cost of living is so high and the wages so low ...

We landed in San Jose, Costa Rica, at a quarter to midnight New Year’s Eve amid extensive fireworks. Fireworks are a very big thing here. Kathleen met us at the airport and as we drove to her house we passed bunches of revelers on every corner shooting off rockets. It was fun--would’ve been more fun if we hadn’t spent the last 20 hours in airports.Next day they took us to a beautiful botanical garden on the grounds of the Bougainvillea hotel. Qu...