Our last day is in the capital, San Jose, with only 350,000 inhabitants but a million who come to work here and all of them weaving crazily in buses, cars, taxis or on motorbikes in one big gridlocked traffic jam. To add to the chaos a trainline runs down the main avenue and crosses the intersecting roads. For once it makes sense not to enter the yellow box junction unless your exit is clear, but it is easy to get caught out, like a guy behind our bus. As a train...

From the cool windy cloud forest we drove down bumpy winding roads to the warm sun of the Pacific coast and the Pan American Highway which runs the length of the continent, but despite its name Is still largely 2 way traffic with opportunities to get stuck behind long slow trucks and tractors, where extra long vehicles slowly overtake long strings of even slower vehicles on the wrong side of the road regardless of oncoming traffic. We stop at a bridge to look dow...

Monteverde is the best known Costa Rica cloud forest but it was unusually cloud free and pleasantly warm compared to last week's chilly cloud forest, although fierce winds howl like banshees day and night here. Roads to the area are stony bumpy dirt roads, deliberately so to deter mass tourism and particularly cruise day trippers, but this is at odds with large billboards aimed at the adrenal adventure seeker. The suspended bridges through the canopy of the fore...

Costa Rica lies on a long fault with a big Pacific plate sliding under a Caribbean plate along the Pacific coastline, making it prone to earthquakes and producing 112 volcanoes of which 8 or 9 are still active. The most active is Arenal which first erupted in 1968 wiping out 3 villages and killing 90 people, as a result of which resorts have sprung up all around it and tourists flock there, including us. Up to 3 years ago visitors could watch lava flows from an ...

5am we are woken by a tremendous repeated noise which penetrates the earplugs, like a braking juggernaut? no, definitely animal - jaguar? wolf maybe? Getting closer, but I still didn't guess. Of course I had read about the howler monkeys in the rain forest, but was still not prepared for this deep, barking, howling, a very effective wake up call but with no control over the timing. During our walks and boat rides we saw several, velvety and brown in the trees as ...