hola!

Unfortunately the journal entries are getting a bit few and far between as a result of not staying in one place for more than 3 days and internet time restrictions. Just staying in this hostel with free internet now though so its time for an update............
After leaving puerto escondido we headed to San Cristobal for a bit of culture. The city is at 2100 meters which i didnt realise until it started getting really coldin the evenings, this was a bit of a shock having come from a place where the temperature rarely drops below 27. Spent a day looking around the city and then went on a tour to Agua Azual and the Palanque ruins (pics should now be up on the yahoo thing). Didnt realise that it was five hours each way but it was worth all the travelling. Agua azual is amazing, its basically a load of water falls with lagoons in the middle of the jungle. Having found a sign that said something like "dangerous not to swim" we decided to find a quite spot and go for it! This was really fun although i dont think the spanish people that were also occupying the area appreciated adams nakedness, but thats an unfortunate consequence of incorrect sign posting!
Afterwards we visited the Palanque runins which are the biggest in the south of mexico. The ruins we�re originally the main Mayan city in the area and are absolutely massive, we walked around for about half an hour and only saw about a third but this was really enough given the temperature at the time.

We left for mexico city the next day and spent a day getting sorted for Costa Rica, I did manage to get up the Latain Americano building though which was great to really get an appreciation of the size of the place. Theres a road that runs though the city thats about 50 km long!
We left at five in the morning for the flight to Costa Rica and just about managed to remember everything except ads passport which was quickly recovered from the youth hostel after we had driven about 20 meters down the road ,hehe.
Arriving in San Jose is certianly an interesting experience, first you have to try and actually get a ligitamate taxi and then you have to convince the driver to take you where you want to go and not where he wants to take you!
As a result of a crazy taxi we spent in the first night in a youth hostel which was about a mile outside the city, this was ok except its a complete nightmare to find your way around the city. We got a random bus in to the center and the place is completely mad! There are no street names and if you ask people for directions somewhere they tell you to go an amount of blocks, and then mention random distances in meters. As a result of this we spent most of the first day finding the place we wanted to get to from the airport.
We got taken to a college party on the second day as a result of meeting an american guy who had some contacts in the city. This was really great and we got to learn some more salsa from our costa rican friends!
Next day we went up to Tourtegero in the national park in the norhth east corner of the country. This was great and involved a jungle boat ride to get there on which we got to start our wildlife watching seeing a load of monkey�s and Camen. We went on a canoe tour of the national park the next day which was incredible (see pics) where we got to see all 3 kinds of monkeys, loads of birds and we found a load of baby camen. In the evening we went to see the turtels on the beach which is basically the main thing people come here to do, which again was really good although your not allowed to take pics of them which was a little annoying as we had to pay 10 dollors to go but it was worth it.
We then headed down to the south carribean coast via a 4 hour high speed boat down the jungle water ways to get to Purto Viejo. Here we met a load of really cool people and basically decided to come to panama. In the end about 11 people all came which was great and we got to Bocas del torro and had some chilling out time on the deserted beaches of the surrounding islands. The border crossing into Panama can only be described as extremly dodgy and involes a bidge with massive holes in it and a serious rust problem.

I�ll continue from here in the next update as its getting a little late and im running out of inspiration!

Anyways hope all is going well in england

Ric