Last Thursday Jamie flew in from North Carolina to spend a week at a place called Manuel Antonio on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Manuel Antonio is a small costal national park noted for its abundant wildlife and beautiful beaches, consequently there is now a 7km chain of hotels and resturants between the nearest town, Quepos and the park entrance. Jamie had fortunately booked a hotel/appartment for us that left us with a huge walk of 100m to the park entranc...

I've been in San Jose for two days now, my advise to anyone coming to Costa Rica is to give San Jose a miss. Its a large, dirty, crime ridden city which appears to have more razor wire on the buildings than in Johannesburg. In the hostel I've staying in I was caught in a flood the first night when I returned from the farewell dinner with the group I'd been traveling with. The new room than I was in, so new I could smell pretty much only the varnish that wa...

I've been in Costa Rica for a few days now and though its very 'Americanised' its an extremely beautiful place. First stop was Monteverde region to check out the 'cloud-forests' and their wildlife. The forrest reminded me a lot of the rainforests at home but with slightly different flora and fauna. I went for a walk through the canopy on the first morning there which was very neat, especially seeing my first wild sloth. The nature on the guided nightwalk through...

Granada is a Nicaraguan town that struck me as somewhere that was struggling hard to recapture its former glory. Sure it had some 'nice', 'quaint' painted houses on the main cobbled tourist street running from the cathedral down toward Lake Nicaragua (as every second local proudly informs you the 10th largest fresh water lake in the world) but once you left the main tourist street and surrounding lanes there were many run down, even dilapidated colonial building...

Crossed into Honduras a few days ago stayed in Copan for a couple of nights saw the ruins (which were overated) and also visited a bird sanctuary/refgue which was great and I got some good pictures of macaws and toucans. We left Copan and managed to get through the flooded low lands of Honduras where we saw many people displaced by recent flooding. After a long day of bus and boat we made it to the island of Utila. Utila is not much to see with its chief a...