Adventures on the Caribbean Coast

We spent a couple of days relaxing in Lima and taking on much needed supplies (2 new surfboards). Lima is a huge city, home to something like 8 million people in the city and its surrounds. We stayed in Miraflores which is a apparently the ritziest suburb in Lima and where most travelers stayed. The city itself is quite plain and covered in alot of dust but it's a good place to visit for a couple of days. We watched the changing of the guard at the local palace and managed to avoid getting tangled up in a big teachers strike which brought the city centre to a grinding halt for a couple of hours.


From Lima we caught a flight up to San Jose, Costa Rica. After getting stung $US115 by TACA airlines to carry my surfboards we were stoked to find they had been taken off the plane in Caracas and had not made it to our destination. They did however turn up 4 days later much to my relief. San Jose welcomed us with some hot steamy weather and a tropical downpour which was only the 3rd time we had seen rain since leaving NZ.We spent a night in San Jose then caught a bus out to Puerto Viejo on the Carribean coast.

Puerto Viejo is a small beachside town with a bit of a reputation as a party town, so there were lots of backpackers around. The Caribbean had a really cool vibe, the people are mostly of Afro Caribbean descent and are so laid back. They were brought in as slaves to work on the banana and coffee plantations years ago and once slavery was abolished many stayed on making the Caribbean coast their home. They speak a Caribbean Creole language which is derived from English but we couldn't understand a word of it. Luckily most people around here spoke English and Spanish too so it was pretty easy to communicate. We found some good places to eat, the slow cooked Caribbean stews were really tasty and we found a coffee shop that had the most amazing iced coconut coffee. The coffee here is so good. The beaches around here were nice but a little under-whelming, especially due to the fact that most were quite polluted. Definitely a nice relaxing place to visit though.

There were heaps of these crabs running round


From Puerto Viejo we caught a bus down through endless banana plantations to the Costa Rica-Panama border and crossed over a very relaxed border crossing. We turned up at 11:30am to find the Panama office closed for lunch so had to wait a while before we could enter. The crossing is pretty funny, you have to walk across this dodgy bridge which is really slippery and has lots of good holes for you to fall through. No OSH laws round here. The locals seem to cross at will from side to side. There were kids on our bus who hopped off and walked across the bridge with us to go to school in Panama.

Our destination was the Bocos Del Toro islands, a small group of islands in the Caribbean just over the border. Although we were in a different country, the vibe was just the same, very laid back. The islands are really green, surrounded by blue water and urchin infested coral reefs. We stayed at this great hostel run by a German Lady, it's called called Hostel Hansi if you ever venture to these parts. Definitely the nicest place we have stayed on this trip.

Anna had been really eager to learn to dive and it was really cheap here, only $US210 for a 3 day course and 2 free dives once you're done. So Anna went diving leaving me free to surf for 3 days. Pity the swell was tiny but it was good to finally get back in the water again. The water was so warm 28 degrees°C and I found a nice little beach break with some small waves which I spent a couple of days at. Anna really enjoyed her dive course and saw a few stingrays, a sea horse and lots of brightly coloured fish.

We had a really enjoyable few days relaxing here then headed back to San Jose. Our boat trip back to the mainland took us up these old jungle lined canals used for years to carry bananas out to waiting ships. They are not really in use much anymore, but we still saw the odd local with a boatload of banana's making his way through the canals.



We arrived safely back in San Jose to more warm pouring rain. We had a brief look around the city which is right in the middle of a festival celebrating cows. There are these decorated cow statues everywhere ranging from cow strippers to cow clowns.







This cow wasn't scared to show her udders off!!


This anatomically correct Mannequin also didn't mind showing hers


Tomorrow we are heading off to the Pacific coast, swell forecast looks good so should get some waves.