Costa Rica

Since we are kind of running out of time, we have decided to just more or less travel through Costa Rica and later on through Panama. We managed though to see San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, (see next report) and the peninsula Osa where we hiked in the National Park Corcovado, one of Costa Rica’s most unspoiled areas (see next report).

So we just spent 5 days in Costa Rica and it might seem difficult to define what the country is like but from the impressions we have got we can say it is somewhat different to the rest of Central America. First of all you notice that the country is richer and that tourism has been around for quite a while. Everything is that well arranged for the tourists, tours, transport, hotel etc. that it almost seems too much. It somehow takes the fun out of it if everything is presented to you on a plate and if everybody tries to speak English with you. You see a lot of gringos in Costa Rica and people who go for a two or three week vacation. The prices are correspondingly higher in Costa Rica, well we are comparing only with the rest of Central America.

The little we saw of the landscape while travelling through Costa Rica was beautiful though, very green and well taken care off. You see less garbage in the ditches or elsewhere and people seem happy and carefree. The busses are in very good shape (compared to Central American standard) and connect even the small villages of the country.

Read more about our stays in San Jose and Bahia Drake (Corcovado National Park) in the following reports.

Bye for now!

Sabrina and Fredrik

PS: By the way, who could have imagined that it would be more difficult to leave a country than to enter it? When we tried to get out of Costa Rica at the Panama border we were not able to do so because the power was down and with that also the computer system of the border officials. We heard rumors that the whole country was without power though others said only half of the country. After a couple of hours they kind of sorted it out by checking our passports via telephone and so we got our stamps and were able to leave Costa Rica at the end.