2nd November A drive down the coast brings us to Puerto Viejo, sandy beaches, palm trees and an endless amount of boutique hotels, cabinas, sodas, restaurants and tourists riding around on bikes.  We stop at a bakery (with slow bad service) for breakfast.  It looked...

CARIBBEAN COSTA RICA The 205km drive to the port city of Puerto Limon takes us around 5 hours on jammed roads, having to continually overtake slow moving trucks and cyclists.  The route takes us via a toll road through Braulio national park and the busy highway 32 all...

28th October   MONTEVERDE CLOUD FOREST RESERVE The towns of Monteverde and Santa Elena sit between two cloud forests which straddle both sides of the Continental Divide.   Warm and humid winds from the Caribbean sweep up the mountain slopes where they cool and...

In the morning, the sight of the looming Volcano Arenal is a majestic one, standing like a huge sentinel overlooking the serene waters of Lake Arenal and pastured green hillsides.

The volcano was dormant for hundreds of years before unexpectedly erupting in 1968, destroying three small villages on its western side. The town of El Borio on the eastern side was untouched and renamed La Fortuna (the fortunate).

We wake up to a lovely sunny day, it’s an 80km drive to Lake Arenal along a slow-going long stretch of road which is under construction, hundreds of orange-clad workers, mud and heavy machinery for miles. The road takes us around the shores of Lake Arenal and up to Lake Arenal Brewing Company where we stop for some lunch and a taste of their pale ale and dark beer which is not too bad but a long way off from British beer.

After escaping a Nicaraguan scam (and with our second flat tyre in the space of two days) then subsequently arriving at the border at lunchtime where we wait around for hours to get through, we arrive in Costa Rica, country number 44, completely exhausted!