Granada - Rivas - San Juan Del Sur - Rivas - Penas Blancas - Liberia - San Jose

So, I am once again back at Hostel Pangea in San Jose, Costa Rica...

We didn´t end up spending too much time in Granada since we basically saw everything in the city in one day... not much else to do besides explore all the neat churches and wander around gawking at the gorgeous architecture... and besides that it was really had to find cheap food anywhere...

So we headed down to San Juan Del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, and stayed at a pretty cool Hostel that caters to Surfers since surfing is the big thing to do in San Juan. We ran into a group of Peace Corps workers that we had met a few days earlier on Isla De Ometepe and ended up hanging out with them most of the time we were in San Juan.

For the most part we passed our days lounging on the beach and swimming in the warm ocean. The beaches in the area here are really neat. They are all small little coves surrounded by cliffs on the sides which makes its reall difficult to walk from one to another. Luckily our hostel runs a shuttle the popular surf beaches... so every morning everyone wakes up and piles into the back of the trucks with the surf boards stapped onto the top of the rig and we make our way down to the beach... where the leave us until the sun is already setting. One hazard we have seen here ( in addition to all the stories of people being mugged or briefly kidnapped) is that there are a lot of sting rays that hang out really close to shore. We saw three people step on them and get stung in the leg... which you then have to slice into with a knife to remove a barb that will keep sinking deeper and usually gets infected if you don´t remove it...

On my last day in San Juan we booked a boat to take us to a private beach for the day... which ended up costing us $10 each. The boat ride was an hour each way and got really exciting on the way back with waves getting to be over 6 feet... but it was really nice to float along the rocky coast and see all the different beaches in the area and not have to deal with a crowd of surfers all day..

I ended up leaving San Juan on my own to make it down to San Jose in Costa Rica while everyone else was planning to stay there a few more days... since it was Sunday there weren´t a lot of people traveling on the first two buses I took to get to the border with Costa Rica in Penas Blancas.

The border crossing itself was a bit hellish due to a lack of electricity... I ran into some more Peace Corps girls, whom I had orignally met in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and they gave me the low down on what was happening since I was struggling to figure it out myself with my Spanish skills still lacking... especailly in a large crowd of people waiting a que for hours at a time and shouting things to the Police and pushing and shoving around... All in all it took me about 3 hours to get stamped back into Costa Rica... which made me a little bit nervous since I didn´t actually get my passport back untl 5 minutes before the bus I needed to catch was leavng..

The bus ride back to San Jose, which usually takes about 4 hours, ended up taking 6 due to a few landslides that had taken out parts of the highway and being stopped and searched by the Police 3 times... The first time they actually found some drugs aboard and after a more thorough search ended up arresting two people... All of this made me arrive in a pretty seedy part of San Jose in the dark.. Reluctantly, I took a way over-priced cab to the hostel I wanted to stay at to avoid walking the 12 blocks alone at night and then got into a pretty heated arguement with the taxi driver out front when he tried to charge me 1,000 Colones more then the price we agreed upon when I got in the cab.. In the end, I just walked away with out giving him the extra money... even though it was only another $1.75..

So now I´m back in the big city and hoping to go around and explore a bit more and take some photos... so long as it doesn´t rain all day..