San Jose

San Jose is the capital of Costa Rica. It's also a necessary stop because, like a spider's web, all routes manage to go through the terminals of Chepe – as it's locally known. Following our border crossing experience, we managed to get a bus almost immediately – finally, a stroke of luck – which took us all the way to San Jose. Unfortunately upon reaching the capital, they dumped us in some dogforsaken spot in the backstreets of dog knows where. We managed to hail a cab and tried to find a hostel that was still open at 2am, but after circling a few blocks we were getting nowhere and the ladies on the corner were looking at us a bit funny so we wound up stopping at the rather posh looking Clarion hotel – which was the ony place that seemed open. We wound up paying about $120 for our night there which is slightly over our regular price range ($20-$30), but we figured that after spending 8 hours crossing a border and to save ourselves wandering the streets of an unfamiliar capital city at 2 in the morning it was worth it. Plus we were finally able to indulge in a long wished-for luxury: a proper bath!

After spending a while over our (thankfully included) breakfast, making the most of the free wireless internet and getting our bearings from the font desk, we set off in search of more appropriate (i.e. cheaper) digs. Just two streets over we managed to find the hostel we'd been after the night before. Figures. Still, we were pretty lucky that they had one double room left. It's pretty weird that there are this many people here. Not since Semana Santa in Mexico had we had any problems finding anywhere to spend the night. Still, we decided to spend the day doing some touristy things cos San Jose is known as one of the few Central Amerian capitals which is not a hole. What we did find is that with a few adjustments in shop fronts and national flags and a bit of de-pedestrianisation, San Jose could be just about anywhere in the USA. McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Wendy's etc are everywhere, mall-going is a popular passtime and they even had their own cow parade!

We decided that the Museum of Costa Rica was worth a stop. It details the history of the country and shows off some of the pre-Colombian artifacts. It was in fact Costa Rica where Columbus first set foot on the American continent. The museum was pretty informative, but seemed to gloss over more recent history and there wasn't much about its unique position in Central America (and possibly the world) as a country without an army: which is strange because the museum itself is an old army barracks. Still, we did learn a lot about the history and culture of Costa Rica – which is why we were there after all.

We switched accommodation for our last night in San Jose to a place out on the outskirts closer to the university and a selection of interesting-looking restaurants. Unfortunately Tracy started feeling a little under the weather and we wound up not doing very much except for catching up with our rest – we hadn't really been sleeping so well. We were woken up at 1am by a couple of inconsiderate people talking loudly outside our door. It made me feel rather old and grumpy to ask them to shut up, but it made me feel a whole lot better to get some sleep.

So we finally stirred ourselves enough to leave San Jose on Saturday. We decided to head for Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast. As the name suggests it's the prime turtle-spotting location in Costa Rica. You can only get there by boat. When we arrived we were in for quite a shock – but that's a whole 'nother story...