Costa Rica

The first two days involved recovering from jetlag and getting used to the climate (very warm, sticky, with rain every day at least twice and sometimes for hours), adjusting to noise and dirt and persistant taxi drivers. We found out later that in San Jose we had managed to stick to the dirtier part of the city and missed out on the nicer places to visit...ah well. And Heredia was not the colonial city described in our travelers handbook..a bit disappointing, but still interesting. It got better from there.

Highlights:

- pleasant surprise, spur-of-the-moment trip to the Valley of Orosi, where we stayed in a hostel owned by a Dutch guy who married a Canadian he met during an exchange program in college...apparently we aren´t the only crazy ones.

- meeting a couple who were once both in engineering but decided to live in a commune...when that didn´t work, they moved to Costa Rica and started a vegetarian restaurant which they run with their daughters...interesting couple to say the least.

- taking a couple of the trails given at the hostel, missing the goal on one, getting a bit lost on the other, and were rewarded with hotsprings with the third.

- getting caught in the rain on one of our trails.

- a gigantic friendly frog, a lost butterfly that was as big as two hands next to each other, a cockroach, plenty of dogs (quite a bit healthier here than expected), an iguana that dropped from a tree right in front of us while trekking through some jungle), and lots of geckos.

- riding horses up the mountain in La Fortuna; they walked through mud in holes so deep that our feet reached the ground next to them...

-waterfall at the top.

-fruit juice from a hippy from some-where-in-south-america (he kept avoiding the question and wouldn´t say).

-seeing maybe-monkeys-maybe-ant-eaters in Monte Verde (Luuk is the only one who insists that they were monkeys...the rest of us are still on a mission to see our first monkey before the trip is over).

-eating fresh, ripe mangos, guanabanas, and bananas.

-watching Luuk run with a girl who was so afraid of lightning that she refused to walk outside with lightning that was kilometers away...she thought running would actually prevent her from being hit...

I´ll tell ya´ll later about nicaragua.
Right now: we are in Honduras, at the beach, enjoying the sun (and the Tour de France on our cable tv...boys...pff).
Hope your summers are going good!
Cheers!