August 2

Granada is a nice old colonial town. A touch on the smelly side, but otherwise lovely. We arrived here in the afternoon after some typically frustrating travels, having woken early to get the earliest bus from Altagracia to the Moyogalpan port that we though sensible (being eight in the morning) to arrive at 9.05 and find that a ferry left every hour on the hour and sometimes more often, except at ten o’clock. So we killed some time on the internet and at a little juice bar before getting the eleven o’clock ferry.

We both inexplicably got a little seasick (well, lakesick) on the crossing, which may have been the result of watching the end of Agent Cody Banks in dubbed Spanish on a funny angle. Or may also have been a result of the fact that for some reason today we are both a little pungent. Time to do some washing, methinks.

We jumped on a bus to Managua at the other end set to change and get to Granda along the way, then sat and waited for the 11.30 ferry to arrive before heading off. I thought resentfully of the two extra hours sleep I could have gotten this morning without losing any time but for a lack of information. At any rate, aside from falling victim to the “pay for your bag” scam, the bussing was uneventful and easy, and we found a nice old hotel in Granada about 2pm. Our room doesn’t have any windows (as is characteristic of this style of building, the owner told us) and is painted with lurid coral and white pin stripes. Love it.

We spent a few minutes regrouping, then headed out to the Museo Convento y Iglesia de San Fransisco, which was built in the 1585, then rebuilt after a great fire set by William Walker in 1856, and now houses somewhat of an anthropological museum. Our gratis guide took us through the exhibits, which included some ancient amusement rides used by the native populations (an eight-metre high pole to which two “messengers of god” were tied an swung about, for instance), some interesting pottery vessels, a handful of crucified christs and mattyred saints brought by the Spaniards to convert the heathens back in the day, and a collection of stone statues relocated from a nearby island (Isla Zapetera) depicting human figures with animal “alter egos” looming behind them. One well preserved specimen was a life-size woman being tackled by a very large crocodile. We enjoyed the chance to learn a little about the area as we’ve been feeling a bit starved of culture recently.

After the museum we took a little stroll around the central park, where clean, well-dressed children urged us to buy them hotdogs and groups of bony, mangy horses strapped to numbered carriages made us feel a bit sad. We shared a hotdog as a snack before traipsing back to the hotel, where we spent the next hour working it off by washing practically everything we own in one of the old-fashioned corrugated concrete tubs. I felt vaguely proud of myself, as I’d never used one before, and the only time I can remember even seeing one was in Pioneer World when I was seven. Couldn’t help but think it was a bit tough on the poor clothes.

Our garments strung out over criss-crossed lengths of wire to dry, we embarked upon a mission of consumerism: first to replace Tom’s broken thongs, then to acquire a suitcase (to hold all of the other items we’ve acquired and to protect the tent from evil baggage handlers), and lastly for dinner, where we ended up lamenting our diets over a fried chicken and chips. Why is it that cheap food is never healthy? We have access to a kitchen here for the first time in quite a while, but ironically now can’t find a supermarket.

We followed it all up with a night-time stroll across town to a backpacker’s joint rumoured to show movies, and earmarked Monday night for I Am Legend and The Assasination of Jesse James, which we now look forward to in earnest. Either as a stroke of luck or forgotten good planning, there are three good-quality day trips to take from Granada, and we’re here for four nights. So, we plan on spending the next few days visiting a volcanic crater lake, (hopefully) seeing some glowing lava at Volcan Masaya, and touring the miniscule volanic islands dotted just offshore in the Lago de Nicaragua. Sound good?

August 1

Pinch and a punch for the first day of the month – and no returns.

We had this idea that there was a boat coming past Ometepe today in the direction of Granada, on the northern end of the Lake of Nicaragua, so at a quarter past eight in the morning we were trying to walk down to the port of Altagracia and buy tickets.

After half an hour walking in entirely the wrong direction – we’d translated “a la izquierda” as “on the left”, rather than as “on the gentle left”, and wandered halfway to Mayagolpa — we came back the way we’d gone and got onto the right road, this time stopping regularly to confirm our heading with fellow pedestrians.

It was a long hot walk down roads that are bad for cars and fine for feet, between colourful old cemeteries, roadside stores selling soda and mobile phone recharge cards, lazy-looking farmhouses with behammocked porches and lush banana plantations. When we reached the shoreline the locals were all out doing their laundry in the salt water of the lake, beating the life out of their underwear on the stones. It was another fifteen minutes longer against the shore before we finally reached the ticket office.

We were in for a bit of a surprise – we’d heard that the boat was at 12:00, but what we hadn’t cottoned onto was that that meant 12:00 midnight! We were nonplussed – sure the boat leaves from San Carlos first, but coming past Ometepe at midnight means it arrives at Granada at 4:00 am, which is hardly a useful time of day either. After conferring briefly, we decided all of our walking had been a waste of effort and that we’d just go around the long way – bus to Mayagolpa, boat to San Jorge, and taxi and bus to Granada, tomorrow, when the sun was up and the hotels were taking guests for check-in.

By the time we had walked back to town, we’d been on foot for nearly two hours, and neither of us had had a drop to drink yet in the morning. We bought refrescos from a pulperia (grocery store, from what I can make out), and then breakfast from Hotel Kencho just down the road from our digs – I had a massive plate of fruit, Max had a somewhat dodgy yellow-coloured breakfast that included insanely salty hunks of cheese fried solid.

Since we weren’t sailing to Granada, a visit to the waterfall at San Ramon would’ve seemed to be on the cards, but we missed the only bus of the day by five minutes, so we decided we’d just relax all afternoon instead. Aside from a few visits to the closed doors of the Museo de Ometepe, which despite the listed opening hours remained resolutely shut all day, we did nothing at all while the sun was still up. Unless you count ordering local beers, rons con pina, playing cards and writing nonsense in little notebooks.

As the sun finally descended we popped across the road where one of the local restaurateurs was having a spiced chicken cookout, and had chicken with red beans and rice, coleslaw and fried plantains for dinner. The food was awesome – in fact, I’d go as far as to say it was the first genuinely terrific Centroamerican meal we’ve had. It’s been a long and hard search across three countries and some decidedly average hamburgers, rices with meat, and questionable fried goods.

We complimented the proprietors on the excellent food, then toured the town in the light evening rain, tipping our caps to the darkened figures lurking on the boundaries of the central park, and returned to the hotel foyer where the unproductivity of the day looked set to continue.

July 31

I completely mutilated a bicycle today, and I have no idea how.

I had rather hopefully set the alam for 6am in order to get our things together and move to another part of the island and still have a full day, but actually rolled out of bed at 7.30 after angrily resetting said alarm when it went off. We had a leisurely breakfast at the hotel (though not by our own choosing, their service was somewhat lacking in speed) during which I lamented the fact that there was no chocolate cake, despite it sitting very tantalisingly on the menu. We were quite glad to see the back of the place in the end, as it’s amazing how many flaws a dark room can conceal.

We ended up on the 9.30 bus headed south to Altagracia, where we planned to rent bikes and hop down the coast past some beaches to a collection of petroglyphs by the smaller volcano. Our plan was going swimmingly too- an hour later we hopped off the bus right outside Hotel Central, got ourselves some vastly improved rooms with spotless shared bathrooms and fixed up bike rental in Spanglish with the owner. Before long we were struggling up the slight but lengthy incline out of town, thinking how lovely it was going to be to take the hill in the other direction at the end of a long day. We hung a left off the only paved road on the island onto a corrugated dirt track, which presented us rather suddenly with a sharp bit of downhill. It was around this time that I realised my brakes were not the best, and having them jammed on full merely slowed what felt like a plummet towards certain death. Something behind me clicked and whirred, and I put my feet down to slow myself to a stop. Tom went on unwittingly.

The chain of my bike had managed to wrap itself over double, so I pulled it back to its rightful position and got back on, only to realise the back wheel wasn’t turning. Problem. closer inspection revealed three broken spokes wrapped around the gears and a giant buckle which stopped the wheel fitting in its designated spot and meant the thing was pretty well useless. I was amazed at the damage, as I didn’t recall even hitting so much as a rock. It felt like my back wheel had just spontaneously had a mental breakdown and given up the desire to go on functioning. Tom came on back eventually and we leaned the bikes up against a handy fence and continued, first on foot and later jumping on a bus.

We were a bit disappointed by Playa Santa Domingo, the sand was a dull grey and the water a bizarre shade of yellow. I’d somehow forgotten we were on a lake, not the ocean. The setting was nice, though, and we ended up having a cold drink and plate of fries in a bar bordering the sand, looking out through the palm trees and, bizarrely, a eucalypt. Halfway through our snack we were visited by a striking long-crested, long-tailed electric blue bird called an Urracka , who looked enquiringly at our chips but didn’t make any moves on them. A few grumblings which could easily have been either thunder or some mini erruptions from the looming volcano (the larger one, Concepcion, is active) announced a strong wind and a bucketload of rain, which fell rather suddenly and blew in the open sides of the bar. We took that as our cue to leave and started back down the road to Ojo de Agua.

The walk took about fifteen minutes down a muddy trail, but once we’d arrived we were rewarded by some concrete-edged clear pools with natural rock and sand bottoms bordered by cabanas, hammocks and some lovely natural jungle. We wasted no time getting into the cool water and spent an hour or so splashing about as the rain continued to fall gently on our heads.

Once fully waterlogged, we starte down the trail leading north and back toward town, which turned back on to the road justt a short space away from where we had left our bikes. We each grabbed one of the vehicles, Tom pushing the broken-wheeled one with the back wheel lifted from the ground, and me pushing Tom’s, which by now had a flat wheel. We caught the attentions of various passers by, but unfortunately our attempts to hitch a lift were thwarted. At one stage a group of young teenage boys ran out from a house and enthusiastically attempted to fix the bike. In a matter of seconds they had the tools out an the back wheel off, untangling the broken spokes and hitting the rim with a hammer to “straighten” it, thereby breaking another spoke. We tried to let them down gently, thinking of our ungracious return to the hotel with the mangled bike, but were only really successful when we jumped on the back of a pick-up headed for the highway. As we drove off I realise we were one rear brake pad short.

At the highway it didn’t take long to track down a taxi heading back into town, and thankfully the chicas at the hotel weren’t too concerned about the bike. I think it’ll be the last time we rent one, though.

July 30

Another travel day, another overland border crossing, from the cowboy grid of Liberia to the mysterious volcano-pocked isle of Ometepe.

We woke around seven o’clock and after getting our gear together hit the bank early, getting a cash advance for squillions from the institution just over the town square, and then caught a taxi to the bus stop, where our ride to the Nicaraguan frontier at Penas Blancas awaited. Half an hour later, we were en route.

Land borders are a somewhat alien, unfamiliar experience for Australians, and this proved to be no exception. There was little sign, at the border, of any security (a few hours later I’d read in the newspaper that 19 kilograms of cocaine and tens of millions of dollars in cash were seized here just a couple of days ago). The border stations were a free for all of people queueing up and submitting their passports to cursory inspection. We walked down a dirt road on a causeway, with luscious green swamps on either side, and after two hundred metres of no-man’s land we had left Costa Rica and arrived in Nicaragua. Entry to Nica was cheap at $7 apiece.

As soon as we arrived in Nicaragua a change was evident. People looked poorer, the roads were less well-maintained, and there was quite a bit more filth around. Over the preceding couple of days when we’d mentioned we were headed out this way to the Costa Ricans, the uniform response had been a grimace and a shake of the head. “Why would you want to go to Nicaragua?” the proprietor of the Peruvian restaurant from the night before had demanded. “There is nothing nice there – unless you count Ometepe, Leon, and parts of Granada.” Of course, our itinerary consists of Ometepe, parts of Granada, and Leon, but try explaining that to a Costa Rican!

We changed our pirate gold (giant Costa Rican colones) and some of our franklins for Nicaraguan cordobas at a bank, then jumped on another public bus headed to Rivas, the major town near our ferry to Ometepe. The bus was filled with guys in wifebeaters looking like itinerant workers, one of whom struck up a conversation with me just so he could ask me for money. Yep, not in Kansas anymore, although by the standards of Nepal or Cambodia, it doesn’t seem like such a poor place to me.

In Rivas, we cast about at the bus station for a while trying to work out how to get to the port, San Jorge, while fending off taxi touts. After a bit we realised there was no bus, walked off down the road, and found ourselves the oldest crummiest taxi I’ve ever seen – smashed windscreen, missing window levers, missing door handles, in fact the only thing on the whole vehicle that looked vaguely new was last year’s operating license stuck to a fragment of windshield. The driver took us the six kilometres down the road to San Jorge for a fraction of the prices quoted by the station touts, though.

From the shore, we could see the impressive twin volcanic peaks of Ometepe looming ominously across the murky-looking waters of El Lago de Nicaragua, each cone bearded by clouds. We were stuck in the ferry waiting room for about forty-five minutes waiting for the boat, whilst cheesy hits from the likes of Toni Braxton and Celine Dion played on the television and the place slowly filled up with tourists and locals, and then we were able to board. The ferry was a flat-decked boat with no railings on the rear section, and it was a surprisingly long trip, taking a little over an hour. We had a clear view of two-thousand metres tall Volcan de la Concepcion all the way.

On arrival at port in Moltagalpa, one of two major settlements on Ometepe, we disembarked and took a look at a couple of cheap hotels before opting for Hospedaje Central, a brightly coloured if somewhat filthy place on the road running parallel to the main drag. We hadn’t had any food since some mangy self-catered rolls at seven o’clock in the morning, so some sort of lunch-stroke-dinner was the next order of the day. Unfortunately, it took a geological epoch for our orders from the hotel restaurant to arrive – probably more than an hour, I think. We opted for the Nicaraguan menu, Max for gallo pinto, and me for the enigmatically named “indio viejo”, which turned out to be a rather disappointing sort of semolina-y slish with microscopic amounts of stringy chicken in it. Still, a big plate of slish at least!

We went on a fact-finding mission around town after waiting to eat, asking about tours we could undertake. The volcano tours all seemed to involve at least six hours of hiking, so we eventually decided that instead of doing one of those, tomorrow we’d take a bus from Moltagalpa to the other settlement, Altagracia, and then rent some bicycles and take them down the coast for a swim.

By the time we returned to Hospedaje Central, it was dark, and after several consecutive nights of getting very little sleep at all, by reason of sickness and of absurdly long movies on cable television, I passed out with my pants still on before it was even eight o’clock.

July 29

We had an excellent day trip today through Volcan Rincon de la Vieja national park, which was kind of like visiting a theme park except that the kitsch of the man made was replaced by the awesomeness of nature. It was an early morning with a six o’clock wake up, ready for our shared taxi at seven with four other guests at the Hotel Casa Real, two Dutch girls and a French-Canadian couple. The drive was pretty bumpy and, riding as I was on a make-shift seat in the boot, I had to keep my neck bent to stop my head from whanging into the poorly cushioned hood lining.

We arrived at about eight and were presented with a choice of three trails- the first to the active crater of the volcano, which was a difficult sixteen kilometre eight hour hike, the second to a waterfall and the third through what they called “the volcano trail”. We got ambitious and decided we could do both the second and third.

We started off heading west toward the waterfall and immediately plunged into a dark, tangly forest full of particularly ominous-looking ficus trees. The hike out took about two hours and wove through some incredible scenery, starting off by crossing a mouldy old suspension bridge and winding up and down stairs made by the sort of ficus roots that you expect to wrap nonchalantly around your foot and pull you underground as a tasty meal. After half an hour or so we hopped over a series of stepping stones across two crystal-clear streams, and as we climbed up the far bank again spotted a little creature strangely reminiscent of a Quokka sans the tail- it was about half a metre long and covered in wiry brown hair, with perfectly round ears and a pointy little snout. It fossicked around using its front paws and hopped a little on its back legs, disappearing back into the brush when it decided we got to close.

Another half hour or so went by when the scenery took a sudden change- we emerged from the dark, spooky jungle and were walking in the open plain, being closely watched by a collection of little lizards with long tails and fluorescent green skin. Despite my prejudices towards all things reptilian, I couldn’t help but like the little fellas, who looked so alert and glowing. The next hour was spent mostly out in the sunshine, with the occasional respite in some theatrical looking forests with dense canopies and little undergrowth, before a short walk down a jungled hill to the waterfall.

As we approached the falls I prepared myself for disappointment, as the thundering roar I was hoping for was more of continuous trickle, but there was no need to second-guess. It was only when we steered around a rocky outcrop that the waterfall revealed itself- a thick stream pummelling thirty metres down into an aquamarine pool lined with large pebbles. The water had carved a channel about ten metres deep into the top of the canyon, and, aside from glancing off a rock about twenty metres down as it fell slightly to the left, plummeted straight down into the pool. We hadn’t exactly come prepared for swimming, but stripped down to our undies and plunged in anyway, the spectactularly idyllic setting being too much to refuse. Other tourists turned up and followed suit. The water was cold and pure.

After we’d filled our desire for swimming we laid our clothes back on again and, sopping wet, set off back down the trail. As we pulled into a patch of forest that made us think of Sherwood Forest, we heard a rustling above us and stopped still. Soon enough we were treated to the amazing view of twenty or so golden brown primates making their way through the canopy above us. We’ve seen tribes of monkeys on the move before, but these ones were quite extraodinary, swinging gracefully from long arms and legs, little pokey honey coloured faces peering out from between the leaves. We debated for a while whether they were monkeys or some sort of small gibbon. They made their way off north west after about ten minutes and left us to head back east feeling pretty chuffed. We made it back to the guide house a bit after twelve and sat down to refill our water and eat some disgusting ham and “cheese” rolls we’d made earlier. A pizote made an appearance, so I got to point the little guy out to Tom before we took the eatern trail through what I’e nicknamed Volcano FunLand.

The second trail was basically an exhibition of the various surfaces through which the earth can ventillate, and was pretty damned awesome. We started off hopping across some muddy trickling creeks and climbing some slopes before reaching the fumaroles. From what we could see of the first fumarole, it looked like a giant pit of fog creeping out from below a fallen tree, and it had the percurliar twang of sulfurous gas. The second was a few metres away and was a bit more creepy, with what looked like a clear little pond with some fallen bracken bubbling madly to one side as if someone had put a bunsen burner underneath it. I stood there a while trying to figure out exactly what was so disconcerting about a little pond boiling, and why it made me feel like I was looking at a portal to hell, but to no avail. It was one of those feelings that you can’t use rational thought on.

We continued on our to our second stop- a volcancito or “minature volcano”. The crater was a few metres across and filled with with a thin ash-grey mud, which was bubbling and steaming in the usual sulfurous way. The trail continued around to bring us to some very hot springs and steaming vents surrounded by some amazing quad-coloured soil of white, sienna, ochre and indigo. The ground was solid and damp, and had smeared where people had slipped slightly in the mud to pull the colours into psychedelic swirls. The artist in me longed to pick some up and rub it into a canvas with a palette trowel, but I had to make do with taking some photos.

Next up were the mud pools, where thick grey mud belched and farted putrid gasses into the atmosphere, seemingly saving up the gas in giant bubbles which then broke and shot mud two metres into the air with a graceless “berrgh” sound. If anyone’s seen the Bog of Eternal Stench in The Labyrinth recently, they can probably imagine the type of thing I’m trying to describe. The trail finally brought us to a gently simmering lagoon the colour and texture of carrot juice before spitting us back out, exhausted, at the guide house. We were the last to resurface, so shortly after the others clapped eyes on us we were back in the taxi and headed for the hotel, thinking of how wonderful geology is, and wondering why we didn’t pay it more heed in highschool.

July 28

The pall of sickness was finally beginning to lift from our journey. I had had another lousy night of sleep – for some reason I’d been awake for more than half the night with my mind racing, full of pointless thoughts about employment, friendships and other odds and ends. But when I did sleep, and then wake in the morning, I couldn’t claim to feel any worse than “a bit average”, and a cocktail of pseudoephedrine and paracetamol put paid to that.

The previous night we’d booked ourselves into a morning tour of the “puentes colgantes” (suspension bridges, I think) at Selvatura Park, a local eco-wonderland, and then in the afternoon we were going to take public buses to Liberia, a town on Costa Rica’s north Pacific coast.

The tour wasn’t until ten-thirty, so we had plenty of time to pack in a relaxed manner, grab some coffee downstairs, and munch our way through a couple of somewhat stale, but filling empanadas from a local panaderia. Then the free pickup service arrived, we packed into the back of a passenger van with half a dozen tourists, and we drove down a few of Monteverde’s rather average unsealed hillside roads to Selvatura.

The place definitely had a theme park feel to it, and when we arrived it was already overrun with tourists from the US. Cunningly, we’d selected the walkway tour and not the more popular zipline tour, because we could tell the cables were going to be crowded, and the idea of queuing for seventeen ziplines in sequence didn’t really appeal to us, no matter how fun the ziplining itself would be.

Costa Rica is an incredibly green country. I’m not sure I’ve ever been anywhere that’s so hospitable to plant life. It’s a far cry from Australia. Here if you wanted a lawn, you’d probably not have any trouble keeping it perfect and green all year round, probably with only minimal watering. Selvatura Park is several hectares of premium rainforest (or “cloud forest”, or whatever they call it here), with an amazing array of epiphytic jungle plants.

We walked off down the relatively abandoned puentes colgantes route, and had a great time traversing a series of eight long suspension bridges above the forest canopy, the highest of which was at an altitude of eighty metres. All around us, and below us, were the phenomenal treetops of the region, where one plant may support dozens of other secondary plants growing in a whole ecosystem fifty metres above the ground, as each seeks to claim its own patch of sunlight.

There was a possibility of seeing tree sloths, so we took our time and carefully studied the upper branches of every tree we passed, but we didn’t end up having any luck. We did see a couple of impressive birds though, including a big black one that looked puzzlingly like a ground bird waltzing up and down the uppermost leaves of one of the trees.

For what it’s worth, it’s also very interesting to look at trees from directly above. You get a completely different sense of form, looking at the branches radiating out from a central point to catch as much sunlight as possible.

At around one o’clock we caught a return vehicle to Cabinas Eddy, grabbed another couple of coffees, had a look at accommodation options in Liberia, and then hoiked our packs up and walked into town to find the bus stop. We’d bought our tickets the day before, and had allocated seating, which is always a comfort.

We caught an initial bus to La Irma, where the treacherous Monteverde mountain road meets the highway proper, and then switched to another to get to Liberia. The whole process only took about three hours, nothing too bad, although when we did reach town we had to take a taxi about six blocks owing to not having a clue where we were – it was already dark by this point. The taxi took us to our hotel of choice, which turned out to no longer exist, but luckily there was a most excellent, and cheap, alternative just fifty metres down the road. Max and I both came within inches of sticking our legs down open manholes as we found our way there, which was slightly worrying.

We bought some fairly massive cafeteria combos at a grub joint just down the road from the hotel – the typical Centroamerican fare, stewed meat with rice and mixed salads – returned and booked a spot on the hotel shuttle out to Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieija, tomorrow’s destination, and then retired to our surprisingly sumptuous hotel room complete with big black TV, wireless internet and double mosquito net. On the televisual menu: The Return of the King, redolent with hobbit homoeroticism. It’s still not a bad movie, but I hadn’t noticed until this viewing just how silly some of the camerawork is. There are some scenes where the director tries to evoke a mood by just waving the lens madly at the set.

July 27

Had an awesometacular, frolick-filled fun fest today to make up for our inactivity over the past few days. I started off in the morning with a visit to Reserva Santa Elena twenty kilometres or so from town- Tom made to go with me, but a sudden doubt as to his health at the front gate sent him back to the room for more sleep.

I got to the minibus about three minutes before it left and was guided into a local tour office to faff about with tickets and such before getting on board. My fellow passengers were four young American girls who talked about their ziplining experiences for most of the journey, and rather put me off going ziplining myself by describing the crowds, lines and lack of self-pacing. It was about a half hour ride up the hill to the rather shmick-looking office/cafeteria that marked the entrance.

The reserve protects a pocket of cloud forest and was created in 1977. I’m not entirely sure what cloud forest is technically, but as far as I could tell it was a wetter version of a rainforest, creating its own mist to hang about and sheild the ecosystem. The forest was amazing, too, everything was covered in green mosses and lichens, with vines hanging in tendrils from wide-spread boughs far above. I set off down a fairly easy trail, stopping to stare at red, orange and pink flowers standing out against the green like lost prehistoric specimens. At a fork in the road, I started first to take the three-and-a-half hour Cano Negro trail, only to give up a little way in when I sunk my boot into the mud and made a loud squelch as I tried to reclaim my foot. I retraced my steps and opted instead for the one-and-a-half hour Del Bajo trail, which was obviously a more popular choice as the path was lined with tree stumps and built up most of the way with sand. The mist was ominous and gave the light a funny quality, occasionally I’d break intoa clearpatch where a massive tree had fallen, and the light hit the forest in sucha way as to make the green seem alive. At one point it started raining, but I got the feeling that it was only raining inside the forest, not outside of it.

I strolled along the paths, taking it easy on my still phlegm-filled lungs and stopping more often than not to soak up the atmosphere and strain my eyes at distant tree branches in the keen hope of seeing a three-toed sloth. I had been worried that the place would be crowded, but found it instead virtually empty, allowing me complete solitude for most of the walk. After a while I started seeing some hopping birds, a hummingbird or two and some butterflies, as well as a handful of centipedes, but unfortunately no sloths. As eleven thrity came round I started getting awfully light headed and realised I’d completely forgotten to eat anything in the morning, so started to walk back in the direction of the cafeteria for a snack. As I sat down with a jam tart and wallowed in a bit of self-pity for not having spied any mammals, a large raccoon-ish thing jumped over the path and browsed into the forest. I abandoned my snack temporarily and followed it for a closer look.

The creature was fossicking near to the building and, when I gasped in amazement at it, the serving guy informed me it was a Pizote. The animal was about half a metre from the ground an a metre or so long, and was covered in red-brown, white and grey fur. It had a long, bushy tail and a thin snout which ended in a black ball of a nose that looked like a pompom stuck on with craft glue. It was quite quick on its feet, which had five thick claws each, and was dragging its nose along the ground sniffing out food sources. A second Pizote came past and stood on its hind legs to reach the top of a railing post. They were adorable things, but I felt they were about 50% bigger than they ought to be, their size (and claws) making them slightly intimidating. They were obviously very timid, though, and ran off when they decided I was paying too much attention to them.

I picked a much shorter trail to follow after I’d eaten, walking up to a defunct research tower on a hilltop. I arrived back at the office a bit before the one o’clock return bus and watched the hummingbirds hovering loudly about a series of sugar-water feeders. I found Tom having just woken up when I arrived back at the hotel.

Tom was feeling somewhat better and was keen for a low-impact activity, so we went out to grab some lunch before proceeding to Monteverde Rarario for some wildlife observation. We started off in the newly created butterfly houses, marvelling at a myriad of local species. Our guide named each specimen and explained the teething problems they’d been having with the amount the butterflies ate- one of the displays had been completely cleared out in three days by some particularly ravenous Monarchs. The Grey Owl Butterflies were huge and had markings on each wing both of a large owl eye and a creepy snake. Cocoons of Glass Butterflies looked like little nuggets of molten metal.

After checking out the six-legged things we moved onto the four-legged in the frog pond. The displays started off a little lacklustre- grey brown toads the size of a fist, including a smallish cane toad and the much larger Smokey Jungle Frog which peered out from under a log like a mastermind villian. Soon enough, though, the cute little poison frogs made an appearance, bright red frogs with blue legs nicknamed “Bluejeans”, transparent frogs, metallic green frogs and the unofficial mascot of Costa Rica, a little green tree frog with bright red eyes, blue ribs and yellow feet. Our guide kept us entertained with imitations of the various calls and habits of the amphibians.

We snuck back down the hill to the hotel at about 6.30pm to step in for the night.

July 26

On the move again at last.

I woke up this morning all stir crazy and viewing our rather nice little semi-apartment like a bit of a jail cell. Tom was still in bed with the cold we’d both acquired, but I convinced him to get up and eat last night’s reheated chicken soup. I must of looked awfully depressed over breakfast, because by the end of it he said we should move on.

It turned out to be a good day for me, perhaps not so much for Tom who was still suffering. I ran down to the town in the morning to secure us a place on the 2.30pm jeep-boat-jeep to Monteverde then went back up to the hotel to pack. At eleven o’clock we walked out the door with our bags and heard the curious noise of a drumming band, which got louder as we got into town. As our view opened out over the mannicured central park, the noise pointed toward a parade of school children appearing to be having some sort of school-band march-off down the central street, punctuated occasionally by a group of baton twirlers or a tractor with a little float simulating a cable car or abseiling canyon or other local attraction. We set our bags down in the tourist office and found an eatery from which to consider the bands over a coffee and milkshake. They were really rather good, knocking out well-timed rendtions of classics with a series of drums, cymbals, bells, clarinets, horns and so on. Each had on their school uniforms and was headed by both a banner announcing their school and a crazed-looking teacher conducting the furore.

After about half an hour the once pleasant noise was starting to become- well, loud- so we left off from the eatery to the other side of the park, where we found a much quieter food tent under which to shelter Tom’s developing headache. After we’d shared an uninspired corn fritter, I crept away to look in the giant white marquee erected across one side of the park, opposite the church, which housed a selection of information stands, craft stores and a large group of people looking intently at something on the ground, which I cunningly avoided after noticing the word “serpentarium” boastfully displayed behind. Tom later popped his head in and reported a giant boa-constrictor type snake, incredibly docile and about four metres long and thirty centrmetres in diameter. He insisted I should look, so I peered cautiously over the heads of the crowd and saw an (excuse me) fuck-off-big coil of reptilian monstrosity that sent me jolting back about two metres in sheer instinctual terror (whoose that I am) where I hid behind a large white banner until Tom was finished observing.

I took a wander about town afterwards and offloaded some cash on some pretty pendants before the time came to get our jeep out. The jeep was actually a taxi (granted, a 4WD taxi) and was most shmick with electric everything and leather seats. We thought we might have the thing to ourselves, which was good, but then we pulled into an *incredibly* posh-looking resort to pick up to other people, who I was imagining as rich evil Tourists-from-hell, which was not good. Luckily my prejudice against the patrons of expensive hotels was unfounded, and the American couple we picked up were very normal, young-ish and rather nice.

Before long we were dropped off at a little bay on the lake with six or seven boats lolling on the shore,where I presented our tour voucher to a random boatman and we were pointed towards one of the shoddier-looking vessels of the collection. After waiting a little to fill with passengers and Tom having to switch sides to balance the boat, we were jerking across the lake with our heads a mere half a meter above the water. The view out over the lake was quite magnificent, and managed to distract me for the most part from the surprisingly large waves threatening, but never quite managing, to break over the sides of the boat. Tom was fading fast opposite me.

At the other landing, which was really just a thirty-centremetre square platform dropped on top of a reed patch, we all climbed out, were arranged into three minivans and followed each other up the hill towards Monteverde/Santa Elena. The road was windy and badly maintained, but, as those types of roads tend to, offered fantastic views of the valleys falling away beneath it. The countryside here is covered in velvety-looking green grass, dotted with little houses, livestock and trees, with the cloudforests trailing off into the distance. Other than braking for a big pink pig darting amusingly across the road, a surprise change of drivers and the compulsory tout-stop at a local snack bar/souvenier shop, the drive landed us in Monteverde without incident.

Our first choice of hotel was full, but we got a nice and very clean room next door for much more than we really wanted to pay, and Tom crawled into bed to rest up after his trooper effort at travelling. I managed to sort things out at reception despite my embarrasing lack of Spanish (pero soy apprendiendo) and trotted off up the road to scout out some dinner. The town, actually the two settlements of Monteverde and Santa Elena, is beautiful, arranged along a triangle of gently sloping roads and composed mostly of nice looking restaraunts, little shops and a big supermarket. It also is evidently very tourist oriented, with prices to match what you’re used to at home. I retreated quietly out of a pizzeria after reading their menu and discovering a pizza was the equivalent of $16 (plus tax,of course) and trudged, disheartened, back to the hotel for a conference on dinner strategy. After a bit of research, though, I found a meal of beef, beans, salad and rice for under five which we both shared, our cold having been one of those ones that turns you off eating much.

And that pretty much brings us up to the second. Tomorrow Tom will make an awesome recovery, and we’ll go to the frog pond and butterfly park, and take a walk in the cloud forest.

July 25

Might as well call this Journal of the Plague Day. At least for today, one of the most forgettable of the year so far.

I barely slept during the night, flipping over and over with a high fever and a piercing headache. My whole body was aching, and pretty much the only consolation was that because I’d caught it from Max, I could be fairly certain it wasn’t malaria.

It was clear from an early hour that practically nothing of interesting was going to happen. Max was in recovery mode, having left her fever behind and replaced it with a raspy cough and feelings of physical debilitation. The English-language cable station had a motley collection of surfing movies on – the watchable but vapid Blue Crush, and a painfully bad quasi-documentary about big wave surfing called In God’s Hands were show across the matinee hours.

At some point, I ate a small tub of icecream. For me, this was the day’s highlight.

Max made us chicken soup for dinner, which turned out to be surprisingly edible, surprising not because of Max’s cooking skills, which are estimable, but because I was able to bring myself to eat. Then we completed our surfing trifecta with Lords of Dogtown, which was immeasurably superior to the other two, and really rather good. It was more of a skateboarding movie actually, about some Californian kids who redefined street skating in the 1970s. One of them was called Stacy Peralta, so those “Powell Peralta” skateboards kids used to rave about during the late 80s craze in Australia must be named after him.

I won’t go on, anyway. Suffice it to say that we are both pretty sick and we watched TV and occasionally ate some food. Fascinating! I’m sure actual vacation programming will return shortly.

July 24

After the nearly empty debacle of the previous day, when all we’d done was move hostels, sleep, and watch TV, Max insisted that I do something without her — “do something constructive”, I suggested half-joking – so I decided to visit Volcan Arenal the hardcore way, by public bus and private feet.

Arenal is La Fortuna de San Carlos’ main sight, a rather active volcano that has been experiencing semi-regular major eruptions since it returned to life in 1968 in a shower of incandescent boulders that destroyed two small settlements nearby and killed eighty-seven people. At that time, La Fortuna was a blip on the map, a relatively insignificant farming town. Since then the compelling attraction of Arenal has turned it into a real tourist trap, and as we find it it’s crawling with travellers, the majority of whom are young kids on their summer break from the US, flush with cash for ATV rides and ziplining extravaganzas.

I walked at first to the town’s main bus stop on the central avenue next to the park, but something – probably the overwhelming absence of buses – told me I might be in the wrong place, so I followed my nose around a couple of corners and found another place where buses stopped. After asking a couple of locals, I worked out that I was in the right spot, and felt slightly smug.

It was a twenty minute wait for the bus to take off, and a half hour ride to the turn-off to the Parque Nacional Volcan Arenal, where the driver unceremoniously dumped me and two other skanky hikers (admittedly, one was somewhat less skanky than I).

The actual park entrance was signed as five kilometres down the turn-off, but I was feeling up for a long walk. Over the past few weeks we’ve had a bit less exercise than we were on average in most of our other destinations, and we had previously been getting very used to footing it everywhere for hours on end.

As I walked along the unsealed road the cloud-covered form of Volcan Arenal loomed up, only its black base visible above the forest line. The sky was overcast to the horizon in all directions which didn’t bode well for witnessing volcanic activity. I was passed by two or three taxi-loads of tourists in the forty-five minutes it took me to reach the national park entrance.

There were two trails to be walked – the Heliconias trail, and the Coladas trail, and neither was particularly long. It’s understandably forbidden to approach the caldera at all, given the volcano still erupts regularly, and lava flows down the mountainside every day. So as a park visitor you’re limited to walking to fairly distant viewing points and seeing what you can lay your eyes on.

I walked the shorter Heliconias trail first, an alternative to following the main road to the trailhead of the Coladas. It was a rather dull, humid pathway through tall grasses, the plants lacking in interest. As with practically everywhere in Centroamerica, there were huge numbers of lizards, which skittered off into the brush ahead of me as I walked.

Heliconias was better, with some genuine jungle — in which I saw a group of howler monkeys chomping contentedly at the top of some plantain trees – eventually giving way to the lava field. This was a huge expanse littered with black rocks about twice the size of a human head, that had been shot out by Volcan Arenal in times past. Although they were lightly vegetated in places, the rocks weren’t entirely settled, which made it fairly tricky to navigate around on them.

From where I was I could see the bottom half of Arenal, as the top half was still swathed in cloud and fumes from the caldera, which were pouring down to a certain level before dissipating. More interestingly, though, I could hear the volcano for the first time. It was making loud noises periodically, which I’d describe as being similar to the sound of a very thick soup coming to the boil, combined with gunshot-like reports. From time to time, one of the largish rocks would tumble suddenly into view below the cloud-line, rolling down the slope with a tracer of volcanic ash behind it.

I walked back along the Heliconias trail, and up the main road to a “viewing point” from which, unfortunately, the view was rather unimpressive, and having exhausted the possibilities of the park, decided to head back to town. As I was reaching the highway again, it was beginning to look like rain.

I sat forlornly under a bus shelter for a while, with no idea when the next public bus might be coming along, before finally asking the “tourist police” across the road, who told me there wasn’t one for three hours. Three hours! That was so ridiculous I decided I’d be better off trying to walk the eighteen kilometres back to La Fortuna, so I set off.

For a while it was a pretty enjoyable roadside stroll, the highway lined with the luxurious damp jungle that seems to cover every undeveloped square inch of Costa Rica, the road gently winding back and forth and up and down. I tried half-heartedly to thumb a ride from any one of several dozen empty tourist vans driving up and down, but none of them stopped for me, probably because I’m a big long-haired lout and in need of a shave.

After about an hour, the rain, which had been persistently drizzling, began to show signs of getting serious. Fortunately I was just walking past an extremely fancy resort called Tabacon Hot Springs ($20 just to look in the front door, $90 for lunch), so I was able to take shelter under their portico. As I stood there the rain got heavier and heavier until it was absolutely bucketing. A Tabacon employee came by and I asked whether any public buses were going to come past, to be told that there weren’t any.

I didn’t really fancy walking the remaining ten kilometres to town in such heavy rain, so I cracked and asked the reception at Tabacon to call me a taxi. When it arrived, it was one of the umpteen fifteen-seater tour-group taxis that had been passing me all up the road, and I felt like an idiot sharing this practically empty vehicle with just the driver. But at least twenty minutes later I was back in a dry hotel room and out of the weather.

Max looked to have been asleep for almost the whole day so far – it was now about half past two in the afternoon. As for me, I realised on my return to La Roca Virgen that I was starting to feel pretty off, and after an hour lounging in bed watching TV, my system definitely wasn’t keen on getting back up again. But I did, if only to drop down to the supermarket for some chicken and pasta for the evening meal.

When I got back, Max cunningly duped me into promising to cook. When dinnertime actually rolled around, I was feeling as sick as a parrot. It was pretty obvious that the dire bug that had been afflicting Max had transferred itself to me. I staggered over to the communal kitchen and cooked us Panamanian sauteed chicken and pasta in a state of delirium, while holding a conversation with an American girl who’d done horrible things to her right leg falling off a rented motorcycle – it looked as if someone had surgically removed her right knee and then grafted a godawful Frankensteinian mess in its place.

I carried two plates of delicious-looking food back to our hotel room, but in a cruel and ironic twist neither of us had the stomach to eat more than a third of what was in front of us. I was feeling really, really rotten, and shortly thereafter just passed out in bed.