Welcome to Nicaragua......

Granada and Lake Nicaragua

James......

Jude........

Janet........

James emerging from the mist!

a baby boa!

We made it to Nicaragua! Quite an eventful journey yesterday which involved queuing at the Costa Rican border control for ages whilst being hastled my money changers, being charged a lot more than the local people on the bus to enter Nicaragua (hmmmmmmm, think we funded the bus drivers next couple of meals!), having our passports put in a plastic carrier bag and taken somewhere, having to pile off the bus and grab our luggage while Nicaraguan customs officers chucked it off the bus, drag our bags to a random table in the baking sunshine and queue up some more while they randomly checked bags (although I don´t think they actually checked any!!), retrieve our passports from a fierce looking border guard, get back on the bus which by this time was an oven, find out our bus didn´t go to where we thought it was going, get dropped off on the outskirts of a random town, hunt for a very elusive bus station which turned out to be through a cavernous market, and finally get on an old yellow American school bus with bullet holes in the windscreen for a bumpy 1 1/2 hr journey to Granada. Phew. Anyway it was worth it, Granada is a lovely colonial city near Lake Nicaragua with a great chilled-out atmosphere. You can see an active volcano from here too! But tomorrow we are off again, hot footing it through Nicaragua into Honduras, San Pedro Sula to be precise. From there we go to Puerto Cortes to catch a boat to Belize on Monday.....hopefully!!!!!!

The rest of our time in Costa Rica was brill. The canopy tour was great fun, swinging through cloud rainforest and very high-up! A total of 3 km of cables, the longest wire was over 1/2 mile and the highest 130 m above the ground. Also in Monteverde, Janet, James and myself got to hold a one-year old boa constrictor at the serpentarium, those of you who know about my phobia will understand what a big deal this was for me!!!!!! And on our last day in Costa Rica James celebrated his 30th birthday in San Jose :)

xJ&Jx