Costa Rica in a blur

The plan had been to fly through Costa Rica without really stopping, as the guidebooks indicated that it is one of the most expensive Central American countries, and so it just made more sense to spend our time in the cheaper countries.

The first bus trip was easy, although we were lucky not to miss the bus completely. It arrived just as we got to the pick-up point and left immediately, even though we were about 5 minutes early. So getting to David we got an immediate connection straight to the border. Luckily there wasn't much of a queue for Panamian immigration, as the processing for each person seemed to take ages.

On the Costa Rican side there was no queue at all, and we just hopped on a bus to the capital, San Jose, pretty much straight away (after the usual bit of confusion caused by our embarrassing lack of Spanish though).

Once in San Jose it was a fairly straightforward walk to the required bus terminal. We had time for a bite to eat and I used the Internet for a bit, and then we were straight off up to Liberia. This was the first indication though of what became an extremely annoying feature of independent bus travel in this part of the world. Basically there are many different bus companies travelling to various places, and they all have their own bus terminals scattered around the place. In this first case we could easily walk between the terminals, but that certainly didn`t hold later on!

Anyway, we arrived in Liberia fairly late, but it was small enough that we could easily walk from the bus terminal into the town. After the usual checking around, we found a good, clean place to bed down for the night (not in the guidebooks). Liberia looked like a nice, clean modern little city, but the next morning it was another early start to try and get up through the border and into Nicaragua.

The first bus terminal we walked to didn`t have buses to the border (this being the first indication of how fustratingly confusing this whole multiple-bus-terminals thing really is), but the proper terminal was only a few minutes further walk. Once there is was a short enough wait for the bus to the border at Penas Blancas.

Again we were lucky with immigration as the queue moved along very quickly, and after paying our 7 dollar entry fee we were in Nicaragua, having `done` Costa Rica in just a day and a half (it did look very nice and jungley though).