When Gregor first told me that there was no road connecting North America to South America, I thought he was joking. That’s ridiculous, I thought, of course there’s a road.
Well, you can’t actually drive between North and South America because of a 50-km break in the Pan-American Highway called the Darién Gap. It’s a roadless stretch of swampland and forest between Panama’s Darién province in Central America and Colombia’s Chocó department in South America. (more…)
The plan was simple: 1) drive from Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast to Panama City, 2) do some interesting things along the way. What wasn’t in the plan: visiting a Panamanian hospital, performing axle surgery on Lucky, and driving across Panama twice to fix a piece of paper. Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t go according to plan. (more…)
Of the 7 weeks that we spent in Costa Rica, only 7 days were rain free. We didn’t plan to drive through the country during peak rainy season (September and October happen to be the wettest months), but we’re actually grateful that we did. The rain makes the land so lush and green and it makes the tourist crowds much thinner. (more…)
Gregor and I recently spent two weeks at Playa Sámara on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, parked in a ‘rustic’ campground called Camping Los Cocos. We are rarely drawn to a place so much that we want to stay for two weeks. In fact, the few times when we have stayed in one spot for more than a week were under very special circumstances – for example, when we took Spanish lessons, or when we both got the flu, or when we found a hippy beach in Mexico where chocolate croissants were delivered to our van every day by a handsome Spaniard.
Camping Los Cocos had exceptionally bad washroom facilities and was a rather hazardous place to camp. So why did we stay there so long? Well, the place had a special something… (more…)
Okay, so Gregor and I are pretty impressed with Costa Rica. After a disappointing month in Nicaragua, we expected to be slightly underwhelmed by the country claimed to be a nature-lover’s paradise. It turns out that Costa Rica is kind of a big deal, especially in the flora and fauna department.
Costa Rica has over 500,000 species of animals, fungi, and plants – that number represents about 4% of the world’s species. (more…)