A Family Road Trip in Costa Rica

Welcome in Costa Rica. The line with trucks coming from the other side is a few kilometers again.

Roads, not too busy.

It's less green than we expected it to be.

Yes, i see the first mountains coming up in a distance 🙂

Same as in the rest of Central America; fires everywhere.

Balbo's. Runned by Edward, Wilma and Diego from Holland. They started last summer and turned the garage which was in here before into a restaurant for locals and travelers who travel between Costa Rica & Nicaraqua. They made it from nearly nothing into this!

A lot of overlanders stop at this place because there are nearly any restaurants or so ever in this area in North Costa Rica. From Left to Right: Edward the owner, cyclist Nick from the UK who stopped by for a breakfast, and us who stayed here a few nights.

Howler Monkeys close at Balbo's

Along the Balbo's restaurant is a river. There should be crocodiles in this river they told us but they are not dangaurous as long you don't bother the youghones.

Crocodiles grow their young underneath the green you can see besides the grass in the river.

Hanging around close by the river.

Two Polish cyclists. Overlanders are supposed to write down something on the restaurant walls. In just a few months time the walls are pretty filled up already.

We also filled up the walls a little. Maybe hard to see but that's a good reason to go for yourself and check it out 😉

The Polish leave again. Bye guys, maybe see you down the road again.

Kim having fun...

Learning chess the first time of my life. I did win!!

We are about to leave Balbo's again but Kim is having long conversations with owner Wilma.

On the road again. These signs are all over Central America. We only laugh at them and cycle along. Everybody is walking and cycling everywhere. The signs are just a waste.

When we are in search for a place to stay for the night a minivan stops by and the driver tells us he is the owner of a restaurant/rafting company. He invites us to stay for the night behind his restaurant.

The next day we find a lot of fruit along the road. We love it and eat a lot of it.

You want some fress melon?

When we wanne leave again Arjan discovers he has a flat tire. Bummer..

After the flat tire at the fruit market is fixed we cycle just 5 minutes and Arjan has another flat tire.

Look at this thing. the tire was empty in just 2 seconds!!

🙁

At the end of the day we end up at a parking where we are aloud to camp aswell. Nice spot along the beach.

Not to bad we guess. We stayed for two nights.

Filling our days with reading and making long walks on the beach.

At the parking they have two parrots. They where talking a lot. Sometimes you couldn't make the difference between a human or the parrots talking.

After two nights along the beach we move on. In just a few days Kim's parents will arrive on San Jose Airport for a 12day visit.

Nice views along.

From the coast to San Jose it's a long climb up. From sea level to 1000m. Halfway the climb we end up in a small bar asking they know a place for us to stay for the night. They tell us in the park opposite the street we can camp safely. We thank for the advice and order a beer.

One of the guys you see on the previous picture is so drunk he can't walk anymore. His friends drop him in his car where he falls asleep straight away.

The park opposite the bar and near the policestation. Not to bad for the night.

When we leave the small village again we pass the famous brigde the bartender was talking about yesterday.

At least we can take some pictures of it. From here it's not far anymore to San Jose. Kim's parents will arrive tonight.

We check in at our prebooked hostel close at the airport and take a walk to it.

Parents picked up, car picked up and checked in at their hotel. Now organize everything and have a good sleep after such a long flight.

In the early morning we do our own breakfast close to our hostel with selfmade fress coffee.

At the hotel we meet up again with Beppie and Rieks.

Good to see eachother again after 10 months. At an American Style bar we have long conversations about everything happend back in Holland and about our adventures over here.

After another night close to San Jose we move on to the coast. Along the way we pass a river with huge crocodiles.

Don't mess with these big boys.

The Buddha House. Our basecamp for the coming few nights. From here we will discover the area around.

Not a bad place at all. Because Beppie and Rieks still having a jetleg we take it easy today.

Once a year there is an international scouting game going on called iScout. The iScout is an online game played by scouting groups all over the world. Our scouting group in Almelo, Holland joins the game with about twenty people this year. We help them with the online part of the game.

The clue of the game is to do funny challanges, earn questions with beated challenges and earn final points with every good answered question. The challanges are mostly group challenges so we can't do these out here but we can help with the online questions. For us it is fun to speak group members again and see them doing the challanges.

Challange: create a bowling in a supermarket out of a melon, cucumbers and vanille vla.

Challange: Tape someone onto the wall.

Challange: No idea but it's a fun picture haha...

Challange: Make a picture from someone abroad in another country with a famous building. Although it's not a famous building we were able to help with this challange.

Challange: Create cookies with the iScout logo. There were many many more challanges, we're not gonna bother you with here.

We finished 183the out of 477 groups. Not to bad 🙂 Hey guys thanks for having fun together and see you again live in a few months!!!

iScout finished. We drink some margerita's and mojito's.

The next day a visit to NP Manuel Antonio is planned. The park is famous because the loads of different wildlife.

Ready to go altough Beppie and Rieks find it pretty hot day.

Bats haning around.

A slot is climbing up slowly.

Butterflies all over.

More unusual is the termite insects

Huge ants with golden asses.

24K gold?

More slots around.

Look at his nails.. huge.

Small lizards...

Big lizards.

It's a monster!!!

Monkeys high up in the trees.

Monkeys close by.

Pretty close by.

At one moment he didn't like it anymore.

Snakes passing by.

At some point in the National Park the beach is very narrow and close to another beach.

Same spot taken from the ground.

What are you looking at mate?

Amazing views.

Taking a shortcut over some rocks.

Spotting sea animals aswell.

On the beach you have to be carefull non of you stuff will get stolen by one of these guys.

Cute to see but they are real gangsters.

More beach views.

Wanna swim??

Yes we did aslo take a swim. We hanged our luggage in the trees agains the racoons. (Flash back to Alaska and Canada 🙂 )

More sea live discovered.

Pretty common in Holland but over here they dare to come close by.

At Hotel Ibiza. Wondering how many hotels at Ibiza are called Costa Rica.

Ready for another National Park. Wet forrest and dry forrest in one park together. We wanna check it out.

Rieks and Beppie wondering the huge trees.

Looking at the leafcutter ants. We saw them before in Belize now again in Costa Rica.

The leafcutter ants are creating huge highways through the jungle.

The four of us.

Wondering around.

Looking up for the tropical birds we hear all around us. They are hard to spot because the trees are dense.

Colorfull lizards on the ground.

Some trees are so close they grow together.

Kim spotting uncommon insects aswell.

The path is going this way over the old bridge. The bridge is closed because it's to dangerous so we pass through the dry river.

Trees with millions of needles.

You deffenetly don't wanna climb these trees.

Also there are monkeys in the trees here.

Awesome ain't it?

More colorfull monsters. Look at the blue colours through out his skin!!

Woodpeckers eating the insects out of the trees.

We move to another place along the Costa Rica coast. More up north with a nice pool.

In front of our appartment.

They have parrots flying around at the appartments.

Sometimes when you take a shower outside they come and check the water when they are trirsty.

Beautifull animals. The fun thing is. They are free to go and fly around all the time but they keep coming back to their home.

Also gekko's are present to eat the insects.

Close at our appartment is a bar with a nice view over the beach.

We stay till the sun goes down.

The day after we visit another small but very touristic village. We check out the shops and hang around at the beach.

A lot of venders come along trying to sell stuff. This lady is lucky and is able to sell us some of her goods.

At night back at our appartment this big guy hops in front of us.

Time to say good by again. We did like it a lot that you both came over these days. See you soon again!

We go from one visit to another. In about a month Arjan's daughter Maud will come over in Ecuador. Because we can't cycle through four countries in one month we have to take the bus on some parts to be on time in Ecuador. We've bin in Costa Rica for a while already so we take the bus straight from San Jose to the border with Panama. From the border we will pick up the cycling again.

At the border we find a bed to sleep in at Hotel Asia. Low budget but not runned by Asian people as you might expect.

They welcome us at the Hotel Asia with music from Holland. Or at least, they think it's from Holland. It's just a crappy but positive song from our German neighbours 🙂

Wifi again. Time to call home again.

Boxed TV's and unboxed fans in Hotel Asia. If you go to close to the fan with your head you will miss one ear!!

The Panama border. At this picture we are out of Costa Rica already but we didn't know that yet. As we discovered later we, and our Hotel Asia, were on no mans land in between the Costa Rica and the Panama imigration offices.