Do you know the way to San Jose? Well, from Sucre you take a 10 hour bus south to Uyuni. From Uyuni you take a (absolutley freezing) 7 hour bus and then change onto a 2 hour bus to the Argentine border. All these buses will rattle your brains out. Then you spend an hour or so crossing the border and having your bags cursorily searched (the woman with no teeth grinned and openly invited the customs men to search her, which they duly did to her obvious enjoyment: Young Man! – in fairness to them she looked like she’d chewed a million tons of coca leaves in her time, and most of them were just before the border!). Then you take a 23 hour bus ride to Salta. Then a 25 hour bus ride to Puerto Iguacu (this place seems very familiar – oh look, there’s the ATM that ate my card back in March!). Then a bus across the border into Brazil and another bus to the local terminal. Then you take another to the long distance terminal in Foz do Iguazu (this place seems very familiar – are there any waterfalls around here?) and then a 24 hour bus ride to Rio. From there you fly to Panama for 7 hours and onto San Jose for a further hour (giving yourself only 50 minutes to transfer to add to the stress if the plane is even slightly late). Give yourself just over a week to do this to give yourself as many headaches and as much stress as possible and as much bus boredom as you can handle.
We had hit a brick wall in Bolivia. Karen was better but I was getting beyond sick of packing my (enormous and really heavy) bags and moving on every 3 days. The problem with leaving Bolivia till the end was that it doesn’t have the big attractions other South American countries have (and its south is REALLY cold – mmmm, freezing cold showers anyone?), so we were a bit ‘travelled out’, which was a shame because most people love Bolivia. Our solution to this was to get right out of South America and head to Costa Rica to work on a turtle conservation project. Unfortunately, this solution involved even more travelling(?!).
We arrived in San Jose a couple of days early. So we took one of Ross’ world famous(?) walking tours around the sights and headed out to the overcrowded park. Karen loved the Asian restaurant in San Jose so much that we went there two nights running. After all this we had to head back to the airport to meet our turtle group (which, unfortunately, wasn’t really a group of turtles - just other people who were going to be working on the project) and be taken to nearby Alajuela to have our orientation stuff.
‘I left my wallet in my back pocket... a $300 lesson you don’t need to learn!’ – the managing director insisted on doing the orientation video himself. He was a burk. The video was aimed at 17 year olds who have never been further than their local Tesco. It turned out that Karen and I were the oldest people on the project (the application form(?) had a section for ‘Work Experience’... erm, in my summer holidays I sometimes mow my dad’s lawn or wash his car and I had a job in Clinton’s Cards where my responsibilities involved dusting the novelty mugs and making tea for the ladies on the till!... ‘How do you think things will be different to where you live?’... errrr, I don’t recall seeing too many turtles in Manchester.... Hang on a minute, aren’t we PAYING to do this?! Even so, Karen wouldn’t let me fill mine in with the above answers).
After borientation we headed off to the ‘zoo’(/small collection of animals) and later to the casino for team bonding where ladies drank free and we showed our dangerous side by going crazy on the roulette wheel – only walking away when we had lost a full 2000 colones (which is the equivalent of about 2 Great British pounds)! Rock n' roll!
|  | 
|
