From the Pacific to the Atlantic in a day

Well... more accurately the Caribbean Sea which is part of the Atlantic... but you get my point.  Costa Rica is one of the few places in the America's where this is possible.  We started the day in Monteverde up on the Continental divide where we had been delayed due to flooding of roads and landslides.  The roads in and around Monteverde are pretty wild as you can see below

|That's a 1000' or more drop off and those roads are very slippery mud.  Note the imaginary guard rails!

Jen was starting to have cabin fever as the local temps in Monteverde were about 12 degrees and she was going nuts from all the rain so we figured we'd try to make it to either Manuel Antonio on the Pacific for much more rain (but warm temperatures) or back to the Caribbean side to Manzanilo.

After about 60kms of those roads and visibility ranging from feet to a mile or so, we finally broke out of the clouds and got on the Panamerican Highway (a road that goes all the way to Chile... although calling it a highway is a bit of a stretch!).  We stopped for some delicious "spiky fruit" which is something the locals enjoy... we've paid anywhere from $1-$4 / bag for it but this was the most tasty!  It tastes a bit like Leechy and you need a sharp knife to get them open.  Very clear fruit wrapped around a hard nut inside that spiky shell.  A big hit with all but Rachel.

Mamonchino - "Spiky Fruit"

From the Panamerican, we drove to Punto Arenas on the Pacific side to see if we could get through to Manuel Antonio but we were told the road to MA was flooded and people had been stuck down there for a week so we decided to dip our toes in the Pacific and head across the country for the Caribbean.

The Pacific...  this was one moment it wasn't pouring down rain.  

Some of the stuff from high tide...  enjoying being out of the car after 3 hours

Back into the trusty BeGo "Crap Bucket" for the drive across the continent

One of the few moments it wasn't pouring down rain - but you can see it's just a mile or so away.  You've never seen it rain until you've been in a Costa Rican downpour!

We took the new toll highway back from Punta Arenas to San Jose and enjoyed a pretty good drive for that portion although there were a few necessary detours around roadworks intended to prevent landslides.  |Then we made the mistake of assuming bright orange highway markers in the country mean the same thing in the city....  nope.  We were on an assortment of one-way, back streets and alleys as it took us 90 minutes to get through San Jose when we made our next mistake.  NEVER assume the shortest distance between two points on a map is a straight line!  After 3.5 hours of very twisty, turny up and downs, we finally arrived in "Squirells" (a journey that with our guide Modesto took no more than 1.5 hours).  Now we know why he went half way north to Nicaragua and back to get there.... but we saw the real |Costa Rican Central Valley at least.    After getting some fuel in Squirells, we spent another 30 minutes trying to find the road to Limon which we realized we'd passed through earlier.  Needless to say, CR maps are NOT accurate.  

From Squirells, it was another 90 mins or so to Limon, a rough port town with more containers than people that Jen had read was having a Mardi Gras... although we saw no sign of it and were told it wasn't for kids anyway.  By this time we were rushing the sunset as we wanted to get to our destination before dark so we could find a hotel... So no time to dip our feet in the Caribbean.

No time to stop as we rushed down the Caribbean coast towards Manzanilo and Puerto Veijo.

Just after this picture was taken, the sky darkened right up to pitch black and the clouds let loose with thunder and lightning like we'd never seen before.  We could barely see ahead of the car, so pulled off at the first little village of Cahiuta which looked like a bit like a Jamaican hell hole at dark... and found a spot that had a room for us and we settled down for the night after putting on over 500Kms on the car.  We were woken up about 5am by Howler monkeys having a party outside our room.  Bright sunshine but man, can they wake the dead. 

The first of hundreds of Howler Monkey pictures and videos.  Personality galore!

After this, we spent the last 5 days down the road at a nice little spot run by an Italian Family led by "Franco".  More on that later.