Why only 3 days? Well, there’s a story to that and it involves an airline. Not just any airline but the same blasted one that caused us such difficulty departing Brazil. CopaAssholeAirlines.
But board it we did, thankfully. You’ll see at the end of the post the challenge this time around but in the meantime, let’s explore Panamá.
Except WE were the monkeys, for a couple of hours at least. Not so much swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan but instead zip lining from tree to tree!
So we moved from the not overly mountainous area but a delightful small town of La Fortuna to more mountainous territory also on the traveller circuit known as Monteverde. To get here we found a combined 4-hour service that would offer van-water taxi-van transportation which sounded great and would allow us to cruise along Costa Rica’s largest lake, Lake Arenal, with constant views of the volcano as a picturesque backdrop.
Five days later and through no fault of our own, we were finally able to leave the undesirable capital city of San José in desperate search for the real Costa Rica. Did we find it? Let’s find out…
Do you remember in my last post I questioned whether the Easter holiday drawback might have worked out for the best? Granted, I said it with uncertainty and no real conviction but it really has worked so very much in our favour!
Accommodation rates are back down to normal, the vast amount of people have dispersed back to whenever it is they came from and then there was the weather. Plenty of locals informed us that it chucked it down during Easter week, rain for days we were told.
I was a tiny bit apprehensive about visiting Mexico City. It’s one of the biggest cities in the World and it conjures up preconceived ideas largely delivered to us by Hollywood, let’s be honest. In reality, as a regular tourist, it’s so very different. We only had a couple of days in the Big City and we used that time wisely. The first day we walked over 5 actual miles to get about and see and have a feel for the city. To have gone from all-inclusive, chilling to walking 5 miles literally the next day, well, our little feet hurt the next day. Perfect then, for us to achieve more exploration but this time courtesy of a tour bus allowing us hop on and hop off as we liked.
Viv’s surprise started in my familiar fashion. I did tell her that we were gonna stay along ‘the strip’ but it would be the lowest budget accommodation available - which she’d have been perfectly fine with. In reality, our stay would be in a pretty decent hotel and for a couple of nights! There’s plenty of hotels along to choose from though many much older, but if you know how, where and what to look for, you can find a more modern and ‘boutique’ spot - if that’s your thing.
It appears that Mexico is one of those countries, of which there are many, where the existing taxi community has a problem with modern, helpful-to-the-rest-of-us services such as Uber! Instead of embracing new technology and making the switch, they stick to what they know and choose to resist change. As the detesters exist in their many, they do appear to have largely driven out (excuse the pun) Uber from certain areas of the country and Cancun is seemingly one of them!
So after weeks and weeks of biding our time, exercising patience and scrutinising the never ending changing criteria for different countries, our flight out of Brazil finally happened. Hours prior we picked up the results of our rapid Covid test. If we’d have received a positive result, well, who knows what would happen. Would these random airlines have given us our money back!? I dread to think but it does show how difficult a time it is to travel with so many variables unanswered.