We didn’t expect too much from another Central American capital city (after Managua and San José, and also due to travel guides not praising Panama City too much). But we forgot all of that when we arrived at our AirBnB room in the charming Casco Viejo neighborhood. The apartment was overlooking Plaza Bolivar, one of the nicest places in the city. From the sundeck we also had a nice view of Panama City’s modern skyline.

Our host Andreas from Rome was having his family over (including dachshund Jacobo)—really nice people. Simone bonded with them over a great cup of espresso (no milk, no sugar, just like the Italians).

Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal.

Of course we had to take the tigerduck to one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the Panama Canal. We went to see the Miraflores Locks, where we had to wait a little bit since there were no ships passing through between 11am (when the last ship moves up from the Pacific towards the Atlantic side) and 3pm (when the first ship moves down in the opposite direction). It’s quite fascinating how huge ships can steer through the narrow locks with only 10 cm room on each side. Other than that, there’s an overpriced restaurant and some other rogues.

The bus ride to the airport led us through the areas of the city that you probably don’t want to stay in (lots of charmless highrise buildings).

And this concludes the Central America portion of our trip. Argentina, here we come!

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We wanted to do something special for Christmas, so we did an overnight hike on Volcán Barú. With an elevation of 3,474 meters, it’s the tallest mountain in Panama.

Our guide David of Boquete Mountain Safari picked us up at noon on December 23rd, together with co-hiker Nadine. The first few hundred meters we went by jeep, and then we hiked for around four hours. You could go the whole way up by jeep, but that would feel too much like cheating, and you would probably get sea-sick on that bumpy “road”.

We were expecting a rather uncomfortable, cold night in a tent, but thanks to a really friendly policeman (watching the transmitter station up there), we could stay with him in his warm cabin. In return, we cooked a nice dinner for the five of us.

Before sunset, despite quite a few clouds, we were lucky to get a glimpse of both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean at the same time. That’s what makes this place unique! The tiger duck was happy, too.

On the next morning, we saw a few other hikers coming up who had walked through the night (and some taking the cheating option). Many of them left again too early to see the fog clear up. Don’t do that if you get the chance!

After making our way back down, it was time to skype with our families who had already started their Christmas celebrations. We missed them! Our Christmas dinner with our hosts Olaf and Hanni (two “downshifters” from Germany) wasn’t bad, either, but nothing compared to home, of course.

Breakfast on the 25th actually had a touch of home, thanks to the town’s German butcher and his Leberkäsesemmeln. This guy would make for great material for a Tarantino movie!

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As Janosch put it:

Oh, how beautiful Panama is!

And it was beautiful, indeed. We were lucky at the border (only a few minutes wait time—others said waited for hours) and the whole trip to the little island paradise of Bocas del Toro went very smoothly. Only note to ourselves: If the sea is rough, don’t take the outer seats of the last row in the boat (or enjoy getting soaked).

Crossing the border between Costa Rica and Panama.

We didn’t know that Bocas has its own microclimate. We had almost exclusively had nice weather so far, but apparently, Bocas was right in the middle of its rainy season. That was a good excuse to get some work done, and we also had great fun playing Monolopy with Gül and Sinan, a really nice German couple. When the sun came out for a few hours, we set off together on a boat trip to Red Frog Beach.

What do you do on a rainy afternoon? Buy some property!

Both Bubba’s House and the Bambuda Lodge had a really nice, laid-back vibe. Just the right preparation for our Christmas adventure…

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This time we didn’t choose the easy option, which would have been a direct 3-hour boat ride. Instead, we left at 8 in the morning, taking one boat and four different buses (for a third of the price). We arrived at 7 in the evening. A bed and a bathroom hardly ever felt that good before.

Hotel Novelty Playa is a bit out of town, but definitely worth staying there! Host Luis (from Albacete, Spain) is super-nice, the rooms (there are only three!) are gorgeous, and you’ll never want to leave that balcony.

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Getting to Tortuguero was a bus-bus-boat trip, partly on the “Caribbean Highway”, a wide water canal in the Eastern part of the Tortuguero National Park.

Equipped with flash lights and rubber boots, we did a night hike through the rain forest. Our guide Victor was fantastic in spotting animals which would otherwise have escaped our notice: tiny frogs, an enormous bull frog (who can swallow chicken and snakes as a whole!), obelisks, grasshoppers, lizards, termites and their nest, a woolly opossum, dangerous spiders and jumping tarantulas.

We almost didn’t manage to get our shot of the world’s most photographed frog, the red-eyed tree frog. It wasn’t until our way back to the village, when Victor spotted a tiny exemplary of one of the red-eyed tree frog’s varieties.

Fortunately, we didn’t dream of spiders that night. We were probably just too tired.

The next day started early: By 6:15 am, we were already sitting in a lancha with four other people and a guide and were exploring the wildlife of Tortuguero’s waterways. We saw huge iguanas, lizards, caimans and all kinds of birds including tucans and parrots.

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Costa Rica’s capital feels like a mixture of a medium-sized US-American and a large Spanish city. Outlets, US chains, better, bigger and more expensive cars all contrasted sharply with what we were used to see in Nicaragua.

Not too thrilled about the city, we spent most of our time getting some work done in the comfortable patio of Casa 69.

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Monteverde was our first stop in Costa Rica. Getting to Monteverde is a bit inconvenient, coming from Nicaragua. The public bus option includes a trip to San José to catch the connection to Monteverde, which you could do on the same day if you start really early. We went for option #2, more expensive, but faster: We took a local bus from the Costa Rican side of the border to Liberia, spent almost three hours there, and took a pre-booked shuttle van that dropped us off at our hostel in Santa Elena.

Pension Santa Elena in Monteverde region’s main town Santa Elena was a friendly and relaxed hostel packed with young (mostly US and German) backpackers. We even got to enjoy one of their Saturday night live music sets they have during the weeks coming up to Christmas: A keyboard, a sax and a wonderful female singer performing Christmas songs (including Stille Nacht and Oh Tannenbaum in German!) put us into something like a Christmas spirit while we were having burritos, guacamole, chips and local Imperial beer for dinner.

We had only one day in Monteverde which spent doing a canopy tour in the protected cloud forest reserve. Monteverde is considered the best region in Central America to do canopy tours, which basically means ziplining on cables suspended on trees across the firest or high above the tree tops. We went with 100% Aventura, who feature the longest zipline in Latin America (> 1.5 kilometers!) and the Tarzan Swing—a free fall for almost three (looooong) seconds before you start to swing back and forth. You can call us Tarzan and Tarzan now!

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Isla de Ometepe is the world’s largest volcanic island in a freshwater lake, located in Lake Nicaragua. Its main attractions are the two volcanoes Concepción and Maderas, which are called volcán de fuego and volcán de agua, respectiveley, because Concepción is an active volcano with small to medium ash explosions and eruptions every 50 years, while in Maderas’ crater, a lagoon has formed. Climbing the volcanoes should only be done with a qualified guide—it has happened in the past that people got lost (in lack of designated trails) and even died.

Getting to Ometepe was not difficult at all: From Granada, we took a shuttle to San Jorge, where the ferries leave, and then set over to Moyogalpa, one of Ometepe’s two main towns. The ferry took about 1h 15m to get to Moyogalpa.

Obviously, we had to climb a volcano. At 6:45 in the morning, we met with our young, competent guide Ezekiel who would be taking us safely up and down the volcano Concepción, with an elevation of 1600 m the taller one of the two. We started our hike at 50 m above sea level. The first section of the hike was pretty flat, but quickly turned into a strenuous uphill path through amazing plantain and banana plantations, later cutting through a beautiful humid and dense rainforest, home to miko and congo (or howler) monkeys and other animals. At about 1000 m, vegetation stops and there is nothing but rock, stone and blackish sand.

The view from the 1000 m mirador (viewpoint) was amazing: we overlooked the island, Lake Nicaragua and spotted more volcanoes and the city of Granada on the lake’s shore. The top of the volcano, however, was covered in a thick cloud that at 10:30 already began to descend towards the mirador, where we rested and had a snack in the sunshine after the strenuous first three hours of hiking. Although we knew that the chances of seeing the crater in these cloudy conditions were low, we decided to continue our hike towards the top.

Climbing up on rocks and sand was really hard, and we imagined it would be even harder on the way down. Plus, the view was very limited in the clouds. Given the bad conditions and the difficult ascent, we turned around at 1400 m, only 200 vertical meters below the crater.

But on our way down, we were compensated with spotting many, many monkeys (and them spotting us—at one point, they literally circled us) and beautiful blue, yellow and orange butterflies.

We reached the foot of the volcano by 3:15 in the afternoon, almost eight hours after we had started from there. We were pretty exhausted, but very happy and impressed by Concepción’s range of vegetation and its biodiversity.

There was still time to visit Punta Jesus María, a narrow sandbank from which we had a great panoramic view of Isla Ometepe with its two volcanoes. And we also had our well-deserved beer, a coconut to drink and delicious papaya juice to recover from the hike. A tuk-tuk (one of the island’s tricycle taxis) took us back to Moyogalpa.

We stayed for two nights at the Corner House Bed & Breakfast right on Moyogalpa’s main street leading uphill from the port. Highly recommended! (You just have to use the complementary earplugs when the street party outside gets too loud.)

Goodbye, Nicaragua!

On December 12, we started our return to the mainland very early, because we had to cross the border to Costa Rica and make it in time to Liberia to catch our shuttle to Santa Elena.

Nicaragua was such a great place! Tourism is just about to take off and is being highly pushed by the government. But for now, the country seems to be quite pristine (and chaotic). It has a lot to offer, although we preferred the rural areas and nature sights to most of its cities (with the exception of Granada). We never felt unsafe or ripped off. The infrastructure might not be the best, but finding and taking transportation was easy (and it certainly helps if you know some Spanish).

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Oh, Granada! We really liked this colorful, buzzing, charming city. Despite being more touristy and international than the other places we’ve visited so far, Granada still boasts very authentic flair: the busy market and street life, locals hanging out in rocking chairs at the front doors of their houses, and wild traffic.

We also included some work days at the fantastic Garden Café. Great fresh lemonade for $1 a glass!

Over the past ten days, our daily rhythm had become synchronized with the sun: We got up early (ocassinally with the cocoricoo of roosters) and used to call it a night early. However, we couldn’t help but enjoy Granada’s Calzada, a broad pedestrian street lined with bars, restaurants and hospedajes, where the Happy Hour seems to start mid-afternoon and goes on and on and on…

Laguna de Apoyo

We took a day-trip to Laguna de Apoyo, a freshwater lake in the crater of an imploded volcano. We spent the day kayaking, swimming, floating in rubber rings and sunbathing at the Hostel Paradiso at the shore of the Laguna. From the lake, hardly any houses are in sight and there’s no real village around the lake, just trees over trees and nature. Along with a cold Toña and a chilled Sangria, this place actually came pretty close to paradise.

A couple of hours later, our shuttle dropped us off at la Calzada just in time for Happy Hour.

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Seventy kilometers off Nicaragua’s mainland coast and only an hour-long flight away from Managua, Corn Island was a more than welcome distraction from dusty, hot and chaotic Nica cities.

Big Corn’s landing strip almost covered one fourth of the island, and on our paseo by bike across the island, we witnessed that the kids playing soccer on the small triangle of lawn right before the landingstrip didn’t even stop their match when one of the three daily planes was landing. Since we only stayed at Big Corn for two nights, we didn’t go to Big Corn’s smaller sister island Little Corn, which you can only reach by a (sometimes rough) boat trip.

The island really had a Carribean feel, with significantly more people of African descent than the mainland, reggae music (we even heard Jingle Bells reggae-style playing in a church), everything going at a slower pace, and simple tin-roofed huts alternating with colorful houses and hotels. Plus, Big Corn offered amazing flora and fauna: A dog getting in close combat with an aggressive crab is far from being unusual here.

We stayed in a charming priavte cabana with thatched roof at Paraiso Beach, a tiny village of a few cabins, a small terrace restaurant and hammocks suspended between palm trees, in Big Corn’s main community Brig Bay. Flowers spread out on our bed were welcoming us at our arrival. It was paradise, indeed!

On bikes, we explored the whole island within two hours. We rode on white beaches, along the landing strip, stopped for a cold Toña beer and a double-shot of Nicaragua’s famous Flor the Caña rum on the rocks (slow pace, as you know). The rest of the day, we were chillaxing in hammocks, reading, blogging and taking in the abundant green vegetation around us.

Eventually, we had to get back to the mainland. The flight to Corn Island with La Costeña was not a problem at all, but the return to Managua promised to be… exciting. When the officers at the sole check-in counter in the smallest airport we’ve ever seen (which looked more like a regional bus terminal) asked us to step on the scale they had previously used to weigh our checked luggage, it became pretty clear that this time, we would go with a substantially smaller plane. We were handed out reusable plastic “boarding passes” that only said “Managua”. After Simone counted ten other people in the waiting room, she immediatly hit the bar for a beer. In the end, the flight was not too bad. Yes, there might have been a few tears and nervousness in the beginning after climbing into the tiny, tiny plane, but after a few minutes in the air, Simone had to admit that sitting basically in the fourth row of the cockpit was actually pretty cool.

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