Trip Planned!

Well... about a week in, we finally have everything (almost) figured out. Tomorrow we're going to an active volcano in Costa Rica, then up to a beach town in Nicaragua for ziplining and to watch turtles lay eggs. On the way to eventually leaving from Mexico City on Aug. 6, we're going to go scuba diving for like 5 days on a Caribbean island, go whitewater rafting, see a bunch of Mayan ruins, see Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, see a soccer game in Mexico to see how real soccer fans act and some other cool stuff. Of course we have to get buses at all the right times and hope our guidebook is right about travel times (it definitely was not today as an expected 12-hour trip took 24 hours), so we'll see what ends up happening.

The trip today was ridiculously long because, for some reason, Panama decided to have only one person working their customs check. When you have bus after bus (and an angry group of a motorcycle gang) all in line, that just does not work right. It took us four hours to cross the border ... unfortunately every country can't be like the swinging gate entrance to Mexico. We also probably would have missed our connecting bus, but as it turns out we gained an hour entering Costa Rica, which neither of us realized heading into the trip that Panama was a different time zone than the other countries.

Costa Rica so far is pretty nice. It is so green and the whole country seems to be a giant forest. It is expensive though, even though $1 US dollar is worth $500-plus "colones", things are still a lot. I ended up paying nearly $4000 colones for a bowl of Chinese food of chicken and broccoli (in my defense, my spanish is so bad I did not know I was ordering chinese food, because obviously I mean to try central american food while I'm here). I did buy some pretty good fruit from some people who just came onto our bus during a passport checkpoint to sell it. I forget the name, but it looked like those spikey brown things that fall from trees, but you could peel them open and eat the insides that kind of tasted like an orange.

They were called Mamón Chino. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambutan

In Loma Bonita, there was ONE known mamón chino tree so I didn't see a whole lot of it unless I was in penonomé at the market. What we had all over was the regular Mamón which is a little more sour but so good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melicoccus_bijugatus