...of Mice and Men (and Women)

Onto the next chapter of our travels...

We arrived in Costa Rica yesterday at 2pm CST (2 hours behind EST). Our route took us from Toronto to Miami (we've been in Miami's airport 3 times within the last 5 months now) and we flew out of Pearson at 6:15am. Needless to say Robyn and I were both zombies yesterday. Our connection left Miami to San Jose, Costa Rica at 1pm and arrived in Costa at 1:30, the time zones affecting the arrival. A quick shuttle ride (arranged before departure) and we checked into our hostel, to promptly crash and nap for the next three hours.

Today we're meeting up with the rest of our jolly gang for the next few weeks: Ashley, Scott, and Chris. Ashley few into the area today and Scott and Chris have been in country for the better part of the last week. They'll get to the hostel later this evening.

We plan to spend 3 weeks touring Costa, spending the majority of the time on the Western, Pacific, coast, but first we will be heading North to Tortugero for a couple nights. From there we'll head back through central Costa near Monte Verde on our way to Montezuma and other beaches along the coast. We're going to stay as a group for a while but eventually Chris must return to San Jose to fly out and then a few days later Scott and Ash depart also.

Robyn and I will continue on though: although the timing is flexible by design we'll be flying from Costa down to Ecuador to explore the country for a bit. Also of importance off the coast of Ecuador is the Galapagos Islands, which was one of the reasons for our travels. After our time in Ecuador (3 weeks?) we'll go further South to Peru in order to visit Machu Picchu and the rest of the country. We plan to commit to three more weeks or so in Peru, which takes us to our currently-scheduled return date of October 5.

Everything sounds like quite a whirlwind right now, and it will likely end up that way too, but we're very excited about it all and I look forward to sharing as much as I can with everyone.

I'm off to drink a beer now on the patio of our hostel. Things are starting out rough.