Costa Ricaaaaa baby!

Beaches = 6

National Parks = 4

Getting told off for skinny dipping = x2

Sloths = 3

4-Wheeled Drive Dream Machine= 1

Episodes of sunburn = 40 (of which Sophie = 3 and Rob = 37)

The result of spending twelve glorious days with these two marvellous human beings is that I am now twelve days behind on writing my blog. So here goes summarising two weeks of awesomeness…I’ll try and let the photos do the talking for the bits I had my camera…

Monteverde, Volcan Arenal

And so began our adventure in Costa Rica. As our flight had been delayed by a day, Soph and Rob had already picked up the 4WD and had a full Costa Rican low down from a very helpful guy called Jose (of course he was) who’s impressively extensive advice served us swimmingly throughout our trip, in a kind of “What would Jose do?” way. Thanks Jose!

We first headed up into the mountains where we spent two nights in the very beautiful El Castillo, which we used as a base to visit the spectacular Volcan Arenal, a still active volcano surrounded by beautiful forest. We swam in the crater of an extinct volcano, we swam in hot springs (basically a boiling hot stream!), and we caught up on 8 months of gossip as we did it! Maravilloso!

From here we drove along the incredibly scenic and incredibly bumpy route to Santa Elena where we stayed in probably the best Air BnB I’ve ever come across (wooden cabin in the forest, with incredible breakfast and the world’s most friendly host, one of whom was an 18 year old Tico girl who we all fancied more than a little bit, and put us to shame with her outstanding English skills - https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/3237481?guests=4&s=ofGwvlza  ). We spent a few days here exploring the National Parks (which simply blow your mind with their beauty), eating delicious cakes and drinking velvety coffee in quaint little coffee shops and just exploring the area. You’d think we’d seen enough forests by now, but each one is unique, and I have to say that Monteverde was one of the most beautiful I’ve seen-trees dripping with epiphytes and moss, and wonderfully atmospheric clouds curling through the trees. Beautiful!

It was a looong way off but finally we saw one-a Resplendent Quetzel!

The Pacific Coast

Our first stop was Samara…think quaint little beach town, rolling waves, palm-fringed sand and chilled-out atmosphere! We spent a great couple of days here hopping between the sea, cafes and bars, and hiding from rain-showers. We even took to the waves and dusted off our (rather basic!) surfing skills…it’s funny how you get back into the swing of it quite quickly and we all spent many happy/salty/splashy hours clambering up on our boards and flopping off again in those feisty Pacific waves! Absolutely loved it!

 

From Samara, we tootled up the coast in our 4x4 to a little town called Santa Theresa. I say up the coast, but as its rainy season and it’s, well, been raining lots, large sections of the coastal road aren’t passable as they’re currently rivers, so we had to cut inland by about 5 hours. You can’t complain when you’re driving somewhere as beautiful as Costa Rica though!

Santa Theresa was a fab place to visit. By a stroke of luck (and the fact that the guys in charge of our hostel were useless stoners who could barely focus, let alone fix a broken AC machine) we inherited a giant apartment with its own balcony, right by the beach. We loved Santa Theresa-more incredible, palm-fringed beaches (I know I sound like a broken record!), more awesome surfing (and more scary waves), and this time no rain, great cocktails and incredible food thrown in to boot! We discovered not only a sweet little bar on the beach which made ludicrously strong cocktails, but a wicked little French creperie selling insanely good, well, crepes, we stumbled across an Italian bakery where we indulged in mouth-wateringly good feasts of Italian goodness, and we had some bloody good burritos from a little street soda bar.

From Santa Theresa, we scooched over the hill to the very lovely town of Montezuma. We’d only intended on staying one night here, but we made the quick decision to spend two nights as, well it was just bloody good! Montezuma is a cute little town with loads of little surf shacks, bars and cafes, and endless gorgeous little coves to explore. It also has a pretty awesome waterfall which you can walk (/scramble) to and we spent a bloody marvellous day taking a speed boat to Tortuga Island, snorkelling, drinking beer and soaking up the sunshine on a tropical beach. Lots of giggles, lots of fun and lots of toasting love, life and friendship!

White faced capuchin

White throated magpie jay

Turquoise-browed Motmot

A very shy hermit crab!

Last stop on the Tour de CR was Quepos, a rather non-descript town, but a cool little base for our final destination- Manuel Antonio National Park. This is the smallest and busiest of Costa Rica’s National Parks, and as a result, there are tonnes of people everywhere. Whereas this does not tick my boxes for a relaxing, back-to-nature experience, it does mean that wildlife is easier to spot as they’re so used to humans, and you can earwig onto other people’s guides without having to pay a penny, hurrah! It also has some marvellous little walks and some simply stunning beaches, so all-in-all a pretty cool day. And we saw THREE sloths!!

Finally-we found a cinema in Jaco showing Bond!...and had the whole cinema to ourselves!!

Birds eye view of a croc from a road bridge on our way to Quepos

Cheeky Racoon!

Three-toed sloth!

Iguana

So it was with heavy hearts that we made our final journey together in our trusty 4WD to San Isidro, (a slightly shifty town full of barbed-wire infringed buildings and locked gates) and said a sad goodbye to these crazy kids!

To the next adventure! 

One last thing…

For Christmas last year I got given Sudoku toilet paper. It’s useless. You can only fill it in with number ones and number twos.

…That was recently voted as the UK’s BEST toilet joke...hmmm…..It’s good, but I preferred the runner up…

Did you hear about the film Constipated? It never came out.

…possibly because I can relate to it more, but that’s another story.

My final post on Japan, has to be an entire post dedicated to the quite frankly exquisit art of Japanese toiletry. It is probably weird to say that the toilets were one of my favourite things about Japan, but bear in mind that I make this statement on the back of 6 months in SE Asia where I once used a public toilet that had no lock on the door and required me to pee like a man into a gutter with a giant sh*t in it. I had also paid for the privilege. I also think they somewhat epitomise the absurdity of some of Japan’s crazy culture of technology and convenience, so here it is.

Public toilets in Japan take the peeing experience to a whole other level! Each one (even in the excuse-the-pun ‘crappy’ toilets) is accompanied by what I like to call a Control Panel….comme ca…

(apologies for poor photo-it's tricky taking a photo subtly in a toilet...if only there was an option to play music to cover the shutter sound...oh wait!..)

 These buttons between them allow you to…heat up the seat, vibrate the seat, squirt water up your lady bits, squirt water up your back bits, play bird songs to mask sounds (!!), spray deodorant to mask smells, and one of the buggers flushes the damn thing!

The thing is…I can’t read Japanese, so this invariably takes me about 10 minutes, evokes giant queues, and leaves me feeling like I’ve had a rather stressful mini break in the world’s smallest spa (although with undoubtedly fresher botty bits!).

It was only in the last (yes the LAST) toilet I visited in the airport in Tokyo just before I left, that I found a convenient wall-chart explaining everything to me. Thanks Japan.

Kyoto

After a few days in the capital we caught the world-famous Bullet Train from Tokyo to Kyoto. This in itself is a cool experience -230miles in 2hours…phew! That’s some speedy training! Japan is a country of 127 million, almost double that of the UK, but with a land area only slightly bigger than the United Kingdom. It’s also very mountainous, but the Japanese are valley-dwelling folk and therefore only occupy about 20% of the land area. This means where there are people, there are a LOT of people! We didn’t pass into countryside for the ENTIRE 230mile train journey! We did however, see some beautiful mountains in the distance and see a lot of concrete.

We then spent 4 spectacular days soaking up Kyoto. Kyoto is a mind-boggling city: It has 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines. Needless to say we barely even scratched the surface of these during our 3 days here, but we did love cycling around in the lovely Autumnal sunshine, wondering around exquisite Japanese gardens, admiring ancient temples, surreptitiously loitering around Geishas, exploring vast markets and drinking green tea. I haven’t time to go into more detail but I would totally recommend this city-it’s certainly up there with our favourite places we’ve visited for sheer wow-factor.

 We had a unique experience through Air BnB, where we stayed in a typical Japanese apartment owned by an absurdly friendly Japanese man called Hiroshi who, amongst other things left us Samurai dressing up clothes to, well, dress-up in, and a selfie-stick should we want it (we didn’t). He also gave us free sake in his bar-Happy days. One of the (bizarrely) best bits about this Air BnB was that it didn’t have a shower which meant that we had to use the local bath-house. This, was quite hilarious. Bro disappeared through one door and I disappeared through the other (men and women are separate), into a hot and steamy series of chambers, which resembled some kind of greenhouse/60s swimming pool hybrid. There’s a great-deal of etiquette to follow, but it basically involves getting stark naked, scrubbing yourself vigorously while sat on a mat on the floor next to lots of other naked women, before being able to use the facilities. But then it’s totally worth it-there are Jacuzzis, steam rooms and hot and cold baths. Enough that I could hide myself (and my naked body) away without having to chat to the lovely (but exceptionally nude) old ladies around me.

Our last day in Japan was spent in Osaka (actually, that’s a lie-our last day in Japan was spent in Tokyo airport and an airport hotel as our flight was delayed by a day, but that’s a whole other story). This is a crazy, sprawling metropolis which I imagine would be a claustrophobic nightmare to live in for many (I imagine I would be one of those), but for Western tourists like me and Bro, this was a fascinating adventure into yet another exciting world of Japanese culture. I didn’t take my camera out, so you’ll just have to take my word for it!

Well I have to say that we came away from our week in Japan with an overwhelming sense that we have only just scratched the surface! We were humbled by how incredibly friendly the people were (and I mean seriously, going-totally-out-of-their-way-to-help-us friendly), we were incredibly over-indulged with fantastic food, we were blown away by incredible architecture, we were gobsmacked by the shear urban-convenience-gadget-electronic culture, and we heard just enough about the things we didn’t see to know that we seriously want to go back for more.

Thank you Japan, you’ve been a treat!

Japan Baby!

My initial thoughts of Tokyo were that it reminded me a great deal of London. In fact, I initially felt a little underwhelmed as I was expecting culture shock, but at first I just kept feeling like we were back home. Even the weather was (satisfyingly) fresh, and the sun nice and low, in an English autumn-type way: An insanely welcome break from the humidity we've been drowning in for the past 6 months, but it definitely contributed to my weird feeling of being back home. From this starting point though the week just developed into one long culture crescendo! The more we saw the more different it felt and the more we fell in love with Japan.

Tokyo was a mixture of frustration and pleasure. Frustrations as despite our best efforts, we kept missing things. First we arrived too late at the famous (world’s largest!!) Tsukiji fish market, then we arrived too late for the Imperial Palace (it closed at 4!!). We went to the famous Ueno Park on a Monday when not only all the museums were shut, but all of the cafes too. Not the cafes!!! We then woke up early to watch some Sumo training, but after trekking across town, found out that wasn’t on that day, and then we went back to the fish market at the right time, but it was a public holiday and was shut. On the plus side, the little sushi restaurants that everyone had raved about at the fish market were still open, so we ate incredible, practically-still-flipping fresh sushi and still enjoyed the buzz, and these fruitless jaunts actually led us to some marvellous little corners of Tokyo, so we shouldn’t complain too much!

We also had some fab experiences-we enjoyed going up the Government Office Tower to see incredible views over the city as the Sun went down. We walked across Scramble Crossing-the famous intersection with thousands of pedestrians crossing every hour. We sat and watched everyone else walk across Scramble Crossing.

Sushi on the night we arrived

Scramble crossing

The views from up the City Hall tower

We explored the surreal and quite-simply mind-blowing Akihabara area-a crazy, garish assault on your senses in the shape of sky-high tower blocks emblazoned with neon lights, crazy sounds from everywhere-every doorway, lamp-post, street-caller and even from buses. There are entire sky-scrapers set up for entertainment… a floor for bowling, a floor for table tennis, a floor for darts, a floor for cinema, THREE floors for karaoke (and every room filled up at 2 in the afternoon-insane!), a basement floor for adult entertainment (!!) and literally countless floors of endless arcades adorned with zombie-like Japanese men and women sat pressing buttons like their lives depend on it. We tried to take photos but got told off, so I really can’t capture this but just take my word for it-these places are like nothing I’ve ever seen before!..

A cartoon DVD store...(adult section downstairs)

An Anime car

An action figure store (full of adults)

Vending machines are EVERYWHERE!!

You probably can't make out form this picture, but school girls in tiny tartan skirts with knee-high socks stand around on the street in Akihabara touting for customers for all sorts of entertainment establishments...(they didn't want photos, so you have to make do with a distant one!)

This was a 6-story technical store!! It was massive!!

...And…we ATE SO MUCH JAPANESE FOOD! Ah man it was SO good!!! I’m not even going to try to describe it but just saying- I’m going to be bereft when this week’s over.