We Nicaraguans have many dictators. Then we kill them.

My lengthy excursion across Panama now over, it was time to head all the way back across the Central American isthmus and beyond. I was expected in Nicaragua in about a couple week’s time, and after deciding against a ludicrously overpriced flight to Managua (~£500 for a 1hr30 flight) I was instead going to savour the journey towards the spiciest country I’ve been to yet.

Costa Rica ¶

Indiana Ben and the Kingdom of the Crystal Dipshits ¶

24 straight hours of bussing after leaving Puerto Lara, and I was finally at the famous Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca), just across the Costa Rica–Panama border on the Caribbean coast. Puerto Viejo itself is a major backpacker/party/surf town and I’d met many people heading to or coming from it throughout this trip, so I figured I’d check it out and then I could at least say I’d seen more of Costa Rica than just the Osa peninsula. As one might expect from a Caribbean beach town in the middle of a tropical paradise, the beaches were lovely and I rented a bike along with another guy from my hostel (another German, of course) and went on a nice cycle ride along the coast towards Manzanillo (though the nature reserve was a disappointment).

Despite the luscious scenery, I kind of hated Puerto Viejo. It’s the first place I’ve been to during this trip that really felt like there was no real town underneath the shell of the tourist town—I imagine everyone who works there commutes in from distant elsewheres. Worse than that was the precise flavour of tourists that seemed drawn to the place, a cohort I shall unaffectionately call the ‘crystal dipshits’: think harem pants; twirling poi; sensitive young men playing guitars on the grass with their shirts off; more than happy to tell you the latest woo they’ve adopted from some ancient vaguely Asian custom; and quick to rail against non-specific toxins in coffee or soda whilst doing lines of cocaine or taking ‘shrooms all day. Also, as an added twist, now they’re all also anti-vax and just as eager to tell you about that, including my personal favourites: a UK couple who got refused entry to Nicaragua at the border when they were unable to present their vaccination cards or a recent negative test result, in what I can only describe as a monumentally negligent approach to looking up entry requirements before setting off.

Photo by the author

Truly, I have never seen more white people with dreadlocks, and the first hostel I stayed at—Rockin’ Js—had an aesthetic I could best describe as refugee camp-chic, with a two-storey building and rows upon rows of tents (charged at a rate of $10 per person per night, the same price as the air-conditioned dorm room that I inexplicably had entirely to myself). After this first night I switched to Backpackers Puerto Viejo, a much more pleasant little hostel comprising two dorms joined via the kitchen (which was also the building entrance); few other hostels I have stayed in are so perfectly-architected to promote sociality, with everyone inevitably running into each other and hanging out in the central kitchen area, just like university halls. I met several cool people there, including a Quebecoise called Orlean who was heading to Nicaragua to work in a hostel; I noted the location and said I might see her again there.

After a week, I was fed up with the artificiality of the town and the inflated prices of everything, so I took a 5-hour bus up north to San José (standing room only). There I stayed in a slightly more intersting area than I when I had first arrived, in the much nicer In the Wind Hostel, and made a couple pals. One was just coming from Nicaragua and so I asked her about my current plan, which involved crossing at the far less-trafficked of the two official border crossing points (Las Tablillas or San Pancho, depending on which side of the border you’re on) and making my way gradually north towards León through the Rio San Juan region east of Lake Managua, rather than the traditional tourist route on the Pacific side. She told me that she didn’t think it would be doable, that there was nothing there and that I’d struggle to travel on public transport.

I ignored everything that she said.

Nicaragua ¶

The Accidental Immigrant ¶

It was finally time for me to head to Nicaragua, on another 5-hour-long standing-room-only bus to Las Tablillas. The bus stopped just short of the Rio San Juan, the river that delineates much of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border, and I saw a couple of roadblocks on the bridge; not impassable for a pedestrian, but enough to make me think perhaps that wasn’t the way to go. I saw that everybody who had been on the bust with me turned to the left, past a Costa Rican Red Cross tent, and started heading down a dirt track; this must be some sort of temporary diversion, I thought, and set off along with them.

We walked and walked and walked, which seemed a bit excessive. After a kilometer or two of walking along the border wall, we crossed through a gap in it and doubled back on ourselves. This was a bit of a red flag, and when we had to make an unassisted river crossing (me holding onto branches to keep from falling in with all of my backpacks) I really started to have my doubts about the route I’d chosen:

Photo by the author

When we finally arrived at the Nicaraguan side of the border crossing, I saw a couple of immigration guys leaning against their vehicle impassively watching as the group walked past, and then turned left and headed straight into Nicaragua. I went up to them and asked where I was supposed to get my Costa Rican exit stamp, and after much bemusement they pointed back across the bridge… to Costa Rica.

It turns out I’d accidentally managed to follow a big group of Venzuelans sneaking into the country (although given that the authorities were sat there watching it, sneaking feels like the wrong word). Regardless, the clearly-amused immigration girl was surprisingly friendly, given where I was and how many men with guns were walking around, and she thankfully sent my dopey ass back across the border the direct way. The Costa Rican guards asked me if I was coming from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, and I tried to explain in Spanish that, physically, yes I was, but legally, I had never left. They were confused, but seemed to get bored with me pretty quickly and shooed me further on.

Eventually I had all of my paperwork in order and crossed back again, over the bridge this time.

Heading Downriver ¶

My next stop was San Carlos, in the south-eastern corner of the enormous Lake Nicaragua. The town is gorgeous, with steep elevation changes between streets and a destinctive style of brightly-painted buildings. The chaos of the bus terminal—thronged with passengers, luggage assistants, people selling anything and everything and the semi-official money-changing coyotes plying their trade in their distinctive tan utility vests—was a fine introduction to the intensity of Nicaragua.

The next day, I took a two-hour boat ride downriver to the small, car-free town of El Castillo, so named for the old Spanish fort atop its central hill, and fell in love with the place immediately. I had read a blog post that recommended a tour guide called Juan Ardilla and sought him out, but he didn’t have any solo tour options available; he introduced me to another solo traveller (a German) who had arrived the same day, and by the evening we’d arranged an all-day tour for us and a handful of people we’d both met in our respective hostels through Basiliscus Tours. In the meantime, I revelled in the price difference between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Photo by the author

We set off the next day on kayaks, exploring the tributaries of the Río San Juan for most of the morning. I shared mine with the German and an Austrian–French couple, one of whom was certainly out of his depth as the captain and kept crashing us into the bank, through tree branches or beaching us on submerged logs. He also drank almost an entire bottle of rum throughout the course of the day, which may have been part of the problem, but at least he was happy to share it with his crewmates.

We disembarked, checked in with a couple of soldiers (who seem to have the most boring job in the world) and went on a hike through the Refugio Bartola. Our guide was excellent, explaining the traditional uses of various plants, pointing out tiny poison dart frogs and telling us which plants to eat without dying. When we got back to town we all went our separate ways (it was only me and a French girl called Alice in our hostel, the others were all elsewhere). We all got back together that afternoon for dinner and drinks, which ended on a bit of a bum note when the incredibly drunk Austrian guy got feisty and started going on and on about killing Austrian politicians (first to a random German girl from another group that was in the restaurant, and then to us when they unsurprisingly decided to leave); I was in no mood for this kind of edgy LARPing and told him to pack it in.

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I was so enamoured with the town that I extended my stay several times. Alice and I explored the town, checking out the COODEPROSA chocolate co-operative on the outskirts where I had my first taste of the stuff in many months and sampling the fresh fruit juices at Border’s Coffee. I developed a brief infatuation with the This American Life radio show, and figured out how to connect my OSMAnd mapping app. with my OpenStreetMap account so that I could update the data for the town, as most of the restaurants were currently showing as being in the middle of the river:

Screenshot by the author

Somehow a horse tour that Alice had tried to arrange morphed into her helping a farmer take his produce to another nearby town, and we joined back up with others from the tour for a couple meals and a night-time boat tour. My final day there I spent wandering into every school I could find to ask if they needed English and/or IT teachers, with the intention of spending a lot more time here after returning from Cuba. I gave my number to a bunch of people, but except for one school administrator who sent me a single hola a month later and then didn’t reply to my follow-up question I have had no success thusfar and I no longer have the time to spare on this trip; however, at least I have one contact now, and I’m definitely expecting to come back here someday (not least when I’m ready to retire).

Today is Gonna be a Volcano Day ¶

Photo by the author

Alas, my time in El Castillo had to come to an end. Alice and I made our way back to San Carlos, watched the sun set behind the volcanos of Ometepe island and drank by the shore of Lake Nicaragua as we waited for our overnight chicken bus. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea, as chicken buses are not known to be particular conducive to sleep; after five hours on an uncushioned school bus chair my arse was as numb as it’s ever been. We arrived into Managua around 4am and said our goodbyes, and after a couple hours of waiting the first colectivo to León arrived; a minibus with no luggage rack, and after a couple that were too full I eventually managed to squeeze myself and all of my luggage into a seat.

Finally, after a largely sleepless night I arrived at 7am. I was there to volunteer with Volcano Day as a tour guide, and when I arrived they immediately asked if I wanted to go our on a tour that day; I said I’d think about it, and then fell asleep whilst unpacking my stuff and missed the group’s departure. That proved to be lucky, though, because it meant that I got to go volcano boarding in the afternoon instead:

Hanna

Whilst the company offered many tours, the most commonly-booked were the volcano boarding on Cerro Negro (the second-biggest source of tourist income in Nicaragua, so I’m told) and various hikes on El Hoyo and Telica ranging from sunrise and sunset trips to overnight camping expeditions. I got bored of the volcano boarding pretty quickly (and fed up with the expectation of pouring rum and cokes in the back of an old army truck as it bounced around the moonscape surrounding the volcano), but luckily I seemed to get pigeonholed as a camper/hiker pretty early on and didn’t get many boarding shifts after the first week.

Telica crater was always impressive and the sunrise views were incredible; Telica sunrise shifts were perhaps the best available, as a 4am start would get you back by 9am and done for the rest of day, so it was effectively like getting an extra day off. El Hoyo was a more demanding hike, but the views from the campsite were absolutely astonishing; the walk down to Lake Asososca was incredibly tedious, but definitely paid off when arriving at the destination. Unexpectedly, I ran into Orlean again on a volcano boarding tour, as she’d decided to come check it out before heading to her hostel. I again said I might see her there, but later decided I would probably just stay working with Volcano Day until my flight to Cuba.

During this time, I also deepend my antipathy towards reggaeton (although I do still think that Gasolina slaps). From the buses of Panama to the volcanos of Nicaragua, this omnipresent, hyperactive noise-masqeurading-as-music had been dogging me for several months. The final straw came on the Las Peñitas party bus, were nobody else volunteered to connect to the speaker and so I did. After a couple tracks of blessed relief (a mix of Black Box and Swedish House Mafia, I believe), someone asked me if I had any reggaeton, as though I would have sullied my phone’s storage with such frivolities.

Labour Organising with Volunteer Labour ¶

As a seasoned voluntourist by now, not to mention an inveterate rabble-rouser, I also did my bit to remind the others of their reponsibilities (or lack thereof) as volunteers, seeing as how we were all making the owners far more money than they were spending on our twice-daily rice and beans and poorly-maintained accommodation.

For example, the deal we’d all made was 6 days on and 1 day off each week.¹ As my first week drew to a close, I told people it was my day off the following day, though the schedule hadn’t yet come out. They all came out with stories about how it’d never happen like that and how they worked 12 days before getting their first day off, etc.; lo and behold, when the schedule came out, I had been put down for a tour and the others all chuckled at my hubris. Then I called over the girl who wrote the schedule, told her she’d made a mistake and that tomorrow was my day off, and promptly found myself removed from the shift.

Where the others took their shafting as some sort of rite of passage, I just took it as them being crap at enforcing boundaries. I also think there’s a moral case to be made for working-to-rule as a volunteer (and even, potentially, being a little flakey and unreliable) so as to counteract the natural incentive for an employer to rely on enthusiastic free labour rather than employing locals.²

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It’s ambiguous whether the day off palaver was a conscious attempt to screw over volunteers or simply the result of crap organisation (i.e., I don’t think they were tracking people’s days off, and just expected people to raise the issue themselves), but it would happen pretty regularly. Also, we wouldn’t get the schedule for the following day until around 20:30 the night before, which meant it was basically impossible to make any plans, and if you were unlucky with one of the 2am starts it would mean only getting ~5 hours of sleep (and that’s only if you went straight to bed when the rota came out). There was some other schedule-based tomfoolery as well, such as one guy who returned from an overnight tour to find that he was supposed to turn around and go back out later that day, and one girl who got sent on a sunset tour with 45 minutes notice on the same day as a leaving dinner put on, in part, for her, which then had to be delayed until she got back.

Whilst I was initially wary of the company being an exploitative expat-run business (e.g., I had never been near a volcano before, so why was I being entrusted to lead tours on them?), I was glad to see that it (unlike the rival company across the road) was local-owned and that most of the Nica staff seemed to enjoy their work, although there was definitely some sketchiness with how the drivers were treated and some of the younger Nicas there were effectively on unpaid internships. I could also see our unique value as English-speaking volunteers pretty quickly, as most of the clients spoke English³ and most of the Nicas did not, or not well enough, or they were too shy to try to. They knew the routes inside and out though, so we would usually end up as translators and general morale-boosters (and/or bartenders), as well as giving the Nicas a chance to practice their English both on- and off-shift. Plus, at least two of the three bosses were pretty chill, and we could generally slip in as many beer orders with returning tour groups as we wanted.

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But it wasn’t all good. On one Telica tour we left some food out on the campsite table overnight, but unbeknownst to us (or at least me) there were wild horses roaming the area who made short work of our breakfast supplies and made a terrible mess. When we got back, the boss tried to make the Nica I had been with pay for breakfasts in the restaurant we operated out of for all of the clients; this despite the fact that the guy was one of the unpaid interns, and that the boss had just made several hundreds of dollars from the tour. Luckily, one of other owners intervened and my guy got off with a slap on the wrist and a funny story.

The moral of the story is that looking for expat–local exploitation was always going to be too limited a scope; whilst it is a decent heuristic for avoiding contributing to another problem (i.e., paying money that will be immediataely siphoned out of the country to help pay for some Yank’s second home), it’s naive to think that locally-owned business are immune to exploitation. The interests of bosses and workers, whatever their respective nationalities or other superficial similarities, are always at odds and a cool boss is, at the end of the day, still a boss.

Join a co-op.

Semana Santa ¶

Also unbeknownst to me was that my time at Volcano Day overlapped with Semana Santa, or the Holy Week before Easter, which it turns out is a very big deal indeed in Latin America. For a full week we were fully booked every day, sometimes with multiple groups going on the same tours. Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Costa Ricans and more made their ways to León to hike, board and party. The larger Spanish-speaking groups would generally go with Nica guides on their own, but I had a few join on to tours I was leading, and all I can say is that Latinos are definitely not a naturally athletic people (with the prominent exception of one Costa Rican family, where the parents were both crossfit enthusiasts and where the father ended up carrying two backpacks for the two-day trip after the youngest daughter threw a dramatic wobbly about 5 minutes in).

On Easter itself, all those of us who had the afternoon off took a ride the district of Sutiaba to check out their famous passion carpets. Unfortunately, the Church is currently in a fight with the Ortega government and, as a result, the traditional procession of walking through them was cancelled this year; instead, people just dashed them apart themselves.

I Can’t Work in These Conditions ¶

In the end, I spent three weeks working with Volcano Day. It was a bit of a mixed bag: I loved the core activity of hiking and camping (obviously), and I never really had a bad client (though I did have some slow ones, plus one dad-and-lad who had a very odd dynamic, with the kid refusing to join him any photos and constantly complaining about others being NPCs like the weird alt-right kid from Knives Out). But the lack of organisation really started to grate. For example, kit prep was always a nightmare as the number of clients continually changed, and on one overnight trip we arrived at the campsite to discover that in the chaos the kit that had been grabbed was missing tent pegs and a tent; me and the other guide bivouacked in just our sleeping bags that night

The state of the volunteer accommodation was also pretty ropey, with trash everywhere and always a huge pile of unwashed dishes beside the sink:

Photo by the author

We had breakfast and lunch provided each day, but not dinner, but we also had nowhere to store food and were discouraged from using the kitchen (due, not unreasonably, to the women who cooked our meals not wanting to find it left messy). The end result was that we basically had to eat out every night; there was cheap food around, and healthy food, but rarely dfid the twain meet. However, perhaps the biggest killer for me was the inability to plan anything in advance due to how last-minute we would receive our tour allocations. All the late nights and surprise early starts were also a potent recipe for sleep deprivation, on top of the physically demanding nature of the work, and a set of weakened immune systems paired with the unhygeinic living conditions left everybody subject to a continually circulating set of bugs and colds.

Most of my spare time was spent either in ViaVia, the restaurant out of which Volcano Day operated, or by the beach at Las Peñitas. Both tended to involve drinking. We volunteers went up as a group one evening to watch the sunset from the roof of the Cathedral, and had a couple very wholesome family meals. The city itself was markedly more pleasant than all of the Central American cities I had been to by this point, with its charming colonial architecture and small size.⁴ Also, whilst our accommodation may have been pretty grim, there were loads of kittens in it:

Nicaragua, According to the Nicaraguans ¶

Before arriving in Nicaragua, I had some prior familiarity with its history: the Somoza dictatorship; the Sandinista revolution; and the civil war against the US-backed Contras.⁵ Of the period since the ’80s, though, I knew markedly less, beyond a handful of articles about press crackdowns in Index on Censorship. However, I had watched the documentary ¡Las Sandinistas! with a group of friends and already had some inkling of the rocks upon which the Nicaraguan Revolution had run aground, as the women who were essential to the success of the Revolution⁶ found themselves sidelined by their macho comrades and the addressing of their concerns was put indefinitely on hold. I was going into it with an open mind, then, but primed to be critical (as always).

All of the long drives and remote camping trips provided a fantastic opportunity to talk to the Nicas away from the threat of surveillance within the city (where they were noticably more reticent), and whilst many were critical of the FSLN it’s worth noting that this was not monolithic, even amongst the young Nicas, with one of them (whose middle name, I think it’s relevant to point out, was Stalin) praising the government for making Nicaragua far safer than its neigbours, and free of the issues of gang violence that have so plagued them. Another pointed out el Fortín de Acosasco as we drove past it, telling us of the torture and forced disappearances that took place there under the Somoza regime (including some of his own family members, the whereabouts of whose remains has never been determined; he spoke of bodies disposed in some of Nicaragua’s many volcanoes, though I’ve not been able to corroborate that). There were a lot of faded posters along the highways in support of Ortega, and we drove under a bridge almost every day on which someone had painted the words Daniel 2011.

However, another expressed his fear that Nicaragua would be the next Cuba (a particularly interesting comment given that Cuba was to be my next destination), and another concurred, saying that the only difference at the moment was the lack of a centrally-planned economy. And even the guy who pointed out el Fortín complained about the rampant corruption in current-day Nicaragua, particularly of the Transit Police who he said act like a gang, shaking down drivers by issuing spurious fines. I asked him what happens socially when someone decide to join the police if they’re so detested; he said everyone stops talking to them.

On my final weekend in León I finally got around to taking the free walking tour that I’d be putting off since I’d arrived. It was fantastic, and the guide was surprisingly candid about the current state of affairs Nicaragua; at one point I asked him if he worried about getting in trouble and he just said it hadn’t happened yet, and that he knew how to tailor the speech when there were Nicas in the audience. He highlighted a lot of interesting facts about Nicaragua, three key figures I remember being that around 77% of the working population are in informal employment, some 90% live along the Pacific coast and in the interior highlands and 30% live below the poverty line; the one that really surprised me was that the average age is just 25. He also spoke rapturously about the presidency of Violeta Chamorro—who he called the lady of peace—and recounted bitterly Ortega’s manouevering to victory in the 2006 elections against a divided opposition and with only 38% of the vote,⁷ in one of the last elections generally recognised as having been conducted freely and fairly.

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He showed us buildings that still bore bullet holes from the 2018 protests across the road from the city’s hospital, where he told us about the free (but chronically underresourced) healthcare system;⁸ compared to the shiny private hostel around the corner from our place, the state-run one truly looked dilapidated, and our guide told us that hospital-acquired infections were commonplace (though I haven’t found any source to back that up). And, in fairness, he did also say that there was a new hospital currently under construction on the outskirts of the city. Nicaragua, he also pointed out, is a terrible country in which to be a woman; despite initially progressive measures in healthcare and reproductive autonomy following the Revolution, Ortega’s turn to the right and alliance with the Catholic Church upon his return to power has seen the banning of abortions in all circumstances and many restrictions on access to contraception, along with the shuttering of vital women’s services and upticks in rates of domestic violence, sexual assault and femicide (because no duh).

One thing I hadn’t noticed until our guide pointed it out was the complete lack of newspapers in the many roadside stalls and corner shops; the last independent newspaper in Nicaragua had ended its print edition in 2021 in the face of government repression, including a blockade on ink and paper coming into the country. Our guide also took us to the university and explained that higher education is free to Nicaraguans, but that a Bachelor’s takes around 5 years and is only available to those with the means to live in the cities throughout that time; also, depending on the subject, the pro-government propaganda in the teaching materials can be more or less overbearing, though I don’t see how this could affect degrees like computer science or medicine overly much (#STEMmasterrace).

He also highlighted the underdevelopment of the interior and Caribbean coast of the country, which he felt to be intentional; with fewer eyes in those parts of the country, the Ortega government was free to plunder their natural resources in combination with foreign businesses, which echoed the explanation given to us by our guide in El Castillo when we asked why the military were restricting entrance into the Indio Maíz Reserve. Daniel Ortega’s personal net worth is apparently estimated to be around $50m, though these figures are worth taking with a pinch of salt; however, our tour guide did say that whilst Nicaragua doesn’t really have a middle class, it does have an aristocracy comprising Ortega, his family and his friends.

Photo by the author

Nicaragua, already the second-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti, has been particularly hard hit by the loss of its tourism industry—the second-biggest in the country—over the years of martial law following the 2018 demonstrations, and then COVID lockdowns immediately afterwards, but the first cruise ship was due to dock some time in August. We all chipped in some money and our guide took us around the local market, sampling various snacks and delicacies that all seemed to be corn-based. At the end, his historical narrative reached the present day and he gave us his unfiltered opinion about the Ortega government. His pride in the country and his frustration with its current political situation was palpable, but he was optimistic: with its young, energetic population, and abundant natural resources, he believed that the moment that the dictator was gone the country would experience a rebirth and rapid development. His excitement was infectious, though the hundreds gunned down between 2018–2020 show that Ortega isn’t going to go quietly.

On my final day in León there was some sort of anniversary and FSLN youth were out on the streets in force holding demonstrations; though curious to talk to some real FSLN superfans, I stayed away; I think the celebrations were related to the 2018 protests and I didn’t fancy having anything to do with that, and I’d heard enough from some of the Nicas about the indiscriminate violence carried out by those same youth during that period to be wary.

Whilst I do still think that the FSLN were undeniably heroic once upon a time,⁹ and some of their achievements like the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign were and remain hugely impressive, the Ortega rump holding on to power now seems to me to have little to do with them beyond branding.

El Tránsiting ¶

I was about a week away from my scheduled flight to Cuba, which would be departing from San José. I hadn’t really thought about how I planned to get back down there, or exactly when I would tell the bosses that I was off. My vague plan was to go to Ometepe for the better half of a week and tackle the volcanos of Concepción and Maderas, but before I got around to planning anything I ran into a Canado–Croat¹⁰ girl on the walking tour who was headed the same direction as me. After the tour we explored the city, including my first proper pint (ignoring the silly glassware and the ludicrous price) since leaving the UK.

Photo by the author

She was heading to the small fishing village of El Tránsito in the coming days, which just so happened to be the village that Orlean was working in. After a little thought, I decided that there was definitely a compelling argument to spending the intervening week relaxing by the beach rater than going to Ometepe to climb even more volcanoes. I duly informed the bosses that I would be leaving before completing the requested 6 weeks, but it all seemed to be fine. Yuli and I were drinking from midday. Then, at 20:30, I found out I would have to be up at 4am to lead a one-day tour of the usually two-day route up El Hoyo and down to Lake Asososca, solo; I shouldn’t have told the boss that I knew the route when he asked me.

Hanna

The early start not so much, but a good, long final hike the next morning was probably just what my hungover body needed. Once I got back, I planned to go straight to sleep for much of the afternoon but was instead persuaded to join the beach party bus for one last ride. Many beers later, I finally got to sleep around 10pm, as the others got ready to go clubbing.

I’d wiped out the last of my córdobas, so in the morning I headed off to the only cash machine in the entire city that I’d been able to withdraw money from (apparently Mastercard can be temperamental, and both of my banks helpfully replaced my Visa cards without asking shortly before I left the UK after the latter increased their transaction fees). Slightly panicking about how I was going to pay for my journey to El Tránsito, I packed my bags and tried again a few hours later; thankfully, they were working again. I met up with Yuli and we hopped on a chicken bus, then hitched a ride from the highway to the town itself.

A Vacation Within a Vacation ¶

El Tránsito turned out to be a a lovely little fishing village-turned-surf spot. Of course, it has all the same problems that the latter condition brings in terms of profit-siphoning expat-owned businesses, amplified here by the weird fortresslike design of some of these eyesores, but at least that made it easier to identify and avoid them. Another good rule of thumb I found was that anywhere that gave its prices in USD would be about twice the price of anywhere else (if not more: a coffee in a local place would run you 15 córdobas [~15¢] compared to $2 in the fancy, air-conditioned Surf Café). As a seasoned Central American backpacker by this point, I found a few fantastic local eateries—Comedor de Pescadores and El Ancla being the stand-outs—and did my bit to direct others there too, thus eating into the profits of the expat scourge, no matter how minutely.

Photo by the author

Yuli and I stayed at SOLID Surf Camp, which whilst owned by a non-resident expat did seem a little more positive for the community in that it offered volunteering options to guests; the Canado–Croat (a nurse back home) spent one morning going door-to-door providing vaccines and we later both joined an English class for adults to chat with them for a bit. I gave surfing another stab, sharing a day-long board rental with two similarly-amateur Germans, and I popped in to Free Spirit Hostel for a beer pong tournament, much to the surprise of Orlean.

Just as with El Castillo, I continually extended my stay until I had only one day to go until my flight. I set off on the bus at 5am, and 17 hours later I was at Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Santamaría. My flight wasn’t until the next morning, so I tried to sleep, then gave up and watched The Simpsons and the 1964 Soviet propaganda film Soy Cuba, which may well be a new favourite of mine.

I came to Nicaragua excited to see a real revolution first-hand; I left feeling like I had done no such thing. Would I have better luck with my next destination?

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley

I can’t say I’ve spent much of my life thinking about Panama; my knowledge of the place has generally been limited to the Canal, the Panama Papers and the Darién Gap. However, as the best-laid plans of mice and men are wont to do, mine went agley in the best ways possible. As a result, a quick trip across the border for some New Year’s partying became a two-month voyage from one end of the country and back, checking out just about every region of it on the way.

Panama? Completed it mate.

Bocas Nights ¶

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we last left off, I had just set off from Costa Rica with a couple of Dutch girls in tow and a rough itinerary for making it to our destination in a single day (along with an unused Ticabus ticket to Panama City that would have required me to somehow get to the border for 4am). Our destination was Bocas del Toro, a Caribbean island chain renowned for both its party scene and the natural beauty of its smaller, less developed islands. After spending a wholesome Christmas naked in the jungle hosting film nights and group meals, I wanted to celebrate New Year’s with some debauchery.

At David one of the Dutch girls split off to head elsewhere, whilst Anne and I hopped on a bus (literally, our bags thrown from one bus to the other whilst both were still in motion) heading north, through the scenic Chiriquí mountain range and several indigenous Ngäbe villages, their stilt houses and the women’s traditional dresses instantly serving to differentiate Panama as a very different beast to Costa Rica.

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We arrived in Bocas and split up. Anne was smart enough to book a hostel in Bocas Town itself, whilst I booked one that turned out to be 5 km inland (and got scammed by the taxi there to boot). Not only that, but the hostel—Castillo Inspiración—turned out to be a very odd place indeed; the centerpiece was a castle built out of recycled plastic bottles, seemingly in the middle of a quarry, with our accommodation in a building called the Dungeon beside a pool complete with water slide made out of PVC piping. Not only that, but we got free arrival cocktails at the bar, and more the following day for the owner’s birthday.

We quickly formed a tight group of around 8—a mix of Québécoises, Dutch, American, German and even another Anglo—in no small part down to the shared inconvenience of our location. We also soon found a favourite haunt in town called Coco Fastronomy whose sandwiches (known as bapés) were delicious and whose rear deck views were to die for; at the peak of our addiction, on New Year’s Eve, we spent the entire day there drinking and eating bapés for every meal.

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The neatly-inebriated four of us then realised we had to get back to the castle to pre-drink and get ourselves ready to head back out to a NYE party at Aqua Lounge for which we all had tickets. It was at this point that we realised we were well past the end of the bus service for the day, but luck was on our side: after taking a chance knocking on a darkened bus window, we found a guy who was heading over to the other side of the island to sleep on the beach.¹ He said he could take us so we hopped in and… nothing happened. Slowly, Bocatoreños filled the bus (in varying stages of fiesta) whilst the driver did his grocery shopping and other chores. As we waited, several litres of rum and a stack of plastic cups were produced and shared around. All told, this 5 km ride in the party bus took us a grand total of 2 hours, with us arriving at the castle just in time to change clothes and head straight back out.

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Obviously, by this point, I was about a litre deep and so the remainder of the night is a blur that I largely pieced together from photographic evidence the following day. One thing I definitely do remember, however, was spending midnight leaping into the Caribbean sea fully-clothed and losing $40 that I very optimistically handed to a stranger for safekeeping and never saw again.

New Year’s Day was earmarked for recovering, but at midday the hostel owner and staff (i.e., her brother and nephew) disappeared off to a family get-together and left us the pool, so we did what anybody would do: called our friends from town over and threw a pool party. Then, for reasons I can’t quite recall, I had a third litre-of-rum kind of night on January 2^nd.

At this point the group started to go their separate ways, but after initially trying to rush to catch a bus, the American girl and I realised that rushing was a choice and that we could just stay another night instead. We spent the day recovering from our hangovers with a boat trip to Bastimentos island for snorkelling, before finally departing the following day.

Boquete ¶

Jenneva and I made our way down to Boquete, where we met up again with one of the Québécoise from the castle. For the first couple nights we stayed at Agartha Hostel, which Jen aptly described as having an anti-vax vibe; whilst I don’t know for sure how accurate that specific accusation is, we did run into another guest on the Waterfall Trail who pretty quickly launched into an anti-vax diatribe and there were more than the acceptable number of David Icke books in the hostel bookshelf (the acceptable number being 0).

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We also tackled the El Pianista Trail, whose reputation very much preceded it due to the mysterious deaths of two Dutch hikers in 2016, but which was in fact nothing too intense. It was long though, and we treated ourselves to a night of luxury at Bambuda Castle to recover.

The next night we shifted again to Blasina Beer Hostel, which had an unusual capsule hotel-like design. We also met a Canadian from the Québécoise’s hostel, with whom we ended up going on a last-minute horse-riding trip. The Canadian was a through-and-through horse girl whilst my saddle experience was a couple of polo lessons several years ago, but by the end of the session we were the only two who had managed to get the horses to gallop on command.

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When we got back, most of the others went to bed and I ended up in a bar with the Canadian and the much younger Dutch and Québécoise girls. Where she had been pleasant enough earlier in the day, in the presence of an credulous audience the Canadian started to channel some rather off-putting cokehead energy, regaling us unceasingly with stories about stumbling on drug labs in the Colombian jungle and suchlike that I’m sure are a postcode or two’s distance from anything that has actually happened.

She boasted about all the countries she had ticked off on her mobile app. designed for the purpose, and described her plans to travel to Africa for a year during which she would visit 45 Afrian countries. Some back-of-the-napkin maths suggests an average stay of 5 days in each country, some of which I’m sure take longer than that just to traverse, so I think there must be some sneakiness with tripoints and quadripoints. Regardless, that sounds like an absolutely hellish itinerary.

Alas, whilst our approach of booking the following night’s room the day before had granted us a varied tour of Boquete’s different accommodation options, it fell down when we hit Friday and everything was booked out, both within Boquete and without. Unbenownst to us, we had just hit a bank holiday weekend for Martyr’s Day and the Panamanians were coming out in force. In the end, we found ourselves driven (along with the Québécoise) all the way back down to David.

Stumbling into Santa Catalina ¶

Jen and I parted ways after a couple nights in David, which Wikivoyage describes thusly:

Although David is not particularly interesting, it is a convenient transport hub for destinations in the region

Before long, my plans found themselves scuppered once again. I had intended to head to Playa Venao next to volunteer in a Montessori pre-school, but a week before I was due to arrive they announced they had hired a new staff member and no longer needed me. Adrift, I decided to follow the Québécoise and a French girl we had met on El Pianista to Santa Catalina instead. On the bus ride, I suddenly remembered that I had been messaging a farm near there on Workaway prior to New Year’s and had never followed up with them. I dropped them another message, and by the end of the bus ride I had my next stay lined up.

First, though, I spent a couple nights in the town, during which I took my first surf lesson (and managed to stand up on the board!). When we got back to our hostel, I found I had a message on Workaway addressed hey surfers; I was now part of this elite group, and sent a message back.

Rebecca Olive

On my last day, the three of us rented a couple kayaks and paddled out to a nearby island. Unfortunately, a storm blew in and we had to make a split-second decision on whether to try and race back across the channel before we lost visibility of the other shore or whether to hunker down on the island and wait for it to pass. We ultimately went for racing across which, in retrospect, was probably a bad idea, but in this case luck was on our side and the storm blew back out the other way as we were crossing.

Then it was off to the finca (i.e., smallholding farm), to work for the next several weeks. The property itself was a former cattle farm that had been bought by the owners—a family from South Africa—a few years previously with the intention of allowing the original foliage to regrow in the hopes it would then attract wildlife currently absent from the area and they could rent out cabins to birdwatchers and the like. The progress made up until now was certainly impressive, particularly on the property boundaries when compared to the neighbouring fields:

There were several other Workawayers there: another wildland firefighter, this time from Canada; a Swiss schoolteacher; and a German girl who’d just spent the best part of a year at an animal sanctuary in Costa Rica. During the day we would water trees, whack weeds and whatever else needed doing, and then most afternoons we’d hitch a ride into the town proper to hang out on the beach. We had weekends off, but most of the time I would book myself into a beautiful cliffside hostel—Surfer’s Paradise—and spend the days working on my laptop with an absolutely incredible view.

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As much as I had fun in Santa Catalina, I can’t help but feel that it only has a few more years before it is unrecognisable to me. Whilst Wikivoyage describes the surf breaks as uncrowded, that information is clearly a few years old because when the surf was good there would barely be a clear spot along the whole break. Also, whilst the key surf beach is currently a 30-min walk from the centre of town down a largely featureless road, there are several developments of fancy condos (and a Selina hostel) currently being built along it and a dirt road that bypasses the main town entirely; my prediction is that within a few years, those condos will be completed, the dirt road will be developed into a proper road and the town itself will have the oxygen sucked out of it as tourists take the bypass road to their resorts, find all of their needs met there and no longer need to visit the town itself. But hopefully I’m wrong.

A Disastrous Excursion ¶

Concurrently to working on the farm, I had been in touch with the Workaway person who had messaged me earlier. She was trawling for volunteers to work at a surf camp on the next peninsula over, helping with maintenance and painting tasks. Free daily surf lessons were amongst the perks offered, and I reasoned that it would be a smart move since I could then a) practice surfing intensively to capitalise on my recent lesson and b) keep moving eastward towards my next scheduled Workaway in Darién. I asked why they had contacted me through Workaway but didn’t have a profile, and the girl told me that the owners had previously had an account but didn’t want to pay the membership fee any more; fair enough. I arranged a start date and let the Santa Catalina host know when I would be heading off. The day came, and I set off on a two-day journey to the remote village of Guanico Abajo, where the El Ranchito Surfcamp was located.

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I arrived and was shown to the spartan accommodation, which I was sharing with three Swiss and a German. I had really landed in a cluster of the German Extended Universe, with the other volunteers hailing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and even Lichtenstein. We chatted, and I learned that the surf lessons took place around 7 am at the beach 5 km away, whilst our shifts started at 7:30; in other words, the free surf lessons existed only in theory. Disappointing, but I would still have a couple days off each week to take advantage of them.

The next morning, I showed up for my shift and was shown what I was to paint: a 10 ft wall, the top of which I could barely reach even at full extension and standing on the very top of the stepladder. Instead, I started with the roller on the centre, reasoning that somebody taller could come and do the perimeter later (plus, I was given no masking tape for the wooden ceiling beams and didn’t fancy being responsible for covering them in paint). Then one of the owners came over and told me I had to start with the outside, and complained that I hadn’t lined the paint tray with tin foil to make it easier to clean.²

I pointed out that I couldn’t reach the top with the stepladder provided, so she told me (now, not earlier, despite my height being pretty immediately apparent) that there was a taller stepladder. Unfortunately, there was only a small gap between the wall-to-be-painted and another knee-high one, and the taller stepladder wouldn’t fit in it lengthways. The owner suggested I put the ladder over the small wall, climb up the wall-facing side (i.e., away from the wall-to-be-painted) and then reach backward to paint. Feeling like this was obviously a terrible idea, but willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, I climbed up; it was exactly as awkward and ineffective as you may imagine. The owners told me to go sand the inside walls instead; one of the Swiss ended up doing the painting on a regular ladder leaning precariously against the wall, which my health insurance would definitely not have covered me for.

The sanding was not much more successful; depending on which of the two owners would come in to check, I would either be using too much pressure or not enough. Eventually, the day ended, and we headed back to the accommodation. I asked one of the Swiss girls (who was working as a nanny to the owners’ two young children) how her day had been. She replied that she had come down with something and asked to be excused due to not wanting to get the children ill, to which the owners responded only by telling her she would have to leave if she was off ill for more than a week; she quit on the spot.

We then headed off to the beach, where the girl who had initially recruited me took me aside. Apologetically, she told me that there had been some drama between the owners and volunteers in the week before I arrived (colour me unsurprised) and that the owners had just decided to get rid of everyone, including me. She said I could stay for a few more days whilst I worked out my plans, but that I would be expected to work. She left to surf and I told the other volunteers what had happened; they bought me a crate of beer and we commiserated, despite having only met the day previous, with the instant cameraderie that comes from shared hardship. We also plotted; within an hour or two, I had booked myself a hostel in Panama City.

The next morning, I awoke early. The owners had posted the evening before in a volunteer WhatsApp group (to which I hadn’t even been added yet) that I would be cleaning the swimming pool. Unfortunately for them, the first bus out of Guanico left at 6:30, so by the start of my shift I was halfway across the peninsula:

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I later reported the account of the girl who had recruited me, having realised that Workaway hosts don’t have to pay a membership fee and that the reason the surfcamp didn’t have a profile was almost certainly because they had been banned following poor feedback. The account was promptly suspended pending an investigation, although it does appear that this was only temporary.

A Charmless City ¶

I headed all the way to Panama City³ and Hostel Mamallena. The hostel was cheap and had good Wi-Fi, so I planned to just spend the two weeks before I was due in Darién here relaxing and catching up on work. The first red flag should have been when the receptionist thought the two-week booking had been a mistake, and advised that I probably wanted to only pay for part of it up-front. It turned out to be salient advice, though, as after my first day I knew was I unlikely to linger for long.

Having been in mostly rural areas for the past several months, I was unprepared for the miserable heat of a big city. As I looked online for things to do in Panama and plotted them on my map, I also came to realise that all of the touristy areas were located in small islands, separated by the areas of the city that one is advised to avoid both day and night.

Zipping from tourist haunt to tourist haunt by taxi didn’t sound like my kind of travelling, and I was longing to be back by the beach and nature, so after spending a few days in the weirdly antisocial hostel, I hopped on a bus back west; I was heading back to Santa Catalina.

Back to Santa Catalina ¶

The Canadian Workawayer was leaving the same day I returned (our buses passed one another on the road into town) so I missed her, but the Swiss guy and the German girl were still there; I had intentionally not told them I was coming back so as to surprise them when I showed up back in the accommodation. During my time away another German girl and a Uraguayana had joined the crew, and so I was soon back into the rhythm of watering, weeding and weekends by the sea.

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In long conversations with the owner (who was a fount of knowledge and rather prone to being sidetracked) we learnt about everything from the political situation in South Africa to the logistics of the drug trade in the area to the state of Panamanian infrastructure and building regulations. For example, getting planning permission requires so much time and money that the general approach of people in the country is apparently to extend their properties slowly enough to not attract attention—an extended wall one month, perhaps an awning the next—until eventually they have the desired extension as a fait accompli.

I started to notice this more and more, and came to appreciate the almost organic-looking architecture that resulted from the gradual accretion of extra structure. I also thought of Seeing Like a State and how this served a prime example of the innovations that can occur where life is less legible and the state therefore less powerful. I think there’s also an empowering element to this state of affairs; paying for architects and planning approvals is a prohibitively expensive upfront cost for most Panamanians, so this loophole allows them to develop their properties at a rate that is more flexible and affordable to them, or in other words to work all week to add a cinder block to their house.

Towards the end of this second stay, I had the opportunity to pick, wash and roast my own coffee beans; unfortunately, there was no grinder to be found, so they remain whole in my bag waiting for an opportunity to be tasted. We were also joined by another Canadian on the last couple days there, another wildland firefighter; they seem to be absolutely everywhere.

Carnevale ¶

Darién was looming, but before that came Carnevale weekend. Whilst Panama is not the country that first comes to mind when most people think Carnevale celebrations, there are several towns and cities dotted around with notable festvities. King amongst these is Las Tablas, normally a sleepy town of around 10,000 people that transforms for a long weekend into Panama’s premiere party destination. The day is spent dancing in the town centre whilst being dowsed with firehoses, whilst at night the town’s two rival queens (of Upper Street and Lower Street, respectively) compete to be crowned the Queen of Carnevale with competitive fireworks shows, dancing and huge parade floats.

In short, it sounded like it wasn’t to be missed. The other Workawayers were heading west, to Boquete and Bocas del Toro, but one of the German girls was coming east and finished at the farm only a week after I did. I headed off early and spent the week at Travellers Hostel in Chitré, mostly laying in a hammock and working on my laptop, until she came and joined me. Everything in Las Tablas was fully booked, but she had found a B&B in the nearby town of Guarare courtesy of some German travel blog.

It was easy enough to get between the two towns, so we went and partied and almost got crushed by several floats:

On the third night, we drank with a big group of Panamanians that were also staying with us, one of whom turned out to be some sort of celebrity chef. He got us all backstage entrance to a massive club, and we spent one of the drunkest nights of my life partying besides the DJ booth:

The following day I barely left the bed, and on the one after we went to the beach and I got singed rather badly. All in all, though, my second excursion to the Azuero peninsula had been markedly more successful than my first one. It was time to see if that luck could hold out.

Panama City, Take 2 ¶

The German and I headed to Panama City, this time staying in the old town of Casco Viejo. This is the main tourist area, and it really shows: the streets are pristine, the architecture cool, the cafes incredibly expensive and the police present on every street corner. However, in weird Panama City fashion, a wrong turn or going one or two blocks too far takes one straight into one of the most allegedly dangerous neighbourhoods of the cities, where there are no cops to be seen.

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As the German had Uber, we were much more mobile than I had been on my previous visit. We walked down the beautiful Amador Causeway, learning about the relationship between Panama and the US and the history of the Panama Canal, then ended with a visit to the (wildly pricey but fairly interesting) Biomuseo. We also went for breakfast at a cafe one morning and ended up in the middle of a large-ish protest march, which seemed to be something to do with a miners strike, but it wasn’t super clear.

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My second visit to Panama City was much more successful than the first one, but it really is a city where you can smell the Gini coefficient in the air.⁴ Panama as a whole is like that, with towering skyscrapers and the swish offices of multi-national banks trying to evade taxes surrounded by slums and not that far from rural villages without running water or electricity, all despite how much money the Canal brings in for the country.

After several days in Panama City, it was time for the German and I to finally part ways. I was heading to the final stop on my trans-Panamanian tour, and a place whose reputation very much preceded it: Darién.

There be Dragons ¶

Most people, be they tourists or Panamanians, would do a double take when I told them I was going to Darién. In Chitré, a Croatian guy tried to dissuade me from going by telling me it was one of the most dangerous places in the world, offered me a compass in case I got lost and gave me his number to call in case I needed help. The FCDO say to avoid the region, as does Wikivoyage, unless you have a very good reason to go. Even the people at Albrook bus terminal refused to believe that I wanted to go there, trying several times to direct me to the bus to the other Santa Fe in Veraguas province.

Part of this, I think, is the unfortunate conflation of the entire region with the Darién Gap, which by all accounts really is as dangerous as it’s made out to be. But Darién is a big place, and there’s plenty to the province before one reaches the National Park. I wonder too, particularly gauging from the reactions of the Panamanians, to what extent this is just the standard fear of a largely undeveloped region full of indigenous people that we can see expressed throughout history, from the Roman concept of the barbarians at the gate to the savage red man trope used to justify westward US expansion in the 19^th century.⁵ To hear the Panamanians tell it, Darién is a distant Mordor from which few return; pressed further, none of the people saying that had ever been.

Undeterred, I set off on the five-hour bus ride from Panama City. After crossing over several large lakes, their shores dotted by small wooden houses on stilts, the generally barren scenery of the rest of the Pan-American Highway started to give way to lush jungle. Then, all of a sudden, the colour would drain entirely and we would pass for a few minutes through a post-apocalyptic landscape of ash, the result of slash and burn agricultural practices common to the region:

Finally, after swapping for a small minibus for the final leg of the journey, I arrived in Puerto Lara, a small village populated by members of the Wounaan indigenous group. I was here to teach English, as some of the village leaders were hoping to develop the place for tourism and currently nobody spoke any. Me and the other volunteers—a German couple with their young baby, who is having a very cool childhood that he will remember nothing about—were housed in a huge recently-constructed house built in the traditional style, which doubled as a hostel for tourists.

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Photo by the author

Given that it was the dry season in Panama, running water was limited to a roughly 30-minute window every morning that would occur at a random time, generally between 6 and 8 am. Sometimes, there would be no water. As a result, someone would get up early and open a tap to serve as a warning; when the trickle of water was heard, we’d rush around the house to fill all of our receptacles before it cut off. We used the same water for bathing, cooking and drinking, although we boiled it before doing the latter. Behold my shower:

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Class times were set in theory, although it quickly became clear that the kids would just show up as and when to play and we would have to be flexible and just start teaching when there were enough present. As and when also proved to mean pretty much constantly, and the large house served as a combination nursery/playroom for much of the day. This was manageable when I could share the load with the Germans, but they left after I’d been there a week and I suddenly found myself trying to juggle a constant stream of children.

The kids were, to put it charitably, a handful. I’m unclear how responsible I would have been held if something had’ve happened to them, but I would routinely turn around to find them climbing on the outside of the building or launching each other out of hammocks directly beside the railings. One time I got back from the shops to find that they had chopped me up a papaya; it was only later that I realised I didn’t have any knives, and that there must have been a bunch of unsupervised 5–10 year olds playing around with my machete. However, lack of self-preservation and minute attention spans aside, the kids were adorable. I can’t say we made any real strides in English (which was always going to be an uphill struggle, as the kids hadn’t generally achieved literacy in Spanish until around 11 years old), but I did teach them how to tie a bunch of knots.

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The adults were more organised (as you might imagine) and several of them made excellent progress over the several weeks I was there. One kept asking me to translate odd phrases (e.g., I am offering free calls), so I asked why and learnt that she volunteered with the Panamanian Red Cross at a migrant reception centre by the Gap. I asked her if I would be able to join them the next time they went, but she said she’d have to ask her boss who’d have to ask his, and given the speed of Panamanian bureaucracy it was clear that nothing would be sorted by the time I left.

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Inbetween babysitting and teaching I worked, both on my site and on the mobile app. I am using to track my trip, and hiked the nearby trail a couple of times. My birthday came and went without much fanfare, although I did get some nice cakes from a van that would pass through the village every evening, and one of my students took me out to the local watering hole on my final night. Of all the Workaways I’ve done, I think this is the one that I most want to come back to in future to see how things have progressed; also, the arepas rellenas from the nearby Restaurante Arco Iris are to die for.

Back to Costa Rica ¶

My next destination was Nicaragua, but direct flights were ludicrously expensive (~£500 one-way for a 1h30 trip). Instead, I decided to travel by bus, which would double as a good excuse to explore some of the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. I hopped on the 5-hour bus back to Panama City with hostels booked in Panama City and David, but when I arrived at Albrook I found an overnight bus that would take me all the way to the border. I told my hostels not to wait up for me⁶ and settled in for the 12-hour ride to Changuinola, followed by a taxi to Guabito.

I was so early that I had to wait a few hours for the Panamanian immigration office to open so I could get my exit stamp. Then I walked across a bridge, pausing to appreciate the easiest and most picturesque border crossing I’ve ever encountered:

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From the moment I crossed the border, I was struck by just how verdant and lush the foliage was on the Costa Rican side. For the last two months, I had mostly been surrounded by the barren landscapes surrounding the Pan-American Highway, the bone-dry Azuero peninsula, the endless tracts of near-empty land used for cattle pasture and, to top it off, the ashen moonscape on the approach to Darién.

I remembered something that the South African guy had said, comparing Panama and Costa Rica. Decades ago, he said, both countries stood at a crossroads and had to decide how best to secure their futures. Panama had the Canal and all of the money that it brought in, and so decided that it didn’t need to do much at all (in what I suppose is an example of the Dutch disease). Costa Rica, on the other hand, recognised that its greatest asset was its own environment, and that protecting this would be a long-term project and require huge investment in education and environmental protection. Now, the results of Costa Rica’s phenomenal success and Panama’s short-sightedness are easily visible, despite the latter’s attempts to ape the former’s approaches in words if not in deed (e.g., illegal logging is rife in nominally protected areas like the island of Coiba).

I don’t necessarily know how accurate that all is, having only been in the country for a couple months, and obviously there are many other factors that differentiate the two countries (not least of all the six-year-long US-backed and then US-toppled Noriega dictatorship in Panama). But at least from my relatively brief experience, it seems to gel with what I’ve seen. Panama is naturally beautiful and incredibly varied, and the Panamanians generally seem to be pretty happy, but there is a lingering sense of precarity to that beauty and happiness. Just as Costa Rica apparently now exports seeds to Panama for plants that were originally endemic to the latter, I hope that some of its other positive examples can also spread to its eastern neighbour before the twin golden geese of the Canal and the worldwide tax evasion industry stop laying their shiny, shiny eggs.

Mine is an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship

I’ve long wanted to visit Costa Rica, ever since learning that it was one of only a handful of countries in the world to not have a standing army. This, along with its foundational role in promoting worldwide eco-tourism and it’s famous biodiversity,¹ presented an image of a responsible nation with its priorities firmly in the right place. This was all seemingly confirmed during their 2018 elections when, at a time when most other countries were racing to see who could collapse into right-wing extremism faster and more belligerently, the Costa Rican electorate resoundingly rejected the Christian populist candidate.

So far, so good, but the proof is always in the pudding and so I wanted to experience Costa Rica first-hand.

No way, San José ¶

Flying into the capital was a shock after the pristine adobe aesthetics of Arizona. San José is, to put it charitably, a bit of a ‘hole, and it’s worth noting that this is an assessment shared by all but two people I encountered, whether gringo or Tico (the preferred endonym amongst Costa Ricans). I wonder, though, how much it’s a matter of the coat of paint used; the endless gated communities of suburban Phoenix were, functionally, the same as the omnipresent physical security measures around every building in San José (from corner shops to primary schools), but barbed wire-topped chain-link fences are visually much more striking than well-manicured golf courses and discreetly-placed CCTV cameras.

At my hostel (whose front seemed designed to deter ramming attacks) I met my first Tica, a twenty-year old girl who had never left the country and was amazed to learn that the UK has an army and not monkeys. She made a point of warning me to be careful and that not everyone here is pura vida. Later on we went looking for food and asked a guy for directions, who asked his friend, but to no avail. We walked the other way for a while before returning, only to find the guy still stood there waiting for us. He offered to lead us to the place using his phone map and we agreed, but as he led us away from the main throughfare and into the side roads my Spidey-sense started to tingle… and then he brought us to the place and went on his way. He was pura vida, after all.

The girl on the other side of the dorm was unfortunate enough to have the slats of the bunk above her keep falling onto her, and by the morning she had amassed a collection of no fewer than six laying on the floor beside her bed. I only stayed in San José for the night. I chatted to a couple Germans over breakfast and talked about meeting up with the Tica again in Panama. Then I steeled myself for an eight-hour bus ride, the standard of the on-vehicle amenities unknown.

Into the Jungle ¶

The bus ride was largely uneventful, and the scenery pretty interesting, but it ended on a bum note as a baby across the aisle from me threw up all over my shoes about half an hour from our destination. When I arrived in Puerto Jiménez it was dark, and I had a slightly sketchy-feeling 15-minute walk to get to my hostel, in large part down an unlit road.

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Still, though, I was not done. Puerto Jiménez was but my penultimate destination, and as I sat waiting for the bus that would take me to my final one the following morning, drinking a coffee and eating a delicious empanada (shout-out to Nano’s Diner), I took in my surroundings now that I could see them. My first time in the tropics, and it looked and felt exactly as I’d expected: lush greenery everywhere; rusting radio masts like something out of Far Cry 3; and dirt roads with potholes big enough to lose your dog in. I was a long way from the relative swishness of San José now, and the place fascinated me; I made a mental commitment to come back often.

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Eventually, the bus arrived, and by bus I mean a small red minibus that had certainly seen better days. On the 40-minute ride, most of which was taken at around 10 mph due to the state of the roads, I chatted to the driver in halting Spanish and took in my surroundings, from the water buffalo-looking cows to the huge trees. At one point the road narrowed to a single lane alongside the river and the driver explained that the rest of it had washed away in the recent rainfall.

Tomasz Poniży

Finally, I was in Dos Brazos, a tiny gold-mining town located at the point where the two arms of the Rio Tigre converge to form the river proper. I was here for my first volunteerstay organised via Workaway, as a house-sitter at Bolita Hostel—Costa Rica’s only clothing-optional hostel—whilst it was shut for the rainy season… except they had forgotten I was coming, and the rainy season was already about over. Not to worry, I was happy enough to do the normal volunteer work too, and I waited to be told what that would be. The path up to the hostel involved a river crossing and a steep uphill climb, described on the hostel Web site as aggressive and taking around 45 minutes in all, and I found out the hard way that US dollars do not get on well with water.

At the hostel were three couples: five Poles who had never met previously and one Greek guy. As there were no guests yet, the only jobs we had to do were generally keep the place clean and bring stuff up and down as required when making a trip. I had the dorm area to myself (unless you count the trail of leafcutter ants passing underneath my bed) and settled in to sleep.

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The next couple days were a little stressful, as I had to return to Puerto Jiménez to buy groceries and things I had forgotten. Things improved after this, particularly once I had adjusted to the din of the jungle at night and was better able to sleep. I started to explore the surrounding area, tackling a few of the trails and hunting for wildlife in the evening, as well as continuing to study Spanish.

At some point, and I’m not sure why, both of my big toenails fell off.

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Then, whilst out hiking the trails in the buff (as you do), I managed to get my phone wet and kill the display.² It was back to stress as I wandered around Puerto Jiménez the following day looking for repair stores, none of which were able to do anything with my Fairphone; I realised to my frustration that the phone and its replacement parts are only sold in Europe, and that I had paid a premium for a allegedly repairable phone that isn’t repairable in most of the world.

Realising that it would be quite a faff to set up a new phone, I looked on Workaway for a nearby host somewhere less remote. As luck would have it, I found a French couple living in Puerto Jiménez itself and, after meeting the husband in town whilst I was there looking for new phones, I had a new plan all lined up.

Puerto Jiménez ¶

So, much earlier than anticipated, I found myself back in Puerto Jiménez for a longer stay. I had a place to stay and meals provided in exchange for helping the couple around the house, painting, cleaning and walking their dogs. They had three dogs and three cats, including one kitten with whom I became best friends. As I gushed about my new pals to my two-legged friends back home, I found out that most of them were surprised and seemed to think I had something against animals; I’m not sure what I have done to garner such a reputation.

I also realised that it wouldn’t be feasible to order any specific model of phone that I actually wanted online, and so I had to settle for the cheapest that they had in the local electronics store. Thus I ended up with a Samsung Galaxy A13 which, like all normal consumer tech. fills me with disgust every time I use it. Adjusting to stock Android after using /e/OS was hard enough, but I would later discover that Samsung phones really do go above and beyond in an effort to suck as much as possible.

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I quickly settled in to my new routine: I would work through the morning, usually alongside the husband, and then head off to the beach in the afternoon (or, perhaps more often, say I was going to and then take a nap or get distracted by something). I was trying to put my finger on what I liked so much about the place when I read the following description on WikiVoyage:

A funky old gold mine town, main town on the tip of the peninsula, and the only small town with restaurants, bank, ATM, gas station, shops, internet cafés, airstrip, car rentals, grocery stores and crazy night life….You can also shop and see the local culture, and if you are lucky, you just might catch one of their many festivals. People here are friendly and helpful.

That’s right, I had found myself in Costa Rican Deadwood!

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One day I met a German tourist at the beach and we became pals, and so I added bar-hopping to my free time itinerary. For some reason we couldn’t work out, he kept getting charged more for things than me, such as paying ₡2,000 (~£4) for an espresso (compared to my ₡300–500 filter coffees) and even, one time, ₡1,000 for a black coffee that had been ₡500 at the same place the day before. Prices in general were weird, and at least one place clearly set prices in dollars and converted them into colones, leading to prices fluctuating slightly day-by-day.

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Our favourite haunt quickly became a beachfront dive bar called Bar de la Purraja. With his much better Spanish we invited the two barmaids to come out with us after work, and we ended up playing some frames of pool because they assumed that, as an English person, I was super into that. We also learned that whereas I—at least until I opened my mouth—could be mistaken for a Tico due to my tan and attire (shorts, flip-flops and sleeveless vests), everything about my pal screamed gringo and that that was why we were experiencing such different treatment.

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November came and went, and I finally shaved for the first time in a long while; I hadn’t been intending to do it for Movember, I was just lazy and testing my genetics to see if I could grow proper facial hair with enough patience (nope). I saw the Germany–Costa Rica game with a group of Germans in a bar full of Costa Ricans, and few things in my life have ever been as loud, although the French guy did put in a good effort during the England–France game later on, and the France–Argentina final. I even met up with one of the couples from Bolita as they transited through the town after finishing there, and with the ending of the rainy season I started to notice more gringos about (he says, as though he isn’t one).

Día de la Abolición del Ejército ¶

I hadn’t realised this when planning my trip, but I discovered that the the Día de la Abolición del Ejército—the national holiday celebrating the day that Costa Rica abolished its army—fell on December 5^th and was coming up soon. This was the event that first interested me in the country, and my German pal had left for pastures anew, so I decided to spend the day reading up on Costa Rican history.

The story goes that, in 1948, Costa Rica decided to abolish its entire armed forces, the President symbolically smashed through the wall of their former headquarters with a sledgehammer and all the former defence spending was redirected towards education. Costa Rica then went on to have the best 20^th and 21^st centuries of any South or Central American country, remaining peaceful in spite of the trends of the rest of the region and seeing huge leaps in its standard of living.

Of course, the reality of living without an army is a little more complex than just everyone decided we were too nice to hit. Unlike elsewhere in Latin America, Costa Rica hasn’t really ever seen the kind of leftist leader who threatens US corporate profits with the possibility of expropriation and wealth redistribution,³ so Washington was never compelled to support right-wing death squads, military dictators or genocides here. It’s easy to be a happy little hobbit when you’re not drawing Sauron’s gaze.

Plus, Costa Rica has had to bend the knee to the US a number of times, such as backing the Contras in Nicaragua under Monge. This marked the end of the Reform State period, and since then Costa Rica has followed the neoliberal economic line. Not unrelatedly, the generation of artists and writers stretching from the 1980s to now is known as the generation of disenchantment.

So, Costa Rica’s peace and prosperity is a little more complicated than it may first appear, and some of those contradictions are likely to intensify as Chinese investment in the country ramps up, threatening its thusfar successful strategy of play nice with the local nutcase. Like Japan, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for their constitutional pacifism to become a subject of debate.

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But, on that day, I walked the dogs along the beach and spent the rest of the morning painting the kitchen to the sounds of Israel Kamakawiwoʻole and toucans outside. It was about 30 °C, there was barely a cloud in the sky and on that day 74 years prior, Costa Rica made a very cool decision and hasn’t (yet) looked back; I celebrated with a beer on the beach.

Happy in Jiménez ¶

I wanted to find some more people to hang out with and so set myself up on Tinder. I tried Bumble too, as I’d heard good things about it and I find Tinder itself hugely unpleasant, but due to its limited penetration into Costa Rica thusfar they have ingeniously decided to disable the ability to filter based on location, making the app.  utterly useless unless I fancied a 60 km trip to San José for the sake of a date.

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Before he left, the German and I had gone on a night out with a Uruguayan Workawayer who was also in the area and I had been surprised to find that I could mostly follow the conversation in Spanish. After successfully managing to conduct two dates with a Tica entirely in Spanish without accidentally calling myself a jelly doughnut (although I did slash my thumb open attempting to open a coconut) I realised just how unreasonably effective a tool immersion is for language learning, having learned in a couple weeks more than I had in months of Duolingo or years of Spanish lessons at school.

Alizon

Unfortunately, that was as far as things went as our schedules never aligned again. Much of my social life for the remainder of my time there revolved around the animals, although the German did come back to visit the barmaid he’d started seeing and we all headed to the centre of town for the Festival de la Luz; then she taught me a bunch of bad words in Spanish, as is the responsibility of every language speaker when encountering a learner. On my final night with the French I cooked a risotto (with the husband later calling me le roi du risotto in his feedback on Workaway) and said goodbye to my new furry friends.

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It was time to return to Bolita…

Back to Bolita ¶

With my phone issues quickly sorted, I had found my thoughts regularly drifting back to Bolita. Partly this was because I kept coming into contact with it: the German had stayed there one weekend, and the Polish–Greek couple had told me about how the vibe had changed now that tourists were present. I was curious to see the change for myself, and I also didn’t have any pressing need to move on yet, so I planned to spend the holidays naked in the jungle, as everyone should.

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All the volunteers I had been with before were gone, replaced by a Swiss guy and two pairs of Americans, each of ambiguous couple-ness. Also present now was the owner, who had been away in Canada before. Now that we were out of house-sitting mode we were excacipected to do normal volunteer work for 20 hours per week, but after a rambling three-hour briefing and repeated questions we were no clearer on how we were expected to make up 100 hours per week between us when there was a ratio of one volunteer per guest, and the guests were all pretty tidy.

There was a lot of talk about there being loads of projects, but never any information, and the one time I tried to take some initiative (by hanging up a poster we’d been told to hang up), I got into the owner’s bad books because I had used a knife rather than a hole punch (though none were available) and had apparently put it up in the wrong place. Someone else tried to put it up on another wall and it again got torn down, and the owner seemed to assume it was my doing again. The poster was still laying on the floor when I left, where I expect I shall remain until the jungle steals it away one windy day.

Two of the Americans were coming off the back of a season spent wildland firefighting in Washington and, as someone who one considered applying to be a firewatch lookout, I immediately decided I wanted a piece of that action; one for another trip. Now that the rest of the world had effectively halted for holiday period, I was able to really sink into the tranquil jungle retreat vibes and enjoy the glacial pace of life there.

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There had been a fair amount of drinking with the house-sitting crew, and I kept that tradition alive with the new group by bringing a couple litres of rum and cacique with me. By day I lay in a hammock or went hiking, by night we drank and played card and/or drinking games. One advantage of not being with a bunch of couples was that people were more amenable to cooking together, and I even organised a couple film viewings: Clara Sola, because I wanted to watch a Costa Rican film; and Y tu mamá también, because I love it (and now I want to go on a Mexican road trip). The owner disappeared shortly before Christmas Eve, never to return before my own departure, and as a result we basically self-organised ourselves exactly as we had done when there were no guests and didn’t bother to track our hours.

For Christmas Day itself I organised a volunteer meal back down in Dos Brazos, and on my final morning there I woke everyone up at 4 a.m.  so we could hike up to a viewpoint and watch the sun rising over the Golfo Dulce:

Panama, Ho! ¶

I had heard enough people tell me that I should go to Bocas del Toro that I decided to cut short my second stay at Bolita so I could spend New Year’s there; I felt I was overdue some proper partying.

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Before that I spent the night in Puerto Jiménez, and the hostel owner—a Canadian-accented Scotsman with a big bushy beard, who seemed to have a side hustle of videocalling children at the end of December as Santa on holiday—told me and a pair of Dutch girls who were heading the same way how we could make it all the way to Bocas in a single day.

The next day I said goodbye to Costa Rica, having seen an awful lot of one very small part of it, and certain that I would be back some time for the rest.