Costa Rica!

Woke up in San Juan del Sur and it looked about the same as it had when we rolled in. I took some well framed pictures of the beach so as to hide the used baby diapers and trash that we find all over the place. It is as if the town was a nice place at one point but then the trash truck stopped coming. We ate breakfast at a restaurant on the beach that has been there for 32 years. We watched a group of local boys dig one of their friends out from under the restaurant next door and drag him out to the surf and throw him in! He put up absolutely no fight at all, we think he was high on something as he couldn't even hold his head up to breathe. All of a sudden he popped up and stumbled a few feet in from the waves and crashed out on the beach again. We did some exploring and found a yoga studio. The yoga was a mixture of martial arts and yoga so I decided to give it a try, but the class wasn't until 5pm so I decided to get a massage instead, to work out some if the kinks from all the riding. The day was good and we ended up enjoying our short stay with an ocean swim. Decided to head out early the next day to beat the tour buses to the border crossing. We went to bed early to get a good nights sleep, but we were jolted awake at 3 am by a band of people roaming the streets blowing horns and banging on plastic buckets. It went on until sunrise so as soon as it was light enough we got going. It was a good thing that we went for the early start because the buses were lined up at immigration when we got there. Thanks to the butler maps guys again, we were able to navigate the craziness of the border paperwork in record time. We seemed to be right behind a rather unusual couple in each of the lines at the border. It was a seemingly rich Nicaraguan with his trophy wife who's incredibly tight hot pink tshirt read "yes they're real" across the chest. I think her role in the crossing was to distract all the truckers so that the rich guy could cut in the lines! Lines didn't seem to really matter at the border anyway, because as soon as somebody finished at the window everyone rushed to the front! We rode into Costa Rica past the miles of semis waiting to cross the border, to Puntarenas, which was a dump. Drove further from the border and it started to look more like the Costa Rica I remembered. We ended up putting in quite a few miles with the border crossing day taken into account. We started looking for places to stay and ended up in paradise! We had a hotel with a pool that you could swim around in a system of canals, under bridges and waterfalls! The hotel itself was 5 star American standard nice. It had a casino and its own private beach and three restaurants! We recharged our batteries and got ready for an early day again along the coast. The views were fantastic as was the road. We flew along at 65mph for most of the day and before we knew it we were at the border for Panama. The coast line of Costa Rica has really been a highlight for me thus far. I have been here before, but we flew from Corcovado to Tamarindo and missed out on this part of the country. I have to say that if I was going to buy a winter home somewhere someday that this is pretty close to the top of my list! Crossing into our last Central American country tomorrow, marking the end of the first part of this journey south! South America here we come! I just read that the Dakar rally starts on the 5th of January in Peru and ends on the 19th in Santiago, Chile. It would be cool to catch some of that but I doubt we will make it that far that fast.