Everything changed when we crossed the border from Costa Rica to Nicaragua. For one, Nicaraguans are adept at squeezing as many people into each vehicle, be it a bicycle, motorbike, car or truck. A bus drove past us, a group of people on the roof and a man hanging on to the back. A pickup truck was full of people, many of them with half their body outside the vehicle. I began noticing people carrying buckets and boxes carefully balanced on their heads, and everyone seemed to be carrying piles of wood, for their wood cooking stoves. The buses are old American school buses, many sporting Christian quotes on the…

Costa Rica has a problem. It is too beautiful, too attractive, and too peaceful, attracting millions of tourists each year. Its fitting image of paradise on earth is one of the “problems”. We strategically avoided staying in touristy areas, preferring the less known places, small towns or villages, and they do exist in Costa Rica, even though we’ve heard that “tourists are everywhere”. By doing this, what we discovered is indeed a beautiful country, in both landscape and people. We crossed the border from Panama at Paso Canoa and it took us a while to figure out where to get our passports stamped and so on. Welcome to Costa Rica!…

We left Ocu after resting there an extra day and befriending a group of seniors that took excellent care of us. We returned to the Pan American highway just 11km from where we had left it a week earlier, completing a loop in the Azuero Peninsula. This time the road had wide shoulders, clear of the common glass shards, not much traffic, and was a joy to ride. We passed through Santiago, the third largest city in Panama and took a quick look at the “parque” – the main plaza. We left the highway once again to cycle towards Sona, pronounced like the word for prostitute in Hebrew, which we…

We could finally relax. We were at the gate waiting for our flight and there was nothing else to do. After a week of being on the go all the time it felt nice not to think about the next errand, or packing or making another trip to the storage unit. We were both fast asleep before the plane even took off. The three hour flight to Las Vegas seemed too short. In Las Vegas we were stuck with our two huge bike boxes that we had to keep with us till the next flight. The options were spending about 11 hours in the boring airport, or going out to…