🇨🇷 Costa Rica, 🇳🇮 Nicaragua and 🇸🇻 El Salvador

From Costa Rica, to Nicaragua and El Salvador

Welcome everyone to our second iteration of our little newsletter keeping you up to date on everything we’ve been up to! In the past few weeks, we’ve travelled through Costa Rica (where Jesus saved Tom’s iPhone), Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In Costa Rica (5.1mil) we started off in the bustling capital city of San Jose (1.45mil), where we explored the city and found some lovely cafes and brutalist-style public buildings (which we found out are illegal to take photos of). We then travelled by bus to Monteverde (4,100), a mountain town in the cloud forest which boasts 80% of Costa Rica’s biodiversity! Cloud forests are characterised by persistent low-lying cloud cover that brings a subtropical climate. We saw tarantulas, Quetzal birds and monkeys! We loved the people in Costa Rica - they are warm, and welcoming and have a similar sense of humor.

We then traveled to the Costa Rican Pacific coast, and stayed at Playa del Coco (9,000), a beach town with dark sand main beach, fishing lifestyle and some beautiful hidden coves if you’re willing to hike!

It’s here where we discovered an important travel rule: Bad things DO come in threes…

#1 One morning in Playa del Coco, we hiked over a small mountain, down to a beautiful, secluded beach. The hike was tough and heading back that way would have been rough in the midday of 40 degrees, but there was a large dangerous ravine with crashing waves into a cave mouth that prevented us walking around along the beach, so we hatched a plan. We carefully packed our phones and necessities into a dry bag to waterproof them and prepared to swim around. We also packed another bag with less critical items like our clothes, sunnies, sunscreen, and planned to toss it across the ravine to the other side.

After Milla swam with the phones around to be the receiver, Tom was in charge of launching the bag across (we’d practiced the underhand on the rocks beforehand) but at the last minute we thought a fling with the straps would get more distance and his fingers got caught on the straps on the way up! So instead of across, the bag went up up up and landed down into the waves of the ravine! Thankfully it floated! And after 5 or 10 minutes of willing the waves to wash the bag towards the rocks, a kid shows up with a 4m giant bamboo stick and fishes it out for us! Our hero!!! (pic our bag in the ravine and wet clothes drying in trees lol).

#2 We made it to Liberia (district, 64,000) in pretty good time on another public bus in the morning from Playa del Coco. Excited to see nearby waterfalls and have a swim, we jumped in an Uber and headed out. But after we arrived and hiked down to the falls, Tom discovered his phone was gone! This was bad. With no phone reception, we started by retracing our steps back to the entrance gate. When we didn't spot it, we realised it must have fallen out of his pocket in the Uber. There was no way to access the Uber app, so we found a kind stranger and waved down a passing car, explaining our predicament. With our tiny bit of Spanish, we got our situation across to the five friendly locals who squeezed us in the boot gave us a ride back to Liberia (requesting we duck on occasion to not be fined by the police).

We whipped out Tom's laptop and tried using the 'Find My' app to track the phone, but it seemed like the location was only updating once an hour or so. The phone was pinging all over the city, so we figured it must still be in the Uber, but those inaccurate location updates didn't leave us feeling very hopeful.

The phone pinged the closest it had been to us, 1.5km so Tom made a mad dash with no avail. After 5hrs of following its movements we got another update out of town…

We decided to give it a shot. Using Uber on Milla's phone Tom jumped in and went to that last address. With the help of a super understanding Uber driver Jesus, we went on the chase, following those sporadic location pings. Finally, we spotted our original Uber car parked along a street – and knocked on the door. It was the original driver who then pulled my phone out of his glovebox. A big shoutout to Jesus who helped me negotiate all of that, our second hero!!!! (Oh and a big thank you to Milla as well, 2 days in a row she’s helped bundle me (Tom) out of situations of my own doing🤦)

#3 Our run of bad/hilarious experiences wasn't over. We arrive before 6am for a bus to Nicaragua, only to wait... and wait... After THREE hours with no bus and growing anxiety about the border crossing and hours long journey, we thought that forward progress is better than waiting forever (reviews of the company mention the buses sometimes never showing up!) so we jumped on the next crowded public bus to the border town of Penas Blancas and what did we bump into? Our original bus stuck at the border.

Turns out it blew a tire, and we jumped on it to Nicaragua after walking across the border ourselves!

So all in all, good outcomes, somehow! Perhaps good things happen in threes.

We were now in Nicaragua (6.9mil), and it was pretty amazing with its colourful towns, rich history and amazing scenery. A highlight was Ometepe Island (42,000), the largest island within a lake in the world, made up of two huge volcanoes. We stayed in an eco-lodge with amazing food which was farm-to-table style, swam in natural springs, hiked through the jungle and rode all the way around the island, getting very dusty in the process.

In Ometepe, one evening we were lounging in the hammocks of our accommodation when we heard loud, robotic announcements from the street. It sounded like an evacuation siren, we knew one of the volcanos on the island was active, and we became a bit concerned thinking it was the worst, I started imagining our escape, we listened intently, but unable to comprehend we decided to use Google audio translate to figure out how we need to respond… turns out it was just this!

We also spent some time in Granada (125,000), a charming Spanish colonial town with colourful streets and a lively market scene, with the regional traditional dance competition on one evening! We had a good dance and loved the vibrant culture.

And our final country was El Salvador (6.3mil), where we headed for Tom’s bday at the beach! To get there though, we decided that rather than taking multiple public buses across Honduras (we took note from warnings about violent crime crossing borders), we would take a 3 hour boat direct from Nicaragua to El Salvador. Travelling by boat was a novelty, and all of us on board ended up soaked as a cross wind blew the ocean spray. Thankfully we had a dry bag to keep our passports and laptops dry!

El Tunco (5,000) in El Salvador was a lively surf town, with plenty of great places to eat and drink. On my birthday we spent the afternoon at an amazing brewery overlooking the water which included it’s own ocean swimming pool built into the rocks. After sunset we headed back into town to party with some new friends visiting from Guatemala at a beach resort with a DJ playing Latin hits.

We would have loved to stay in El Salvador longer, but with Easter quickly approaching and Antigua Guatemala hosting the largest Easter celebration in the world we thought we better get there to see the amazing celebrations!!

For more pics of our travels visit: https://millaphotos.myportfolio.com/ 

Milla’s Reads…

I thought I would share what I’ve been reading on the trip so far at the bottom of our emails 🙂 please also send through any book recommendations!

I’ll Let Myself In - Hannah Diviney
An honest book which achieved what it set out to do, it taught me new perspectives. Hannah speaks of reckoning with her identity and disability, her role as an advocate, and very eloquently critiques our society’s views on disability and ableism. Hannah speaks about her insecurities about relationships, love and her future, including even about the success of this book, which the book’s popularity hopefully puts to rest.

Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family by Najla Said
I really enjoyed this memoir where Najla, who is the daughter of renowned Palestinian writer and advocate Edward Said, shares the complexities of cultural and religious identities growing up in America. Through historic events such as Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), occupation of Palestine and events of 9/11, Najla's insights on complexities of nationalism, identity and relationships also have a current relevance with Israel’s war on Gaza.

I’m currently reading Yellowface by R.F Kuang, and I can’t put it down!