On the road again..

We returned from South America in April 2016, and in the last nine years, a lot has changed. After living in Bristol for a year, we moved to the Cotswolds and bought a 10-year renovation project house. After two major building projects and a whole raft of smaller renovations, the house is nearly finished. In this time, we’ve also both moved companies, experienced good and bad times, but along the way we’ve made a whole new set of friends in our adopted Cotswolds home near Stroud.

It’s time for another adventure. We’ve managed to arrange a three month sabbatical after some careful planning with both of our employers. While three months is the maximum that I can take, Alex has a little longer, so is taking the lead on getting us ready so that we can travel for nearly the entire time that I’m off work.

We’re leaving in a few days and have a rough plan:

Weeks 1-5

Travelling Spanish school in Panama and Costa Rica. This includes around 4 hours Spanish tuition a day plus activities in each location.

We’ll be starting in Panama City for the first week. We’ll be visiting the Panama canal and taking a trip to the San Blas Islands for a night or two.

The second week is in Boquete in the jungle where in addition to the ongoing Spanish we’ll have a tree top canopy tour.

The third week is in Bocas del Toro by the coast where we’ll be exploring the coast by catamaran, snorkelling and enjoying the nightlife.

In week four we head across the border to Turrialba in Costa Rica, where we’ll finish the week with some white water rafting on the Pacuare river.

Finally in the fifth week we’ll be visiting both Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica as well as Tortaguero on the north east coast which is only accessible by boat. Both of these locations will be second visits for me as I visited over 20 years ago with friends. I’m looking forward to seeing how they have changed, as well as showing Alex places that I fell in love with many years ago.

Weeks 6-12

For our remaining seven weeks, we break out of the structure of the travelling Spanish school and continue our travels with less of a defined plan. There is a lot more of Costa Rica that I’d like to show Alex, but we also want to continue north.

Nicaragua has been on our wishlist since fellow travellers told us of their experiences during our South America trip, as has Guatemala, and we’ve both wanted to visit Mexico for many years. We’ve got our work cut out without even mentioning El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize, and we don’t like to rush countries, preferring to spend a few weeks in each!

I suspect the hardest decisions we’re going to make during this phase are where not to go, but right now there are no concrete plans and, like last time, we’ll keep it fluid and be open to suggestions from people we meet along the way.

We’ll be post on here as regularly as we can, however there’s always a delay while we edit our story and photos, if you want to see the unedited view of our travels follow us on Instagram:

Montañita: Surfing and Cocktails

On the roof at Montañita Spanish School
On the roof at Montañita Spanish School

The small coastal town of Montañita was our final stop with the travelling classroom. We were keen to explore Montañita so we agreed to get the bus from Manta together with our travelling classroom friends Stephanie and Jacqueline at 09:30 in the morning. We arranged to share a taxi to the bus station so that we all arrived together and, since we were the furthest away from the bus station, we got in a taxi at 08:30 and headed over to Stephanie’s. Stephanie was already waiting for us on the main road (5 minutes early, thank you Swiss efficiency) so we headed over to pick up Jacqueline. We arrived 5 minutes early to the spot where Jacqueline had told us that she would meet us. She’d told us that there was a café next door to her house, but we couldn’t see any sign of it so we drove on a little further. I spoke to Jacqueline on the phone and got a slightly confusing response. Eventually after 5 minutes of driving around we put the taxi driver on the phone to the father at Jacqueline’s house and he explained where to go, back to exactly where we’d started, we would have found it easily except that the sign for the café was missing! Relieved and still with enough time we headed to the bus station. At the bus station the taxi driver pointed out the right bus.

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