To Panama and Back - Bastimentos Island

We arrived in Panama and our original plan was to go to Bocas Del Torro, which is an island town on the Carribean side of Panama. We stayed our first night there and it turned out to be a town packed with tourists, which we were NOT super stoked on. So we took a boat tour that had dolphin watching, snorkeling and a stop at Red Frog beach, which is on Bastimentos island. The dolphin watching and snorkeling was pretty average and Red Frog beach was alright, but we mainly wanted to end our boat triop on red frog because we heard good things about Bastimentos Island. Long story short we had a lot less cash than we planned to have and we had to save some money for the boat taxi back to the main island. So we crashed in hammocks at the hostel for five bucks a night and shared two boxes of KD between three people each day, for three days. We ended up going for a hike to two other beaches which were completely deserted we only saw three people at the beginning of our hike. The walk was super fun because we felt like castaways, we were hungry, we were smelly and we were tired. We came to this point in between the beaches that was filled with coconut trees so Prata Shimmied up a tree and knocked off a coconut and after spending a good half hour trying to break the coconut open on the razor sharp rocks one finally busted open and there layed before us the best looking coconut we had ever seen... at least at that moment casue we were starving. So up goes Prata again to grab five more coconuts to eat later.

 We found a native girl on the walk and gave her a coconut (below)

Harry(Swedish) breaking his board at Wizards

To Panama and Back - San Jose

We have recently got back from our trip to Panama, which was pretty fun and as usual when traveling you come back with some stories and hopefully some good photos. We were hoping to catch a bus from Jaco to San Jose and then San Jose to Panama. We arrived in San Jose bright and early, but not early enough to catch the bus down to Panama so we spent the day and night in San Jose and made our way the next day. So our first stop was San Jose, which we were pretty gutted about because we have heard from pretty much everyone we met that it is a rough city, the people can be pretty dodgy and there is nothing to do in the nights. Luckily close buddy Matt Prata had recently been in San Jose and knew of some things to see. The first stop was the Museum of Costa Rican Art which was free and quite inspiring.





Afterward we ventured downtown to get a casado(rice, beans, meat...) and to see what was happening in the streets of San Jose. As we turned down this one street a giant mob of people appeared standing infront of this big gate and there was quite alot of commotion amongst the crowd. The first thing that came to mind was that there is going to be a riot, and then the gate began to open. We heard a giant roar that sounded like a million lions harmonizing and out came a fired up hillbilly driving a monster truck, I began questioning whether the rumors were true and if monster trucks are needed to control the riots here. But it turned out they were just showing the truck off to the crowd and everyone was having pictures around it.

Prata also insisted on revisiting this central square in the middle of downtown to have another look at this game he saw being played. We dont know the name of the game but we do however know the inventor and his name is Rafael. The second we showed up in the square without hesitation Rafael called us over and got us involved. I wont go into the rules because I didnt really understand them myself but Rafael has been playing this game for thirty years and his two amigos seemed to be ditching school to play so im guessing its pretty fun once you know the rules. Soon after partaking in this game we were being approached by multiple sketchy characters including this one young eighteen year old Nicaraguan boy who was missing most of his fingers and was saying that the other men were robbers so we gave the boy some cash and quickly left the scene.