Yet another 5.30am start as we had to have breakfast and get packed ready to leave at 7. We left our camp as the sun was warming up the beach so the 3.5km walk to the ‘bus stop’ was very hot and sweaty. This was not helped by my attempts to long jump on the river crossings being cut rather short. Our transport from Carate to Puerto Jimenez was essentially a truck with a bench in the back. This was fun, but slightly uncomfortable. We reached Port Jim at about midday and after collecting all the bags which we hadn’t taken into the jungle, we had the day to ourselves. We spent this free time to have lunch, go to the internet cafe and swim in the calm seas near out campsite.
We found a pizzeria in town in the evening which actually turned out to provide one of the best, most filling meals of the trip to date. On the way back from this meal I nearly broke my nose as I threw a bottle of coke in the air (for no real reason) and caught it with my face. Before the meal we had gone with Adonis the campsite owner to see his 'trained’ caymans - a scary experience considering their size and the fact that there were about a hundred of them within a stone’s throw of our tents. In order to appease the caymans, Adonis encouraged us to buy some offcuts of meat from a local butcher. It became clear that we would have a really early start, so a group of 7 of us decided it wasn’t worth getting into our ant-infested tents and instead chose to do an all-nighter. We started by having drinks at the bar and then moved on to have a kick around on the beach. At midnight, some locals arrived on their bikes for a game and despite the fact that there were about 20 of them we managed to hold them to a 3-3 draw. Our next piece of evening entertainment was a game of poker with peanuts for chips. At 2.30am we started taking the tents down, the others got up at 3.30am and we all left at 20 past 4 to catch the 5am bus back to San Jose.
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