The San Jose skyline from Hostel Pangea

Day 2 - Wednesday 22nd July 2009

Our street in San Jose

After a welcome night’s sleep we got up just before 8 for a shower.  We met at 8.30 and set abotu discussing the plan for the day.  I had relinquished my role as team leader to Tom Wolstencroft, who outlined the idea of us splitting into ‘tent groups’ and each group taking one of the three major tasks that we had.  Tom’s team went to sort out accommodation and transport for the next few days, Stephen Bugg’s team went to the British Embassy to give them our itinerary and contact details and me, TP and Daniel went to the supermarket to get supplies and arranged the evening’s meal.  We then had a bit of lunch at a local restaurant - a traditional meal of beans, rice and omelette.  Our last mission was to find some methylated spirits.  We guessed that this would be fairly easy, but it was actually an EPIC effort.  We walked around for around 4 hours and went in something like 20 different shops to no avail.

The pool at Hostel Pangea

After this failed mission we did have some success - finding a good restaurant for the evening’s meal.  By now it was about 3 o'clock and we all met up again and swam in the pool for a bit.  The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting with the World Challenge Costa Rica representative, planning, packing and budgeting.  We then boiled some eggs for our next day’s breakfast.  The evening’s entertainment was in the form of eating at the restaurant.  The food was good and the people were friendly, but we were pretty sure that it was a meeting place for gigolos - the red light district started 100m away.  The total cost was 70,000 colones.  The rest of the evening was spent preparing and sleeping.

Planning begins…

The Hostel Pangea bar

Group cooking on the trangias

Dinner in a brothel