The preceding 48 hours to today had given me about five hours of sleep, so we all had a much-deserved lie-in until 8 o'clock.  We basically had the morning off as Chris and Tom went to sort out his passport.  Myself and Daniel spent the morning looking at the group finances in order to work out how much money we had to play with for our upcoming rest and relaxation phase.  After doing this I did some shopping before meeting the group in a pizza restaurant and heading on to San Jose’s bus station.  We were heading back north, to the north-western Pacific coast and a town called Tamarindo on the Nicoya Peninsular.  The town is one of THE major beach destinations in Central America and was beginning to benefit from a great deal of western investment, earning it the nickname ‘Tamagringo’.  The bus was one of the nicest we had with leather seats and a CD player and having left at half 3 we arrived at around 9 in the evening.  We would be spending the next few days at the 'Black Sheep’ hostel and after arriving and checking in we had an early night.

As the name suggests, rest and relaxation days consist of nothing except going with the flow.  We got up before 8am (a habit that even the promise of a day of relaxation couldn’t help shift) and our only orders were to meet again in the evening at 6pm for dinner.  Our room (myself, Daniel, Stevie B, Hannah and Rob) went out for breakfast to make the most of the abundance of western restaurants - getting English muffins and orange juice which would have been an unthinkable luxury earlier in the trip.  We had a half hour to explore the souvenir shops and then headed towards the beach.  It was a stereotypical Pacific beach - sun, white sand, turquoise sea and palm trees.  The rest of the day makes pretty bad blogging - we essentially completed an extravagant cycle of swimming, drying off in the sun, reading and eating.  We had our lunch at a pizzeria (something which is becoming somewhat of a trend) where the menu contained amusing dishes such as the 'Happy Cow’ burger and the 'Third World Special’ pizza.

We arrived back at the hostel in good spirits but these were soon dampened when I found that 80,000 colones (about £80) had gone missing from the group fund in my money belt.  I also couldn’t find my camera with all of my photos on, so assumed that both had been stolen.  I was pretty glum at the evening meal and left early to do a thorough search of my bag.  Thankfully (and most importantly) I found the camera, but the  money had definitely gone. Bad start to the R&R phase…