One down, six-ish to go

We followed up a very bad hotel experience with an amazingly good one. We stayed at the Bocas Inn in Bocas del Toro Panama. We had an INCREDIBLE view of the water right outside our window as well as two hammocks from which to gaze at it. We spent two days there, doing a whole lot of not much. It was wonderful.

We left Bocas on Thursday, took a wet water-taxi ride to the mainland and then two more buses to the border. The border between Panama and Costa Rica is a river which you are able to walk across over a rather dilapidated bridge complete with haphazardly placed wooden planks. So we officially mark one country off our list and have landed safely in Costa Rica. Two more buses and we arrived in Manzanillo, a very small Carri bean town at the end of a rough dirt road. Manzanillo had been on my list of places to see that I didn't get around to while I was living here. It is beautiful. I managed to get myself up and went for a run yesterday morning. We spent another two nights there, enjoying the jungle and beach. This morning we took the bus into Puerto Viejo and are going to spend two nights here. We are going to go zip-lining tomorrow, swinging through the trees like monkeys.

Things are good. AS a side note, while traipsing through Central America, I am also trying to get references and essays together to apply for grad school. This is a not an application tactic I would recommend to anyone else as it is hard to wax poetic about my future when all I am really interested in doing is staring at waves from a hammock. Hopefully though, I will be able to talk someone into letting me into their program.