Bijagua de Upala

It was pretty hot and humid all night and I was glad for the cold shower and cool down in the morning. We had breakfast and then went - finally - back on the road leading South and to Costa Rica. The drive through the Nicaraguan backcountry was scenic and pretty relaxing. Overall we enjoyed the scenery in Nicaragua very much with the iconic volcanoes standing out of the intense green flats.

I didn't think much about the exit because usually the entry is more complicated... But we hadn't exited Nicaragua yet, which was pretty much pure chaos 🙈 Absolutely no indication on where to go next and who to ask... We even needed to chase down a police officer to review Ruedi. Overall we spent more than an hour before we could exit Nicaragua. Then we entered Costa Rica and the process seemed to be more orderly and we finished the immigration and first part pretty quickly. But when we arrived at the second checkpoint we were told that they just went on their lunch break and will be back in an hour 😵 This gave us enough time to sort a bit through Ruedi, read and get some local currency (Colon) from the ATM. When their lunch break was over we were the first in line but it took another 45 minutes because of some issues with the system 🥴 So after 3 1/2 hours we were in Costa Rica and on a - pretty nice - road leading us to Bijagua de Upala, a sleepy little town at the start of a more mountainous area. And it's a great base to go explore the surrounding areas in search of sloths 🦥

We arrived later than expected at the Jungle Life Tours, a tour company that we had read about on iOverlander. When we arrived they were super friendly and sweet, we asked about a tour tomorrow morning and if we could stay for the night. They immediately said yes and the owner's wife, Vilma, brought us a sweet, local drink named Agua dulce made of sugar cane in a special preparation. She also gave us some sweet empanadas 🥰 Unfortunately they didn't have a restaurant, so we went to town and stopped at a pizza place. We both weren't feeling like pizza so we were glad when they had a large menu also with local choices. I tried Chifrijo which was a great choice!

We then drove back to the parking of the tour and listened to the sounds of the nightly jungle buzzing with life. Tomorrow morning we're going to join the first tour into the jungle 😍Læs mere