Costa Rica

Perhaps there’s a point during every long overland trip when you really get into the flow of it. In our case, this happened in Costa Rica. For us, Costa Rica was a crescendo of months of amazing adventures in Mexico and northern Central America. These included exploring unexcavated Mayan ruins in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas to hiking through the indigenous communities in the mountains of the Ixil Triangle of Guatemala and everything in between. But they also involved intensity, including crazy roads and other real dangers like the risk of getting bit by poisonous snakes like Fer-de-lance pit vipers (which almost happened). This intensity was layered on top of the intensity of some of our regular activities like downhill mountain biking and surfing. When we got to southern Nicaragua we started taking deeper breaths. But it was only after we entered Costa Rica that we started to truly relax into our trip. And our relaxation flowed into a series of amazing once in-a-lifetime adventures.