From Anchorage to Ushuaia by Bike

After resting for a day in Heredia, a suburb of San José, staying with April and Jonathan (where, we cooked “gougères,” also known as “cheese puffs” with the comté, and it was amazing!), we headed towards the Atlantic. We had been that way by car, but it was a whole new experience to bike there: a 1600 m high slope welcomed us back on the road, followed by 20 km of downhill to reach sea level. We felt the heat and humidity rise up to meet us the more we descended towards the ocean.

In Costa Rica, everything has been in slow motion since last Friday (April 3), and its only gotten worse since yesterday (Thursday). It’s Semana Santa (holy week), a religious holiday here and everywhere in Latin America. Everyone is on vacation for the week: schools are out and all public services are closed. Since yesterday, overcrowded vehicles have been passing us on the road: it’s a long weekend and everyone is leaving for the coast (Pacific for the most part, but also Atlantic). The stores are closed, and all the hotels/motels/cabinas/campsites are full. We’ve actually been having trouble finding supplies, and so we keep a little extra in our bags, which we haven’t had to do since Baja California in Mexico! In terms of religious celebrations, we haven’t seen much except a lot churches open during the daytime. We’re hoping to see something more this weekend, since there should be more going on.

Thursday we visited a Microfinance Institution. Considering that it was holy week, we were surprised that the manager agreed to see us, but then we discovered that he was from Bangladesh and a Muslim! He had been sent here by the Grameen Bank, started by Muhammad Yunus (who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on microfinance) who he had worked with for 26 years. It is his job to implement the Grameen model here in Costa Rica for the ACRG (Association Costa Rica Grameen). He was very friendly and answered all our questions, and we learned a little more about microfinance in Bangladesh which is quite different than everything we’ve seen so far.

Tonight will be our last night in Costa Rica, in Cahuita, a little village that we discovered two weeks ago with Sara’s family. We got to visit the beautiful beach and swim in the Caribbean Ocean, and we even saw a sloth, but we didn’t have our camera with us… We were really kicking ourselves for not having brought it!!! As we were leaving, we got a somewhat raucous goodbye from a bunch of howler m!!onkey!!s.

Tomorrow we should be arriving in Panama in the early afternoon. Yup, another country! Panama City, about ten days away, will mark the end of our adventures in Central America.

Sara

Carl, Nadine and the kids left yesterday. We had a wonderful vacation with our Vergeze family. We took advantage of their visit to empty our bags and send back what we could to France. And then we filled them up again with sausages, pâté, salted cod [trans. note: apparently a specialty of Nimes], comté, camembert, foie gras, chestnut mousse and (real!) chocolate! Thanks so much to all the family for sending us these specialties from home! We’ve missed them. It’s like having a little piece of home that we’ll take on the road with us, and we can branch out from our regular tuna and tomato sandwiches!

Sébastien’s handle bar bag has decided to retire to France after many years of dedicated service, and so we’ve replaced it with a brand new one.

We weren’t able to visit any microfinance institutions in San José, but we have a good contact in Siquirres, a little village on the way to Panama. We hope to meet with them Wednesday or Thursday.

We’ve hadn’t actually said anything yet, but we think about it often: thanks so much to all those who are following our journey and lending us so much support. Our families let us know when they run into someone who is keeping up with our travels. Thanks also to all those who leave comments on our blog and messages in the livre d’or. It makes us really happy and encourages us to keep going!

Sara & Sébastien

It’s been a little while since we updated our blog. We’ve been spending time with our family instead of searching for internet access. For an account of our most recent adventures, we give you Sara’s cousins, Titouan and Anélie, who are primary students at Jean Macé de Vergèze, one of our partner schools in the Gard.

Arrival in Costa Rica

We got up at 4 in the morning to catch our flight out from Marseille to Madrid. Then at 12:30 we got on the flight for Costa Rica which lasted 11 hours. The food was not good at all. To pass the time we watched the movie “Australia” which was showing in Spanish, English and Italian.

The first hotel that we stayed in was very noisy. A lot of traffic and it was next to the airport. There were a lot of planes. Luckily we didn’t stay there very long.

Cahuita

We drove a long time to get to Cahuita, in the South-East of Costa Rica, where there is a beautiful national park right on the Caribbean Ocean. We saw m!!!onkey!!!s, yellow snakes, white-nosed coatis, giant crabs and mosquitoes. The m!!!onkey!!!s were Capuchin M!!!onkey!!!s and weren’t shy about rifling through the tourists’ bags. We also went swimming in the Caribbean Ocean.

Arenal

We drove a lot to get to Arenal. There was a really nice volcano that rumbled a lot but we didn’t see any lava, even though normally at night you can see red lines of lava running down the volcano. It might wake up at any time. In the evening, when the sun was going down, we swam in a stream that was heated by the volcano. It was very warm and quite nice. The next morning we went to the Volcano Observatory and walked around. On our walk we were attacked by a baby Jaguar. Then we swam in a pool and a Jacuzzi, overlooking the volcano.

Corcovado

We took a lot of roads to get to Drake Bay.

The first day we went snorkelling: driving with a mask and snorkel, but no air tank. We left from the beach in a boat and went close to an island called “Isla de Caño.” A couple of meters from the island, we jumped out of the boat. We tried to swim at the surface of the water and watch the marine life at the bottom: fish, coral, algae…

The next morning we split into two groups to do two different activities: canopy tour and horseback riding. A canopy tour means going on different zip lines through the forest. The horseback riding was Cowboy-style, without helmets. We rode down to the river and swam in the waterfall and then came cantering back along the beach. Then we rested in the afternoon and fixed the 4x4 that had a flat tire.

Sara & Sébastien

This trip is outside the preview of the Association Planète Durable et Solidaire, but we will use the website to keep you updated on all our adventures.

We forgot to tell you in our last article that the night that we met Sylvie and Kevin we also visited another Microfinance Institution in Léon, Nicaragua.

We’ve been riding with Kevin since Managua along the Panamerican, the only road between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. We’ve been up against a constant and strong headwind…. Our worst enemy – I hate it most of all. You could say that my mood is pretty much dependant on which way the wind blows. But I have to admit that in Central America, even though the wind slows us down and makes us work a little harder, it is also nice since the temperature never dips below 30°C. It’s actually better to have the wind on our faces rather than at our backs. Disconcerting, yes?

We rested for a day in San Juan del Sur, an old fishing village recently converted into THE beach front town in Nicaragua. 30 km away, we starting seeing English signs, and we were worried that it would be pretty much spoiled by North Americans. But we pleasantly surprised: the tourists hadn’t really upset the balance of the village. You want proof? We looked everywhere and we couldn’t find a single postcard! But we did find everything we needed for a perfect “rest” day: a little market for our local culinary needs, the ocean and a beautiful beach, and a wi-fi connection….

We took our time crossing the border from Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Before we could even get to the border, we were relieved of $1 each in the form of a “municipal tax,” a kind of rite of passage, if you will. Then we had to pay $2 each just be able to leave the country. We had already had to pay $7 each to get into the country! Kevin had only paid $3… nobody really knows why we had to pay more. It was free to get into Costa Rica, much to our surprise. As soon as we passed the border, the countryside changed dramatically: the vegetation was denser and more varied, the animals more frequent and diverse, and the road was narrower, windier, and steep. There was less garbage by the side of the road, although any garbage is still too much in our opinion. After La Cruz and a magnificent sunset, Kevin left us to follow the dusty roads through the mountains. We rested on the asphalt of the Panam – not the best choice. This is the most dangerous road that we’ve been on since Anchorage. The road is as narrow as the little country roads in the backwater provinces in France and there is same amount of traffic as a major toll highway! It’s horrible! We shook with fear every time a tractor-trailer or bus passed by us. At least our rear-view mirrors gave us a heads-up for the really dangerous ones, and we did have to “jump” a number of times onto the shoulder to avoid being fatally scrunched.

We detoured every chance we got into the side roads, although in the end they were just as busy as the Panam. Thanks to some vertiginous hills (inclines 12 km long with a 7% average grade and bits of more than 15%!) we dragged ourselves up to more than 1000 m in altitude, then headed back down into the central valley of Costa Rica. This was actually our most difficult day in terms of the ratio of altitude to distance (1521 m over 46 km). We were able to see Costa Rica, and all its well maintained landscapes, very different from the rest of Central America. English is common and there are shopping centers with prices in American dollars.

Coming up

Sara’s uncle, aunt and cousins are coming to visit us for two weeks. We’re taking a vacation with them in this peaceful paradise, after all the adventures of travelling through the last few countries.

This break will be outside the purview of the Association, but we’ll post all our stories on the website!

Sébastien

Saturday, March 14, between Léon and Managua

We left early that morning and had more than 90 km to cover if we wanted to get to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, before dark. We came to a little village, about 20 km from Managua. As we biked through, a man ran across the street and called out me to “Just 1 second, please!” I didn’t stop: I felt like something was wrong. Sébastien stopped though, and talked for a bit with the man who turned out to be Kevin, a fellow cyclo-tourist of German and Bolivian origin. He had left Mexico and was heading home to Bolivia. So I stopped, and walked back towards them, pushing my bike. And then the other shoe dropped: “At 7 am this morning, a cyclo-tourist was mugged along this very road.” The news was like a slap in the face. I started to panic. Kevin showed us his bike beside the police station. We went to park our bikes next to his, and then we met Sylvie.

Sylvie is a French Canadian, and has biked a lot and has a lot of experience. She took a number of sabbaticals from her teaching job to travel around the world on trips of 6 to 7 months. That morning she had left Managua, and after about 15 km, a car pulled up right beside her and opened the passenger side door so that she had to stop. Inside there were four men, each with a gun. The driver stayed behind the wheel. The other three were well-organized. They held her at gunpoint and put her bike into the trunk of the car (it was a little city car like a Clio, and the bike hung out of the back). They searched her to make sure that she wasn’t hiding any money on her and then got back into the car. Sylvie ran off into the underbrush, afraid of getting kidnapped or shot. She flagged down a car to take her to the closest police station, where Kevin had camped the night before since he had been unable to find a hotel.

Sylvie had no money, no passport, nothing. Luckily Kevin had a cell phone to call Canada (the phone at the police station could only call locally!) and he lent her some money and translated for her (he speaks fluent Spanish and English). Sylvie’s boyfriend wired her some money right away through Western Union. But because she didn’t have a passport, the money had to get sent to one of the police officers who went with her to the agency. And that’s when the police officers, two in particular, started to ask her for money for everything: for the gas for going to the Western Union office, for the taxi that the commissioner would take to find the muggers… The officer wouldn’t even let her buy her own meal: he insisted on getting it himself and kept all the change. He even asked her to cover the cost of photocopying the police report. When Sylvie finally decided to take the chicken bus back to Managua (where we met up with her again, biking together, very carefully), the officers told her that a parting gift would be appreciated given all that they had done for her! She left them the only thing she had with her, other than her clothes, her bike helmet.

All four of us stayed in the hotel (right on the outskirts of Managua, not the nicest part of town) where Sylvie had spent Friday night. She got there first and told the managers what had happened to her. They said that she was lucky to be alive. I had a tank top at the bottom of my bag that I wanted to give to someone who needed it, and so I gave it to her. She had only her biking t-shirt and shorts. I also gave her some underwear and socks that I didn’t really need (you see, even now we’re not really traveling with the bare minimum!) Of course we offered her the use of our stove and anything else that she needed.

We talked with Sylvie as much as possible, putting ourselves in her shoes. When we finally went to bed, though, it really hit Sylvie about what happened to her. She couldn’t close her eyes without living the scene again… Since leaving Honduras and traveling through Nicaragua, we’ve felt safer and have let down our guard a little. This unfortunate episode has shown us that something like this could happen to us anywhere.

We recognize that we need to be even more careful than we have been in terms of personal safety, and also our personal lives (access codes and passwords), and also be careful of those sentimental things like pictures, videos, and of course our bikes that we’ve traveled so many kilometers on and that we love and hate at the same time.

As the saying goes, it may have been “a blessing in disguise” meeting Sylvie like that, but no matter what we take out of this, we wouldn’t wish that experience to anyone.

PS:

Sylvie (www.sylvietheberge.com) went to the embassy today (Monday) to get her new passport. If everything went smoothly she should be on a plane tomorrow to see her loved ones… but she won’t stay for long, since she’s already planned her next trip, in safer country at least. We wish her all the best, and hope that she is able to get over this quickly and move on to new adventures.

PPS: (by Sébastien)

A few impressions of Nicaragua

The landscape is more beautiful than in either El Salvador or Honduras. The headwind is stronger. There are fewer children and people who shout “gringos” and “gringa” as we bike by, and almost no one comes to ask us for money. But there have been some happy encounters.

Sara