An unexpected swim, part dos

Yesterday, I took from Gwen's lead by taking to the waters with a camera still attached to me.

I'm in the tiny village of Tortuguera in Costa Rica. The adjacent beach is the nesting place for more than 100,000 green turtles. Viewing them can only occur at night time so during the day, we went out to view the wildlife in the national park located south of the village.

The standard way to do this is with a guide in a canoe, where only the guide is doing the paddling. We wanted to have a bit more fun so with a bit of negotiating, we managed to convince our guide to let us follow him in some kayaks.

Unfortunately, when I got into my kayak and onto the open waters, I lost my balance, and flipped the kayak over, while I had my camera on me. The good news though was the camera was in my bag, which miraculously, kept the water out.

Unfortunately though, the lens in my bag built up some condensation due to the humidity, and upon drying out, has left an inner lens fogged up.

So in short, my camera and 1 lend works. The telephoto is out of commission. :-(

Costa Rica - first impressions

So after a 2 days of travel, I finally landed in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. And based on the airport, it was hard to tell that I had even left the states! It had the same drab 70s metallic look that I assume was designed to look futuristic at the time but seems to always look old and dreary. Sort of like a metallic Barbican :-)

On the streets though, things look a lot different. I'm staying at a Backpackers that's quite central but you wouldn't know it. The streets are deserted with most shops closed although that could be due to siesta. Regardless, the place lacks any charm and for me, seems like a mash between Compton in LA and Havana (without the character).

Tomorrow, we're heading out of town to the only ancient ruins in Costa Rica. They're not grand but hopefully will be interesting. It's rainy season though so hopefully the day won't be ruined by it ;-)

App of the trip

As you can see from the score - this app got a fair bit of use during the trip :-)

Going home

I'm in Saigon again and tomorrow morning, we fly to Hong Kong for one night and then it's back to the old dart.

Time has gone by pretty quickly but I am missing home - especially the good Indian food (that doesn't make you sick!).

Healthy breakfast

What better way to start the day than with a nice serving of "bong
milk"?!?!

Rain season begins

Looks like the rain season has well and truly begun here in Vietnam. Today we hired a motorbike and headed out to the north of the island (Phu Quoc) only to have to go back after 10 minutes of riding as the rain was bucketing down. Luckily it cleared up in the afternoon, but this is telling us it's almost time to leave and go back to balmy London!

Gwen gets her own back

No matter how hard we've tried, it's been extremely difficult to like Vietnam. We have been constantly having to deal with the locals trying to rip us off at every turn.

It happened again this evening. We are in the small island of Phu Quoc and after dinner (where again the owner tried to over charge us), we went for a drink at a little stall in the night market. We looked at the menu and I ordered a fruit shake (where the price was listed), and Gwen ordered a "che" drink (no price listed but we had an idea of what the price should be from experience).

After drinking up we paid for the drinks without asking the price hoping they'd be one of the few honest locals. They gave us change which indicated they weren't, although that had already become obvious when a discussion amongst themselves started after we given them our money (knowledge of Vietnamese is not needed as they were clearly discussing what they should charge us).

After we inquired to the costs of the drinks, they gave us a price for my fruit juice that was higher than the menu (looking back now, this was so that the ratio of the prices of the two drinks would remain the same with Gwen's che being cheaper).

I pointed them to the menu price and they proceeded to give us some additional change admitting their mistake however we knew that they were still overcharging us for Gwen's che and she decided she was not having any of it.

So she simply got up, 'accidentally' knocked the table causing her empty glass to fall and smash on the floor. We then walked off with the Vietnamese a little shocked. We knew we were correct in our assumptions as they didn't chase us down or attempt to make us pay for the glass. That felt good! Bit evil though :-)