1 April 2010 - The sweet taste of liberty

We're free! We left the farm the day before yesterday under a cloud of negative energy. Maji asserted that there would be no further volunteers at the farm after us, something that in it's current state would probably be a good thing. We are definitely glad to have our liberty again and it is nice not having to get up at 5:30am or wrack our brains for ways to fill the day any more.

After leaving Costa Rica (including a border crossing where the staff in passport control were watching the Manchester United vs Bayern Munich game whilst issuing tourist visas) we spent one incredibly hot night in Panama's second city David before moving on to the mountain town of Boquete. We have been joined here by Christina, one of our fellow inmates at Earth Rose Farm, who met us following an incredibly speedy visit to San Jose to replace a stolen passport. We will stay here for the Semana Santa (Easter Week) celebrations and hopefully take in some hiking amongst the cool mountain air.

P.S. As a last reminder of the crazy wildlife on the Farm, our last day saw an encounter with a huge scorpion in our lean-to toilet (see picture - click into it and then zoom in to see the full horror). The little blighter was tucking into an enormous cockroach, a meal that proved to be his last...

28 March 2010 - The pantomime continues...

Last night saw some fireworks as Sarah and Darien informed Maji that they wanted to leave the farm early and would not be completing the minimum stay of three weeks (or 15 working days). Maji had a genuine tantrum including a string of expletives and then stormed off like an angry teenager. He drove off the farm and spent the night in his car (not least because he managed to get it stuck in a ditch). There were more arguments this morning but things seem to have died down now. This place is really something of a soap opera and it sometimes feels like we are here against our will as we talk of 'just doing our time'.

Anyway, there is just one more day of this madness until we can get back on the road and, hopefully, to some measure of normality.

27 March 2010 - Abandon hope all ye who enter here...

Since the last entry my opinion of the farm has gone downhill (if that were possible). The lack of direction has continued and we have increasingly been making ourselves scarce rather than risking being put to work on mind-numbing or ridiculous tasks. Today took the biscuit as we attempted to drag some large freshly cut trees uphill using the farm's two dilapidated horses. This was both impossible and very dangerous and something we quickly gave up on. This was part of an unplanned, uncosted and generally ill-conceived project to build a new kitchen and dining room on the farm, a project that Maji seemed to think could be completed in 2 days but would take more like 4 weeks.

Some positive highlights of the last week have included:

• A visit to the local town of La Rivera for a dance. We had envisioned a quaint, traditional fiesta but were greeted with a full on disco complete with smoke, lights and dance music choicely selected by the local equivalent of Fatboy Slim, DJ Danny;
• Walking to the neighbouring farm, La Chinchilla, to see how real Costa Rican farming is done. The farm had emus, hundreds of chickens and beautifully kept vegetable gardens (as well as wonderful owners, Guillermo and Luz);
• More amazing smoothies and juices including the almost freakishly orange mandarina juice.

As I said before, the other volunteers continue to be a source of positivity and our ranks have been swelled this week by the arrival of two newcomers, Sarah and Darien, two Floridians. We were also briefly joined by Joaquin, a Spanish chap who wisely decided to scarper after two days on the farm having quickly assessed that Maji was chronically difficult to work with and the farm a directionless mess. We have stuck it out largely because it provides us with a low cost option in a relatively expensive country and because we have paid a deposit that we would forfeit if we left early (something not particularly in agreement with the principles of the WWOOF programme).

Ah well, we only need to bear with it for a couple more days before we have our liberty restored and can return to a more normal sort of traveling.

P.S. The latest addition to the menagerie of creatures on the farm is an incredibly huge cockroach - about the size of the head of a ladle - that has taken to frequenting our toilet at night. Think the attached picture just about does him justice.

21 March 2010 - More farming (or something like it)...

We have been volunteering on Earth Rose Farm for a week and it has been quite the learning (and eye opening) experience. Before arriving here we had read various travel blogs online about the farm's owners Rosie and Maji (see here). Some people had painted them as loopy hippies and others as incompetent gringos out of their depth on a Costa Rican farm. Both of these views are at least in part true.

Maji (single name only like Madonna) is an aging hippy in his mid 60s living out his dream by owning a farm in Costa Rica, a dream that is somewhat undermined by the fact that he spends six months of the year living in retirement-ville Florida watching the Boston Red Sox on his flat screen TV. He loves the sound of his own voice and has a very specific way of doing just about everything although a heart condition prevents him from doing any of the work on the land. Mealtimes are when he attempts to hold court, chancing his arm at just about any subject and arbuptly changing topics when they don't suit him.

Rosie, his wife, is an amiable and down to earth woman who is always keen to chat and to talk about her gardens and beloved chickens. She is knowledgeable and practical as is evidenced by her management of her three small vegetable gardens - the only successful areas of the farm. She is also a good source for clear concise answers to questions about the work on the farm.

The farm itself is around 45 acres of hillside leading down to a river and is made up of some pasture, fruit trees (bananas, mangoes, star fruit, oranges and different varieties of mandarins) and a lot of neglected coffee plants. Maji is also attempting a reforestation project that aims to see hardwood harvested from the farm over the next 15 years.

On arriving the first thing that alarmed us about the farm was that neither Rosie or Maji spoke Spanish which meant that they are more or less isolated from the local community and from their single paid employee Carlos. Watching them try to communicate with him is somewhere between abject farce and complete horror as Maji mangles both the English and Spanish languages before inevitably turning to one of the volunteers to translate Carlos' responses. Then there is the work - taking direction from Maji is painstaking as he seems to have little concept of what he wants to achieve or in what order. When we asked him about his priorities for the farm he told us that maintaining the coffee plants was one of his top two things to focus on. A day earlier he had been lamenting how the coffee harvest was not worthwhile and Rosie had said that she would like to pull all of the plants out. The volunteers here are often put in the middle between the husband and wife owners meaning that often you are best to listen to neither of them and do your own thing.

Our time here would certainly have been negative were it not for the other volunteers. Christina, Kimberley and Brian have made being here worthwhile and provided some hilarious moments along the way (see picture, ably taken by Brian). We have drunk amazing fresh fruit smoothies and freshly squeezed juices every day which has helped to keep us in a (largely) positive mindset. We have decided to forgo days off in order to fulfill the minimum requirement of 15 working days more quickly, and so have 8 days remaining which we are hoping to make as pleasant as possible.

P.S. No note on our last week would be complete without a mention of the wildlife. We have had both a huge spider (6 inches long) and a whopping scorpion (4 inches long) over our bed in recent nights. This has been supplemented by the late night snufflings of an armadillo who mooches about outside the volunteer dormitory most evenings. Every night heading to bed is something of an adventure. Here's hoping for a few quiet nights ahead.

14 March 2010 - Costa Rica on the double

In the end the rainforest won out over the beach and we headed for the town of Santa Elena and the famous rainforest reserve at Monteverde. Since Costa Rica is substantially more touristy than the other countries that we visited in Central America, the next few days required that we loosen our purse strings and live a little more like holiday makers and less like budget travellers.

This allowed us to enjoy a number of activities including:

• A day of hiking through the rainforest spotting birds and crazy insects and getting our first sighting of a coati (see picture);
• A visit to a frog zoo where we saw all manner of brightly coloured and highly poisonous amphibians;
• A transfer to our next port of call, La Fortuna, by tourist bus and boat across Lake Arenal;
• A night tour to watch the lava exploding and tumbling down the slopes of Volcan Arenal;
• A day soaking in the wonderful hot springs at Eco Termales near to La Fortuna (complete with a visit from a dinosaur sized iguana).

From here we moved on to the Costa Rican capital San Jose for a night (spent at a very modern mall watching a movie with all of the locals in their Saturday night glad-rags). We are now on a bus towards San Isidro and our next calling point for the coming three weeks - volunteering on Earth Rose Farm.

9 March 2010 - Adventures on a fairytale island

Our remaining day in Livingston was cheered up a good deal by seeing Sannee, our housemate from Antigua, sailing into the harbour as we were eating breakfast. One of the benefits of the rather narrow backpacker trail in Guatemala is that (much like on the Appalachian Trail) you're never really sure when goodbye means goodbye. We spent the day with him and his friend walking along the beach and sampling the the very disappointing local specialty, tapado. Whilst we had been promised a big bowl of coconutty soup packed with sea food and plantain, what arrived was more akin to the leftovers from the stockpot (complete with whole, but meatless, crab). This didn't diminish the evening though as we caught up on each others thoughts on Guatemala and then said farewell once more.

If the tour around Guatemala was whistle-stop, then the next 9 days were express. We were more or less in perpetual motion after leaving Livingston visiting four countries in nine days (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica) having previously managed four in nine and a half months. We left Livingston for an epic overland journey involving 5 different modes of transport (boat, minibus, random Honduran chap's car, taxi and, mercifully, luxurious air conditioned bus) and made it to the Honduran capital Tegulcigalpa that evening understandably exhausted. But the next morning it was the road again and another bus, first into Nicaragua and the capital Managua and then on to our next port of call the colonial city of Granada.

It was a blessing to call somewhere home for a few days, but we were less than in love with Granada. It had something of the feel of Antigua, and was not without its charm, but was inundated with tour groups and American high school students pushing up prices and creating a resort type vibe. The town served us well enough though, enabling us to do the usual towny stuff - laundry, internet, etc - and for me to put the finishing touches to the video we had made for Andrew's 30th birthday (see here). We also sampled the local delicacy, vigoron, a combination of steamed yucca, pork scratchings and pickled cabbage served on a banana leaf - odd but surprisingly palatable.

Next it was another of the things that I'd been eagerly looking forward to in Central America. Whilst hiking the Appalachian Trail, I met a chap called Greenlite who had done some traveling in Nicaragua and he was the first person to tell me about Ometepe, a place that immediately sparked my imagination. Ever since I have been looking forward to getting there and seeing it for myself. Ometepe is an island in the enormous Lake Nicaragua formed from two volcanoes that, due to eruptions over the years, have emerged from the lake and joined together to form one island. The larger of the two, Conception, is regularly seen with smoke billowing from its crater. We got our first glimpse of the island on the ferry from the mainland (see photo) and it was like something from a fairy tale, two huge peaks rising from the centre of the lake.

Our plan for our three nights there were to simply relax by the lake and breathe in the atmosphere. Having spent a day getting our bearings (and making good use of the many hammocks), we then ventured further afield for a short hike through a nature reserve where we saw spider monkeys swinging and sleeping in the trees. From then on however it was just relaxing all the way. There was definitely something about Ometepe - it had just enough tourist services to make life comfortable (somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat) but still maintained its rural spirit (cows, pigs and horses wandering around on the beach). Put this alongside the cool breezy climate and the incredible setting and you have just about the perfect place to relax.

From here we had another epic journey first to the Nicaragua - Costa Rica border (which is a big, dusty, traffic filled and very confusing place) and then onwards into the heart of Costa Rica. The 12+ hour journey concluded in the touristy (and slightly grubby) beach resort of Puntarenas where we are currently considering whether to head to the beach or to the rain forest. Decisions, decisions.