Financial Updates: Central (and some of South) America

Time to share our last batch of country expenditure averages! Mostly, Central America was very cheap, and the last few countries in South America were pretty easy on the wallet as well. We left off last time with Peru, so here goes with…

Ecuador: $78.50/day. Not bad at all, though our average was definitely lowered by Andy spending 24 hours in bed with food poisoning in Quito, which meant we had to skip a possibly expensive birding excursion…and, of course, we didn’t go to the Galapagos, which would have blown our budget sky-high. Bus quality was not the highest in Ecuador, but hotel rooms (in the $15-$25 range with private bath) were very decent, and both street food and restaurant food was cheap.

Colombia: $56/day without flight to Panama; $83/day with. Our flight from Colombia to Panama was more expensive than we anticipated—about $250 each with taxes, etc., and we weren’t sure which country to count it against, so in the end we just split it between Colombia and Panama. But even with the flight, Colombia ended up cheaper on paper than we’d anticipated. It doesn’t feel so cheap when you’re there! But Andy and I have noticed that sometimes in countries that seem expensive to us, we compensate by eating out less and doing fewer packaged tours, so it ends up being cheap.

Anyway, accommodation ranged from $10 a night in Santa Marta to $40 a night in Cartagena; and we recommend that you visit Bogota on a Tuesday (half-price movie night) and Wednesday (half-price day at the Salt Cathedral) and stay at the Hostal Platypus (where we got a whole apartment with kitchen for $25 a night) in the old city.

Panama: $98/day without flight from Colombia; $144/day with flight. Yeah, Panama, not so cheap, mainly because excursions are really expensive. And that’s because you usually end up hiring a private guide to take you around. But our trip would not have been the same without birding at Pipeline Road, the train trip along the Panama Canal, and our tour of the Gatun Locks—all worth the money. Hotel room with bath was $20 a night, and restaurants were affordable enough.

Costa Rica: $50/day. This is really skewed, because we only spent two days in CR, and did no excursions except for one trip to the beach (which cost us $13 because it was a national park—we didn’t know about the free beach up the road). We avoided restaurants and stayed in the very cheapest rooms we could find ($20 a night). So that average is really just for rooms, bus, and groceries…if you take a real trip to Costa Rica, expect to pay a lot more (as we did in 2007!).

Nicaragua: $60/day. Nicaragua is the poorest country in Latin America, and definitely one of the cheapest to be a tourist in. We never paid more than $12 a night for a room (but don’t expect high quality at those prices), and tours and Internet were very affordable. We found food to be a little expensive compared to everything else, but, clearly, we got by.

El Salvador: $60/day. El Salvador is definitely wealthier than Nicaragua, but somehow we ended up spending the same amount of money there. Probably because, once again, we did no packaged tours, but just figured out the bus system and went places on our own. Also managed to hit the capital on half-price movie night (it’s Wednesdays in ES). Food is pretty cheap (and tasty!), and our $20/night room in San Salvador was decent. El Salvador is high value.

Honduras: $64/day. We only spent one night in Honduras, so this is pretty skewed, but we hear it’s a pretty cheap country to travel in overall. We stayed in Copan, near the big Mayan ruins ($10 a night for hotel room with bath—cheap; $15 each to visit the ruins—kind of expensive, but very nice ruins). I wouldn’t mind going back sometime and exploring when it’s more stable politically.

Guatemala: $57/day. I think that this makes Guatemala officially the cheapest country we spent any real length of time in. Lodging was around $10 a night (and nicer than the rooms in Nicaragua), and some excursions were quite cheap ($3 each to climb Pacaya Volcano). We thought restaurants were overpriced in some places (like touristy Antigua), so we just ate street food or made sandwiches or cooked. Annoyingly, Guatemala practices “tourist pricing” on some boat and bus routes, meaning that foreigners officially have to pay three times the rate that the locals pay for the same transportation.

Belize: $124/day, strongly skewed by SCUBA diving. (It would have been $78/day without the dives.) Basically, diving is expensive, but the rest of Belize—even touristy Caye Caulker Island—doesn’t have to be. Our rooms ranged from $12.50 to $25 a night, bus transport wasn’t too bad, and with a little sleuthing, we managed to find cheap places to eat out in most towns. The ATM caving tour was a little expensive ($75 per person) but totally worth it. And diving off the Cayes was quite expensive, but also worth it. (There is apparently much cheaper diving off the Bay Islands in Honduras—maybe next time!)

We’ll do another financial update soon, in which we calculate our average daily expenditure for the whole South and Central American trip, working in extra costs like flights, insurance, and camera repair and replacement that we didn’t count against any one country. Until then, adios!

Obsessed: Central America (and the rest of South America)!

If you check out the labels, or tags, on this blog, you will see that Andy has written 52 entries so far and I have only done 45. Maybe that’s because he writes all the obsessions and finance posts. Well, no more—it’s my turn to tell you with what things the countries we visited on the last leg of our trip were obsessed!

South America:

Peru – Coca leaves. Old men chewing them, breakfaster-eaters brewing them…the dried leaves of the coca plant (which, after a whole lot of processing, can become cocaine) are everywhere in Peru (and Bolivia) and illegal to grow or possess in most other South American countries. In their “natural” state, they’re supposed to be stimulating and help fight altitude sickness. I did try a cup of coca tea one morning—not bad, it tasted like green tea, but it had no noticeable effects on me.

Ecuador – The Galapagos. Based on the number of posters you see at travel agencies for Galapagos trips, you’d think that Ecuador has nothing else cool to visit. That is definitely not true—we didn’t make it to the Galapagos, and Ecuador was still one of my favorite countries!

Colombia – Cheese bread! Or maybe that’s just my obsession when in Colombia. Still, there were many different varieties, and you could find it just about anywhere. There were even people baking it in a hut in the middle of Tayrona National Park!

Central America:

Panama – The United States. With US dollars, English-speakers, and Dairy Queens galore, Panama felt more like America than anywhere else we went on the trip. The canal may be in their hands now, but let’s just say that our cultural presence is still felt.

Costa Rica – Not being like the rest of Central America. The government? Stable. The volcanoes? Quiet. The hotels? Expensive. The public buses? Not school buses, and definitely not blasting salsa music, either. Does this place even still qualify as part of Central America?

Nicaragua – The Virgin Mary. Nicaraguans actually invented a whole new holiday that consists of carrying a giant doll of Maria around town and lining up to sing songs to her. Need we say more?

El Salvador – Malls. San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, has more fancy shopping malls than we have ever seen before in one place. We have no idea how they all stay in business, because the last time we checked, El Salvador wasn’t such a big country, it’s populace wasn’t exactly the richest in the world, and it didn’t have a whole lot of tourists! Still trying to figure this one out…

Guatemala – Volcanoes. They’re everywhere, and they’re erupting RIGHT NOW.

Honduras – Throwing trash out the window of a moving bus (arrrgh!). OK, that’s kind of unfair—I think that every country in Central America is obsessed with doing this. It gave me and Andy little strokes each time we saw it happen (and, even worse, when we saw people encouraging their young children to treat the road like it was a garbage can). But I feel like people did it even more than usual on the buses we took across southern Honduras, and I can’t really think of anything else that country seemed obsessed with (no one was talking about the whole election/coup thing in the more rural areas where we were), so Honduras gets the rap for this one.

Belize – Cruise ships. Apparently, cruise ships have started docking in Belize, and no one can decide whether this is good or bad for the country. Belize City seems pro, as it has set up a whole tourist village in which to sell expensive souvenirs to cruisers, while the people who run the awesome ATM caving tour in the west of the country are con, since they think that cruise excursions there would ruin the delicate artifacts in the cave. The folks at the jaguar reserve seemed conflicted—they’d like the extra revenues, but will more people disturb the jaguars? No, because there aren’t actually any jaguars in the part of the park where people can go!

That’s it for obsessions! If you’ve been to any of these countries, what do you think of our choices?

A taste of (the) America(s)--Foods of Panama and Costa Rica

Considering that we spent a week in Panama and only two days in Costa Rica, this post will be heavily skewed toward Panamanian foods. Which, it turns out, thanks to its long history of close ties with the United States, often strongly resemble American foods. (But not always!)

One of the first things we bought on our first morning in Panama City were batidos, or fruit smoothies, from one of the many blender-filled stalls on the street that was whizzing them up fresh for passers-by. Many Latin American countries have batidos, but Panama's stood out for 1) being cheap and 2) having the secret ingredient of a dash of vanilla extract thrown in. (The other ingredients were fruit, evaporated milk, ice, and a few spoons of sugar.) My favorite was papaya and my spouse's favorite was banana, though the peach and pineapple ones we tried weren't bad, either! Sadly, we have no pictures of said batidos, which came in not-very-photogenic (or environmentally-friendly) styrofoam cups.

On to the foods we do have pictures of!

Andy's "second breakfast"--a grape sno cone. Again, sno cones are not uncommon in Latin America, but Panama's were cheap (25 to 30 cents) and came in all of Andy's favorite flavors: His third breakfast that day was a pineapple sno cone and his fourth breakfast was a mint one.


Panama had a different treat in store for me...lots of different kinds of yogurt! Even including some locally-produced, preservative-free ones with crazy creative flavors--here I am about to try a papaya-melon-pistacio yogurt. It wasn't quite as amazing as the label made it sound, but still pretty fun.

Andy and I went out to dinner on our first night in Panama City. I was excited that the local beer cost just $1...

...and Andy was excited that we got free tap water at our table! Panama is the very first country we have been to that apparently felt confident enough in the quality of its tap water to serve it freely at restaurants, American-style. Being usually disgustingly sweaty and thirsty by dinnertime, we enjoyed this perk immensely.

Peanut M&Ms! Another yummy piece of America that was newly available/affordable in Panama. Only 65 cents, less than I'd pay for a pack from a streetside vendor in NYC.

In the Colon free zone, we took a break from searching for a new camera to eat pancakes. Yup, good old American-style pancakes, with good old fake-maple, Aunt Jemima-like syrup, sold from a street vendor (of course) at the rate of two fluffy ones for 90 cents.

That morning on the fancy tourist train, we had received some complimentary snack boxes, filled with American-style treats like Pringles and sandwich cookies. Also included were some mint sucking candies, and I gave mine to Andy because I hate mints.

Hours later, I noticed that Andy's tongue was bright blue. Since we thought we had eaten all the same foods all day, we had to wracked our brains for a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what could possibly have turned it that color, before I finally remembered that he had eaten one of the icky mints.

I' ve already posted this picture, but I think it bears repeating. It is hard to overstate Andy's joy at discovering that that American institution and his favorite restaurant of all time, Dairy Queen, has seven branches in Panama City. When we finally spotted one in the distance at the bus station food court on our second day in town, Andy practically ran over some poor little Panamanian who had the misfortune of standing in between Andy and his DQ.

Two more things that Andy loves are smoked things and cashews, so when we found these packets of smoked cashews at the supermarket in Panama, we had to try them. Turns out that they were not actually smoked, just covered in a crumbly, smoke-flavored coating. Not terrible, but not worth the $0.99 we paid for each packet. (And it turns out they were imported from Brazil, btw.)

Moving on to the purely Panamanian, but completely inedible, here are some fun palm fruits that were hanging off a tree along Pipeline Road where we went birding. I was just testing out the super-zoom on the new camera with this shot. (Conclusion: Pretty super.)

On to Boquete, a cool-climated, flower-filled highlands town in Panama that I really liked. In part because I could sit in the garden outside of our hostel room and eat tutti-frutti flavored yogurt (70 cents) with a fresh granola bar (75 cents) from the bakery around the corner crumbled into it. Ah, breakfast bliss!

Andy's breakfast one morning in Boquete from the local "Central Park" cafe: A fried pancake, a slab of smoked beef, and a hash brown, all for less than $2.

For a small town, Boquete sure had a lot of Mexican restaurants! (A trend we are noticing more and more as we continue north through Central America.) We ate dinner at one, and Andy got a dish called something like "carne in su jugo" (meat in its juice), which actually turned out to be more like a black bean soup with some beef and bacon in it and tortillas on the side. Pretty tasty.

On our second morning in Boquete, I stupidly let Andy convince me to try a new type of yogurt he found on the shelf (though considering it was locally-made and cheap, I might have tried it anyway if I had noticed it). It looked like it had fruit on the bottom, but that turned out instead to be jello. Ew! Jello is disgusting. Who would contaminate lovely yogurt with nasty jello? I stuck to the national Panamanian brands after that.

Panama was the first country we had been to in a long time that had fresh milk on the supermarket shelves, rather than just Parmalat and powdered milk. Another American-style perk we greatly enjoyed. We didn't have cups, so Andy taught me how to drink straight from the carton (yes, I had a sheltered childhood and had never done that before).

At that same breakfast, we enjoyed some foraged fruit that Andy had collected the day before. He found the orange under a tree at a garden we visited and the guava at the side of the road somewhere, I think.

The guava only yielded about one bite of edible fruit for each of us, but it was tasty.

I didn't enjoy our muddy hike up a hill near Boquete that day, but I did enjoy these fresh blackberries picked from a bush alongside the trail!

And I enjoyed these fresh raspberries even more. Yum, berries! Panama was the first place in a while where I had seen berries growing as well as your more standard tropical fruits.

Speaking of tropical fruits, this is a naranjilla, which I believe only grows in Panama and maybe a handful of other countries. Our hiking guide said that the flesh looks like a tomato, but tastes like an orange. Or maybe it was the opposite...

My reward for hiking all day (and falling on my butt in the mud twice)--fresh kiwi ice cream! Just 50 cents at another local panaderia called the Shalom Bakery. (We thought that this might be a kosher bakery, but we were wrong, I guess they just liked the name. So much for trying to Jew it up in Boquete!)

Dinner that night was at a local pizzeria recommended by our hiking guide. The standard pizza came with your choice of four toppings, so we got three types of meat and...peaches. Hey, they were on the toppings list, right alongside pineapples and melon! We were a little wary, but the combo actually turned out to be quite tasty.

The backyard of our hostel in Boquete had some fruit trees, including one bearing these cherry-like fruits. We didn't eat any and still aren't sure what they are. Any guesses?

On to Costa Rica! The first thing we got were a couple of empanadas at a bus station near the border. Turns out that all empanadas in Costa Rica are very fried, and that the breading is made of cornmeal, which makes eating an empanada kind of like eating a gigantic, stuffed tortilla chip. Greasy, but tasty. (This particular empanada was stuffed with chorizo and fried rice--we'd also never had an empanada with rice in it before. Pretty good.)

Costa Rican restaurants are expensive, so we bought some groceries and made most of our own meals during our two days there. My first dinner consisted of roll-ups of corn tortillas and avocado slices sprinkled with a little salt. Here's a glamor shot, pre-roll.

Andy made a couple of peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll-ups before digging into this bucket of Dos Pinos ice cream. Dos Pinos is the big dairy conglomerate in Costa Rica, and you see their trucks and their products everywhere. We remembered this well from our first trip to Costa Rica in 2007.

Another product we remembered quite fondly was the Tropical line of "juices"...really mostly sugar-water with a small percentage of fruit, but so refreshing and tasty. It was HOT in the beach town of Uvita where we stayed on our first night in CR, and we downed this bottle of mixed-fruit Tropical rather quickly.

In Costa Rica, I was happy to return to a country that sold big bottles of drinkable yogurt. Dos Pinos brand, of course. (I got the blueberry flavor simply because I hadn't seen blueberry anything in a long time!)

A peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll-up, pre-roll. The jam is pineapple, the PB is Peter Pan Creamy Honey Roast--Andy's favorite--which we found for a decent price in Panama. Between the PB and the DQ, I feel pretty confident that Andy could survive in Panama for a long time.

And that is what we ate in Panama and Costa Rica! I should also mention that we saw a lot of frozen turkeys and Thanksgiving sides for sale in Panamanian markets...not so much in Costa Rica, and almost nothing here in Nicaragua ,where we are now. What kind of T-day meal, if any, we will actually find this Thursday is definitely up in the air, but we'll be sure to report in our next foods post!

We're Panamaniacs!

Today's post is all about Boquete, Panama. It is in an area known as the Valley of Eternal Spring. Sounds like a Danielle Steele novel. However, after spending a few days there, the name seems apt. Flowers and fungi abound, with most all of the flowers in bloom most all of the time. The downside is that, just as you would expect from eternal spring, it rains constantly. I asked our guide if they have a dry season like most rainforests and he said no. So, without further ado, here are a lot of floral pictures and the like. I will surely run out of flower jokes by the third picture, but I will give it my best for our readers.

What they have more of in Boquete than anywhere I have been on earth (or any other planet) is hibiscus flowers. They are everywhere. Additionally, they are bigger than anywhere else. And with more color. Namely, just better. Here was one that greeted us at our hotel. Well, it didn't actually speak or anything, but it was present when we got there.
Later on the day of our arrival (after a long nap), we made our way to some very large and very free public gardens. Apparently, they and the home in them are owned by some 100 year old architect from Miami who built them 40 years ago and has always kept them free. His lawn ornaments are possibly meant to advertise the fact that he is from Miami. Or at least an American who started building the gardens when lawn flamingos were all the rage.

This picture was meant to demonstrate that the flower is so big I could have fit my head behind it. Now that I see the picture, I can see that my head is way bigger than I previously thought. Still, I think I could have hid my nose behind it without difficulty.

We got a new camera to replace the one that was stolen last month, so we can once again take self-portraits that have more than just our big heads. This is from a three story lookout tower above the gardens.

Tara is in shock in this picture that my head was too big to fit behind one of the flowers. Her dainty little head looks like it has a better shot.

Not all the flowers are hibiscuses. They also had some orange flowers. Don't know what they are, but this tree had a lot of them. I'll call them sunshine bells unless someone on this blog comes up with a better name.

This garden even had its own bridges, built entirely for show, over coy ponds. You could just as easily walk around, but this old guy apparently thought, "Hey, we've got some water. Why don't we build a big suspension bridge over it?" I like his style. If I were old and rich, that's the kind of thing I would do.

With all the rain come rainbows. On average, it rains about every 7 minutes in Boquete with the sun appearing about every four cycles. So, about every 28 minutes, there is a rainbow. Or two. I think we captured nearly all of them from our visit on film, but I will only bore you with one.

On our way to hike in the cloud forest, we passed this castle. The owner died while it was being built a long time ago and it was never finished. Later, we saw some other castles. Again, I like it that eccentric people from the world over go to Panama and decide to build things like castles. A castle and a suspension bridge (possibly with a moat) for me when I'm old and rich.

I posted a picture of a white flower like this a few months ago from Peru. Turns out that Boquete thought the white ones were nice, but turned them pink for more impact. And made the shrub have about 10 times more flowers on it. Very nice.

Some amazing volcanic rock structures exist in the area. This one is apparently a popular place to train for expert rock climbers. I jumped out and scaled it with no ropes, but I wouldn't allow pictures of me victorious over the rock because I thought it might seem vain.

Tara is really proud of this picture of a flower that is locally called Cowboy's Spur. These occur a lot in the cloud forest and are about an inch tall. I think Tara took such a good picture here because she isn't much bigger than they are so she has a good perspective. Finally some fungus! This little guy is such a perfect mushroom, but red. It was one of about a half dozen. I could have stared at it for hours, but we had to go see more fungi.

The biggest and oldest trees in the area are ash trees. This one is about 500 years old. Our tour guide took this one, which is very nice, but covertly took a series of Tara trying to climb up to this point, which is much funnier. Unless you were there, in which case it wasn't so funny. But she made it!

Two fungi in one picture. Maybe not the most exciting of the kingdom, but not bad and a two-for-one special.

This is a nest of the quetzal, the most beautiful bird in the western hemisphere according to most people. We knocked, but the bird didn't seem to be home. Okay, so no knocking, but the guide tried to make bird sounds and nothing came out. And he wouldn't let us cut down the tree to look for it.

We hiked to a waterfall that was severly impacted by flooding last year. All the rocks at the bottom came over the falls, filling in a pool that had been there, and diverting about half the flow of the falls somewhere else. This was mostly interesting because all the tour companies were still showing people pictures of a huge pool where they could swim. Truth in advertising hasn't made it to Central America.

A forest of fungus. So small, yet so perfectly shaped. And they didn't try to run at all when I photographed them.

Tara thought that this fungus looked like potato chips. I thought it was fun that she and the guide had joined in my fungus fanaticism by this point in the trip. We didn't see any wildlife, so might as well see something fun.

What makes this mushroom especially fun is that it is surrounded by hordes of caterpillars. We videoed them to show them all moving in mass, but we still haven't gotten around to adding video. Take our word for it, they were cool.

Speaking of cool, look at this one that looks like a moose antler. Well, not nearly as big as a moose antler, but about the same shape.

I am a sucker for the colored fungi. And the more the merrier. Here is a nice orange one eating a tree.

Again, I try to compare my head size to the flower size. Again, I realize only now when looking at the picture that my head is gigantic. You will note my smile in these photos, though. Tara criticized me for not smiling enough the day before, so all my Boquete pictures have this smile.

This one takes me out of the equation and just shows the lovely white and pink hibiscus outside our hotel door.

And another. I know you are sick of them by now, but they were really great in person. If you are bored, just think about whatever your favorite thing is for all the rest of the flower pictures. Or just skip to the next post.

Only Tara's family will appreciate this one. Skip it if you aren't related.

My favorite fungus! Tiny, slimy, and colorful. It's the trifecta of the fungus world.

This is a view from the top of our hike in the cloud forest. This was the good visibility. About 30 seconds later, the fog rolled in and it got even worse. Tara was less than pleased that we hiked all that way to see some fog. I wasn't thrilled about the view, but I saw some great fungus, so it balanced out.

Back in town, we saw this sign. Tara is a huge Golden Girls fan, and Shady Pines is where Sofia Petrillo on that show lived until it burned down. (No, of course I didn't know the character's name. Tara just spelled it for me.)

They have nice, big beetles in Panama. This one was walking along, and I took the opportunity to grab it for a quick picture. It didn't seem to mind.

Last one is actually a moss or lichen of some kind, but it could almost pass for a fungus. Covering a huge rock. Very nice.

In conclusion, if you don't like flowers and/or fungi, you should probably avoid Boquete. If you like Spring, you should probably go. Also, tons of Americans and Germans retire there, so if you like retired Americans and Germans, it could be a good place for you. We really liked the city and surrounding area, though the rain would get on our nerves if we were there for more than a few days.