Costa Rica

Puerto Viejo is billed as a party town, a paradise, somewhere you'll go and never want to leave. Sadly it is none of these. The Caribbean storms that had thus far prevented my from seeing that coast were still in full swing. The devastation was everywhere, flattened houses, ruined crops, waterlogged everything.

As a result of this Puerto Viejo was empty. I stayed in Rockin' J's, a hammock based hostel about 500m walk to the town centre. This was hostelling on an industrial scale with hammocks everywhere, countless tents on a raised platform and a few dorm rooms. Sadly it was empty, maybe about 20 tired, wet travellers.

We'd heard that there had been a bit of trouble on the road to town recently with local kids on bikes robbing travellers at gunpoint. With this in mind a group of four of us got together to make the walk to town. We were all over 6ft tall and our group included an Olympic rower (only got a bronze medal but figured he'd still be useful in a fight). As we walked in formation down the dodgy street we were buzzed a few times by the bike kids, they stared at us, we stared at them, each trying to out-menace the other.

We made it to town to find we were pretty much the only people there. A quick dinner and a bottle of $2 beer (Costa Rica is a relative rip off) and we headed back to the safety of the hostel compound.

The next day we heard that 5 of the 20 people staying at the hostel had been robbed on the same road the previous night. This place was hell, it was time to go. In five months of travelling through such places as Mexico City, El Salvador etc I'd never felt so unsafe.

Panama was next with the promise of another paradise, Bocas del Toro, around the corner.