Day 110
I spent 3 nights at my accommodation in San Isidro and to be honest there was not much to do in the city and whilst I was there the weather started to turn showery which discouraged me from exploring further on the bike. I used my time to catch up on the usual housekeeping stuff like emails etc. and when eventually it was time to leave I have to say that I was glad to move on.
I left San Isidro in the direction of San Jose (the capital city of Costa Rica) and immediately the road started to climb, and climb. In total the road climbed up in to the mountains for about 30 miles before it levelled off a bit and by this time I was high enough in the mountains to be above some clouds.
As I rode further North the road climbed even higher and eventually I found myself in some cloud, and as you can imagine it was cold and damp.
It took me a while to get up over the top of the mountains and to get down and out from under the cloud. By the time that I did so I was very cold, so I made a quick stop for a hot coffee in a sunny spot to heat up a bit. Then once I had warmed up I got back on the bike and continued to head down from the mountains, I quickly reached the town of Cartago. I then took road number 10 from Cartago to the city of Limon on the Caribbean coast where I had booked accommodation for a couple of nights.
When I made my first unsuccessful attempt at crossing in to Costa Rica in February, I had originally planned to visit Limon before exploring the rest of Costa Rica. When I had looked at the pictures of Limon online, it looked quite inviting. On my arrival though I wish I had not bothered riding all the way there. Limon is a shit hole, just like the city of Colon in Panama. I stopped at the seafront, I parked the bike, took some photos, and wondered what I was going to do here for the next couple of days.
Whilst waiting to check in to my accommodation I found a small bar further along the seafront where I stopped and bought a 500 ml bottle of water which cost me 1,000 Colones (about $2) This was by far the nicest spot that I found in Limon and as you can see in the pictures, it’s nothing to write home about about.
Just as I was checking in to my accommodation the skies opened up and the rain came down hard. It lasted for most of the time that I was in Limon, except for a few hours in the late afternoon on both days. I used these breaks in the weather to explore the city on foot, however when I did so I saw that the city was even worse that I had seen when riding through it on my way to my accommodation.
There was litter everywhere, most of the buildings were falling to pieces, every shop had bars on the windows or a security guard at the door. Even small fast food shops, small corner shops, and small bakeries had metal grills from counter to ceiling with only a small opening to pass out the goods and take in the money. The whole place had a horrible feel to it.
Not far from where my accommodation was a new supermarket that had just been built. As you can see from the picture below, it looks like a maximum security prison complete with a perimeter fence with lockable gates, and the whole thing was topped with razor wire. Needless to say there was also an armed security guard inside the front door.
That picture says it all, in my opinion Limon is not a place that I shall ever return to nor will I ever advise anyone to go to.
Day 111
I arose early and I was looking forward to getting out of the city, however it was raining heavily. As I waited on the balcony of my accommodation for the rain to ease or to stop I thought about my time in Limon, not only was it a complete dump but the accommodation that I had unfortunately booked had a few issues that I did not like.
The first issue was that it was one of those “self check-in " places where an email gets sent with instructions how to get in to the property etc. Whilst this all might be very desirable for the owner, I hate these places. The doors all had different codes that I had to enter in to each different digital keypad lock on each different door and the owner had mounted cameras everywhere outside the actual living accommodation which meant that whilst I was sitting on the balcony bored out of my mind watching the locals mess about outside, the owner was potentially watching me all of the time.
The second issue was the location, it was situated at a busy road junction on the corner of which there was a local grocery store. From dawn to dusk, drivers parked their vehicles directly outside my accommodation to go to the grocery store, slamming their car doors, or leaving their vehicle running whilst they went to purchase something, sometimes with the car stereo blaring out from the open windows. Then there was the constant stream of traffic in the area, again from dawn to dusk, cars, buses, lorries, and lots and lots of small bikes and mopeds with incredibly loud exhausts, ridden by helmet-less individuals texting on their mobile phones as they went flying past where I was sitting on a first floor balcony. Then there was the building itself. As with most of the buildings in this town, the roof was made of some form of corrugated iron, which acted like a drum when it rained. On both nights I was regularly awakened by the hammering of the torrential rain on the roof of the building.
Anyway at around 8 in the morning the rain stopped and I made a break for it, but I had only gotten about 20 miles out of the city when I got caught in heavy rain that appeared from nowhere and I got thoroughly drenched again. The rain came and went till I reached the town of Cartago where it stopped completely.
Once out of the town of Cartago I backtracked along up Highway 2 in to the mountains back in the direction of San Isidro for a few miles, I then took road number 244 to a small town called San Marcos where I had arranged to meet up with another biker and his wife. Tonny and Katerine, who are from Denmark, have been travelling for about 10 months now travelling down from the USA and through Central America on a pair of Honda CRF 300’s.
Once I met up with Tonny and Katrine in the town of San Marcos they introduced me to a local biker who then took us all to a local coffee manufacturing plant that happened to have an onsite coffee house so that we could try out the local brew and very nice it was too.
This particular part of Costa Rica is the centre of the coffee growing area, as such the coffee plantations smother every available hillside, and the roads in an out of the area are quite steep and twisty.
The town of San Marcos was very much to my liking so I decided to spend a few days there using it as a base to explore the surrounding area.
As I have previously explained in this blog, I don’t record my travels on video as for me it’s too much work to do all that recording and editing. However, if anyone reading this wants to see videos of the places in Central America that I have written about here in my blog then you might want to visit the YouTube Channel run by the Canadian guy Jeff that I met in Penonome a few weeks ago. Jeff has been to most of the places that I have been to or that I will be going to and the videos on his channel can provide a much better idea of what these places are like to visit than what my photographs are able to.
https://www.youtube.com/@gettinglostshow
Also if you want to read what the Danish couple Tonny and Katerine who I met in San Marcos are up to on their travels you can find their website and links to their social media here.