We left behind Panama and continued on with our Central America backpacking trip, crossing the northern border into Costa Rica.
I quit my job last July and decided to take what I coined an "adult gap year", given I was taking it aged 28, instead of the typical gap year age of 18. I went back and forth for months on exactly when I would go, which countries I would visit, for how long I wanted to travel, with whom I wanted to go - if anyone...
My Central America trip would turn out to cover five countries in five weeks; the first three (Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua) with my partner Tobi and the last two (Guatemala, Belize) with Ina, one of my friends from Salzburg.
Costa Rica was decidedly my least favourite country of the trip unfortunately - and quite possibly one of my least favourite I've ever visited. I shared about this on Instagram while we were traveling, with the key reasons being that it was absurdedly expensive, miserably over-touristed (trashy beaches, everything's become a tourism grab) and poor infrastructure with nowhere materializing into a place we were happy to spend time. We ended up leaving Costa Rica after just three nights instead of the original eight we had planned.
One of the highlights we did enjoy while in Costa Rica was our morning visit to the Jaguar Rescue Center in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, near the border to Panama.
Although it was a lot of work, I made daily vlogs on Instagram reels of every single day of my Central America trip which I branded "the backpacking series".
→ Check out my episode of the Backpacking Series of visiting Puerto Viejo!
