Holy Week

Wednesday we woke up early to get to the border early because it always takes forever. We had to take a mini bus to this town where we would have to take a boat taxi to Bocas because it's all islands. There's about 8 little islands in a cluster called Bocas del Toro. You can take a water taxi between all the islands. It was real cloudy the whole time we were here so the water wasn't as clear as it normally was so we didn't see many animals. After we checked into our hostel we just walked around the small town before going to bed because we were so tired. Our hostel was rela nice and you could see the ocean from the deck.

Thursday we slept in and spent most of the day just hanging out at different islands. First we went to bastimientos where a little village was. We hing out with the little kids for a while and Zak played baseball with the older boys. Michelle found a barber that cut her hair in this old salon that was basically an old chair under someone's house. Andrew and I went exploring and we found an old graveyard. We hiked to the other side of the island to Wizard beach where we sat for a while. Eventually we got on another taxi and went to Carenera island and hung out at Aqualounge which had a "swimming pool". The swimming pool was basically a hole cut in the deck soyou could see the ocean. They had a high dive though.

We met a spanish teacher from New Jersey that we hung out with until dark who talked to us about jersey shore and reno 911.

Kate was sick the whole trip and spent the whole day in bed so we went back and got her ice cream and made her brother made a big pot of chili. We got invited to a secret party at some rich guy's beach house on another island. It was fun but got boring fast so we went back and went to sleep early.

Friday we booked a tour for four islands that we could snorkle on and see some rare birds and starfish. Instead the boat driver only took us to two islands where we couldn't really snorkle because there were no reefs close by. We went to starfish beach which had hundreds of starfish that we put in a big pile and played with. I guess starfish can die if you take them out of the water for more than a couple seconds so we might have caused a starfish genocide. After we got back we were too tired to do anything else and the boys were really sunburned so we went to bed around 9.

Saturday we had a plan to get home before 7 because we had already bought all our return tickets. Since the atms were all broken and the banks we closed we couldn't get money out to pay for our hostel which made us late to the bus. The bus had left and hour and a half early anyway because it filled up so fast so we had to take a taxi to the border. Then we had to wait for a bus going to Limon where we could take a different bus to San Jose. We didn't get back to the punt until almost 10. We spent about 13 hours traveling today.