We spent yesterday arranging all the paperwork for shipping the car to Colombia. After we had fixed the customs paperwork mistakes on Monday and bought another months insurance (for the extra two days we would be here) we had several visits to the police. We had also arranged a shipping agent to sort out the paperwork, which was another $100. After writing several notices and leaving them in hostels, posting on Craigslist and other sites we discovered there was absolutely no one else looking to share a container heading south at this time. So instead of paying $600 each, I have to spend $1100 now or wait for someone else to show up. We wanted to go south on the Steel Rat Yacht so we were left with little choice.

First we had the to get the police to check my car really was what it says on my form. Our agent told us it was ‘best to go at 10-11am’ but what he really meant was ‘they are only open from 10-11am’. This meant we were running around at 10.40 trying to find a copy place!

With that done we could relax until 2am when we had to go across the street to get more paperwork. We headed over to the mall to pick up Melissas new glasses. Since her old ones are 2 years old and she can barely see I was expecting great things from her new ones but I can still see better than her. We had her eyes tested again and it seems they could be better. So after waiting a week for the glasses we now have to wait until Friday to get them fixed. Of course it was too much to ask that they get it right first time…

Back at the Judicial Office (in my trousers, no shorts here, the guards checked twice) we waited some more, handed over more copies of everything and finally got the final piece of paper we need. Then we swung by the nearby Customs office in the steadily increasing traffic and heat to extend our permit for the required 2 more days and then had a frustrating hour travelling back to Mario, the agent who was only 3km away.

Now it seems all we have to do is turn up at the port on Monday with the final £378 we have to pay, put the car in the container and we can really relax.

Until we have to collect the damn thing from Cartagena next week…..

Here in panama city the weather is HOT! We spent the day looking at shipping options for the car and I spent it scratching my bites. Melissa seems to think it’s an allergy but I think our ‘posh’ hostel has bed bugs. At least in my bed!

So far we have a price of £978 for a 20′ container or £1200 for a 40′ one that can take 2 cars. We need to find a friend within the next 2 weeks.

Maybe its time to stop neglecting my blog.

I’ve finally made it to the bottom of Central America, well, there is another thousand miles to the Darien Gap and Columbia but it feels like I’m nearly there. After nearly 3 years, many tortillas, plenty of cervezas, a lot of fun and 30, 000 miles of driving I’m still going. I’ve picked myself up a girlfriend on the way, the beautiful Melissa, who is coming with me and this should hopefully speed my trip along a bit more.

The plan for Panama City is to have a look at the architecture, check out the canal, do a bit of shopping and arrange for the minivan to be shipped across to Columbia in a container. We will follow in a yacht that sails lazily down through the islands of San Blas before reaching Cartagena after 5 days and my penultimate continent. The ship I want to sail on, the Steel Rat, just left which gives us a couple of weeks more here to arrange everything. Hopefully we can find someone to share the container with or the price could be a lot more. Still, I’m expecting to spend nearly a thousand dollars. Lets hope it doesn’t blow up in South America :p

Hey traveltrousers readers…you must be wondering…who is this? Well as you can see, my name is Melissa and I will be travelling with Mark. Oh yeah, I’m his girlfriend. I just gave Mark his daily dose of organic Costa Rican coffee (the best kind in el mercado central) and waiting for him to wake up. Oh! I hear a noise…he’s awake.

So we’re preparing for the road trip down to Panama, going from San Jose ->Limon-> then to Panama through Bocas del Toro. I heard it’s a beautiful place, so I can’t wait to go! We were hoping to leave this week, but now it turns out we’ll be leaving next week. No problem, it gives us time to hang out with friends before leaving .

Yesterday we went to Bar Acapulco in Sabanilla. If you’re in San Jose and want to go to a real Costa Rican bar or “chinchorro,” go here on a thursday night. At the Acapulco is “noche vernaculo,” where they play live music and say ver tico things to the public and people would answer back. It’s something like two rappers dissing each other, but think tico style. It’s hilarious!!! You have to know some of the words to know what they’re talking about and a direct translation, might not be that funny, but you’ll get a true taste of how ticos are…always laughing, always joking.

Back to eating choclates…we’ll keep you guys posted

In order to put my parents minds at ease about the dangers of travelling (and possibly living) in Columbia I spent some time on the FCO website collating some information. Every country is listed but not all country entries contain complete information. Only 86 list total visitor figures which makes it hard to be sure I haven’t missed some vital statistics. Many small countries presumably get a handful of tourists each year (British or otherwise) which makes compiling 100% accurate figures impossible, just because 2 Britons visited Bhutan in a year and both accidentally died would not make Bhutan the most dangerous country in the world. Most entries give figure for deaths, hospitalisations, arrests and detentions as well as numbers of passports replaced, but the data is sometimes patchy. I have attempted to interpret the figures as best I can.

According to the FCO website the safest countries for British tourists are as follows:

The figures are deaths per British tourist for whichever year the website quotes (typically 2008 but occasionally 2007 or 2009)

The USA was in 13th place with only 1 in every 42763.16 tourist dying while in the country. Columbia was placed 22nd (out of 73), apparently no where near as dangerous as my father would suppose.

So which are the most dangerous places to go to as a British tourist?

Its Botswana, with one in every 833 tourist not making it back to Blighty. My parents would be far better worrying about Venezuela, the comparatively calm Columbia had one death in 18,000 visitors. The country that really stands out in this list is Thailand. 288 out of 812,000 Britons died there in 2008 and is a place I have explored extensively and my parents have been there twice. According to the FCO it is 6 times more dangerous than Columbia.

However, if we look at your chances of ending up in Hospital, sadly Columbia pops to the top of the list, with 7 Hospitalisations in 2007 out of 18000 visitors from the UK. The safest countries are, unsurprisingly, Switzerland / Liechtenstein, Sweden and Ireland.

If you want to know which countries you’re most likely to be arrested, here is the top ten.

Most of these arrests are small amounts every year, typically 1 to 4 cases, but the United Arab Emirates arrested a massive 294 Britons in 2009 out of a total of approx 1.1 Million visitors, meaning 1 in every 3741 Brit ended up in jail. This figure is dwarfed by the 1534 detained in the USA in the same year, or 1 in every 4237.29 visitors and a further 2290 were arrested in the UK’s favourite holiday destination, Spain. Spain’s 1 in 7423.58 statistic is still twice as low as the figure in the UAE. One wonders what everyone in the UAE is being arrested for…

You would be least likely to end up in Hospital (and requiring a consular visit) in Iceland and Vietnam.

And if you’re wondering where the most passport go missing the prize goes to Botswana, with 29 passports lost or stolen with only 5,000 visitors. Britons lost more passports in total in Spain (7548) and the USA (3228) but down under in Australia a massive 2,446 passport were replaced in 2008, that’s one for every 274 poms that visited!

My Father, bless him, is paranoid that I will be killed in Columbia and doesn’t want me to go. According to his source, “a book he is reading by Jeffrey Archer”, there are 25 murders in the Capital, Bogota every day… That’s 9,815 a year!! Happily that is no longer true and if we look here we see the murder rate in 2006 was 18,8 for every 100,000 inhabitants. That’s dropped from 81,2 for every 100,000 in 1993. The capital’s population is around 8,5m so we have about 1600 murders a year, and a figure that is likely to have be dropping in the last 4 years. Incidentally, the murder rate for the whole country was 33/100,000 in 2006 so one could argue the capital is more dangerous than the rest of the country.

So, what are my chances of meeting a grisly end in the Romantic streets of old Cartagena.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a handy website that details the advise they give to British Nationals travelling around the world and it reveals that in 2008 out of all the 18,000 British tourist that visited only one was killed. That’s killed, not necessarily murdered… Can you really make a decent argument out of a figure that has only one statistic?

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

What is clear is that tourists (at least not British ones) are not dropping like flies in hails of bullets any more. It seems that people have very long memories when it comes to dangerous places. When I visited Uganda in 2006 and mentioned to a few people that I might go over to Rwanda, everyone was terrified for my life. I ended up near the border and didn’t have time to go, but I met several people who said it was perfectly safe. The genocide was 12 years earlier but in most people’s minds there were still bodies piled up on the street and gangs of machete wielding thugs roaming the streets. Columbia still has problems but the usual perception is that it’s still very dangerous.

The FCO site has a list of countries it advises against travel to as well as figures for deaths and other problems in nearly every country in the world. I decided to do a little digging…

I bought an Apple mouse back in August and after a week of playing around with it, never really got it to work. It would detect but when it claimed to have been connected it just wasn’t. I would look at this box

wiggle the mouse and… nothing. I tried again a few days ago and it seems all my pain was due to a lack of patience. While I waited for 10 seconds and giving up I should have taken my time since XP was figuring out that I didn’t have the code to pair the mouse and it was going to have to ask me for it. This can take 30 seconds or so.  So, to fix it I waited until the pop up box asked me for the code (0000) and then it paired successfully. It now works every time which is just awesome.

My new problem is getting it to synch every time i reboot…

I love my Samsung NC10 Netbook, I really do. I put in a 500Gb drive, upgraded the ram to 2Gb and put in a FM transmitter and Mini SD card reader. I’ve opened it so many times its missing half the screws… But it has, or rather had, a rather annoying problem. A few months ago the fan started to occasionally make some noise. It got louder and louder and I took it apart to blow the dust out a few times but it was still noisy.

Finally last week it stopped turning altogether. I had already been to a couple of local store here in Costa Rica to see if I could get a replacement part. They told me to try e-bay… At least on e-bay the replacements were only £14-24, getting a new one from a site in the UK would be £50… That’s 1/6 the cost of the unit, and its only a year old!

I had a crappy fan blowing air at the back of it but Melissa (my new gf) and I wanted to head to Nicaragua tomorrow for the weekend, so this wasn’t a good solution. I took it apart again, removed the fan/heatsink and blasted it with WD-40. I was barely turning at all. I tried finding how the fan attached to the heatsink and gave it a knock which led to the fan disconnecting entirely.

It seems the fan is only really attached by the force of the magnets in the moving part and presumably this was full of dust and gunk, slowing and eventually stopping the fan. I blasted the inside with more oil, wiped off the excess, put it back together and … it now works!!

Try this before you send yours to the repair place or pay £50 for a new fan!

La Fortuna in CR is beautiful and the hot river was awesome, which is good since Im now stuck here with a leaking, bulging tyre :/

After yesterday @ the beach, I’m no longer a guy with a board but a real surfer! Gnarly dude! I ache all over :p costa rica this afternoon!