San Jose

San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, where I am writing this entry, is a strange place that leads what can only be described as a double life. During the day you could almost be in a European city, with pleasant parks, pedestrianised streets and international brands in every shop. But when night falls, and the shutters come down on the chain stores, there's no doubt you are in a far-off land. Then the streets fill with drug addicts, prostitutes and other lost souls. Surprisingly, many of the street hookers here are transvestites - I hadn't expected that in Central America. From a distance they can look quite convincing, but when you get closer you realise that they're about seven-foot tall in their heels with prominent Adam's apples and big hands. I've also been told that they're as hard as nails and have been known to beat up and rob tourists. The drug addicts are a pitiful bunch - at night they hang around at traffic lights with plastic cups to beg for pennies to buy their next fix. When I first saw them crowding around a car on a street corner moaning their pleas with sunken eyes, collapsed faces and filthy clothes I thought I had strayed into a zombie movie.

I've not been up to much here, just spending a few days recovering from the hectic pace of the last couple of weeks. Tomorrow I'm planning to cross the border into Panama. It's a tough decision to move on so soon - Costa Rica is famously beautiful and has so many amazing things to see. But it's expensive. Also it has one of those awful currencies where a dollar is five hundred Colones. This means that you are constantly paying for everything, no matter how trifling, with one, two or five thousand notes. All too soon these amounts rack up to fifty thousand, which is one hundred dollars - an unthinkable sum in the other countries I've visited.

The only cultural thing I've done so far is to visit a museum of insects with Lewis, the Hull DJ who is killing a few days before going off to look after turtles on the coast for a month. We were told that the museum was in a basement at the city university, so off we went. When we arrived we found ourselves in the middle of some sort of political protest. Huge banners were hanging on the campus buildings deploring the country's ruling party (sweetly known as TLC) and CAFTA - the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which hits all the right buttons for scholastic socialist spleen venting. But unlike British students they didn't express their anger by occupying the dean's office or chanting slogans and waving placards - no, they booked a band and had a party in the afternoon sun. Despite everything we were still asking students where the insect museum was and then, simultaneously, had the same awful feeling. There we were, with fantastic music playing, in the sunshine, surrounded on all sides by tanned beauties jigging about in tight jeans asking where we could find a cellar full of dead moths. By way of compensation, as if to prove to ourselves that we weren't irredemably square, we went for a couple of beers. Having taken the proverbial pens out of our metaphorical top pockets we felt able to actually visit the museum. It was interesting, as far as it went, but had seen better days. Many of the specimens were being eaten by mites, and the explanatory notes, all in Spanish, were yellowed with age. Some of the insects were quite amazing, particularly the goliath beetles, which were about the size of a page boy's shoe.

I did a very silly thing last night - at about the time I usually go to bed (about ten) I decided to go for a wander around the town. I went to a couple of bars and had a few beers to add to those I'd had with Lewis earlier. At each place I was immediately pounced upon by plump prostitutes, who were quite charming after I told them that I was travelling on a budget of ten dollars a day and was staying in a dormitory hostel, and so wasn't much of client for them. They were from all over Central and South America and come here because there are so many rich American tourists, they said. Now for the silly thing - on the way back to the hostel I stopped to take in the midnight ambience of a little park in the centre of town. It was a remarkably pleasant evening - even the moaning cries of the drug addicts seemed atmospheric . . . and I fell asleep on a park bench in what I now know to be one of the most dangerous places in Costa Rica. Apparently you're meant to avoid it at night. Luckily no harm came to me - perhaps the local low-lifes thought I was an off-duty transvestite.