Epic Journey alert--if you want to go from Granada in Nicaragua aaaaalllll the way down to Panama City by road as quickly as possible, it will take about 8 hours to get to San Jose in Costa Rica, you'll need to stay there about 2 hours then a mental 16 hour long haul, stopping almost solely at the Costa Rica/Panama border (where you'll be for 6 or 7 hours anyway).

Leaving Granada we were taking the normal bus down to San Jose; it was fine, long but we brought snacks with us and toughed it out. At the bus station in San Jose, we bumped into some old buddies- Mark the Kiwi and Ruiari (Rory) from Ireland, plus one of his mates (who'd recently been robbed. b*****.) The bus from San Jose left about 11pm and got to the border with Panama around 3.30 in the frigging morning. Rather than letting everyone stay on the bus which would have been the sensible option, the driver and conductor made everyone get off and go to the 'Check out of Costa Rica' building- which wouldn't open until 6am. Their reason was this way we would be in front of all the other busses full of people. Goddamn it, the only other fricking busses that showed up were two and they were taking people away from the border back into Costa Rica, not trying to get through.

Screw it. We eventually all got through that part of the process then had to walk a few minutes up through No Man's Land (where there were many shops, a McDonald's and several hundred people living happily) to the Panama 'check in'. We'd heard that that one was the worst of the lot and could take 1-3 hours. God, if only. The staff at the immigration seemed to spend 10 minutes per person talking… me and Nick had maybe 15-20 people ahead of us, and it was as though we sat still (we'd given up standing and we sitting on the sidewalk with a thousand others trying to get through). I had my watch on and it took hours (this time I'm not joking or exaggerating) to even get ahead anywhere. After possibly 4 or 5 hours in the queue (still not kidding) we got to the front of the line. Only to be told we needed to show onward tickets leaving Panama. Normally we would have those with us as a matter of course but nowhere in Central or South America had anyone asked for them, so they were in our backpacks in the hold of the bus. Along with a lot of other people's! There was a cyber café just across the road (excellent, excellent foresight on that person's behalf!) so we were able to run across there and print things out. The pratt at immigration had said we'd be able to just go straight to him when we got back rather than going to the back of the queue which is one of the only decent things that happened. Many of us tourists got caught with the same situation, one lady didn't have any itinerary, not even on her emails, so conspired with the bus driver (I'd been talking with him earlier and he said queues this long were normal) as even he could see the entire bus full of people were about to mutiny, to just buy a cheap bus ticket for a week's time back to Costa Rica. For f@ck's sake it was an absolute fiasco and from what I've seen of Panama since then I cannot understand how they can be so so terribly s***e at that part of things. Christ, I need to move on otherwise I won't stop ranting about it.

Lunch on the bus was provided--Big Macs picked up from a Maccas at one of their stops! Hilarious, didn't believe Nick when he said what the food was. One poor guy sitting next to us was vegetarian though so wasn't able to have anything as there were no alternatives.

Argh, still pissed about that fricking border. Right, anyway. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon into Panama City, finally, and headed to our hostel in Casco Viejo, the old city. On Saturday (tomorrow, incidentally) we are taking a boat from Carti (couple hours away by jeep), sailing to the San Blas Islands for a couple days, then carrying on to Cartagena, Colombia. Fun!! The hostel helped us organise the jeep, it's picking us up around 5am tomorrow, rats.

We've done a bit of sightseeing here, wandering around the old town. Panama City has been around for centuries but used to be located somewhere else about 20 minutes out of the current town. Back in 1671 the pirate Captain Henry Morgan (yup, like the rum) landed there with his dastardly pirates and destroyed the place, so they rebuilt it here. There are roadworks and restoration works going on at the moment in the old town, they are repaving the streets and re-doing the buildings and it will look stunning when it's all done. Eventually. Yesterday we went out to the Panama Canal visitor centre, as you can't actually take trips on the canal itself. It turns out ships pay between US$250 000 and $500 000 to use the canal and it takes 7-8 hours to get through all the locks. It would take 2-3 weeks to sail down South America and around if they didn't go through the canal. A magnificent construction, I think it said over 20 000 people died building it (though many of those were from malaria or dengue fever). In 2014 they will be widening the canal somehow, so larger ships can also travel through. Amazing. While we were there a ship was actually passing through in front of the visitor centre lock towards the Pacific. It took over an hour to move a few hundred metres, very very slow, but incredible to watch.

Anyway there are still about 400 photos of Nicaragua currently uploading onto facebook, then I just need to post this blog and the Panama photos, and we'll be up to date! The next week is going to be cool, 5 days sailing-- snacks and sea sickness tablets top of my list for things to take..

So, signing off for now, and looking forward to talking with you in a week's time!