Lake Arenal

What a day!

The roads in Costa Rica are notorious for being less than perfect - potholes are common and out of the cities you'll be glad you've got a 4x4.

Although there have been new highways opened and roads re-surfaced getting from A to B can, at times, be painfully slow...

Today we drove from Santa Elena to La Fortuna.

Google Maps puts this 100km journey at just over 2 hours.

Let's just say that was wishful thinking!

The Ministry of Transport seem to have spent all their budget on speed signs and yellow paint and have no budget left for directional signage which the motorist might find useful.

Fields and mountainsides begin to look the same after a while and without any sort of landmark we may as well have navigated using a 100 colone coin - heads we go left, tails we go right...

Eventually, we found our way to the town of Tilaran, and from there it's a relitively straightforward drive along Lake Arenal - apart from the last slight detour of the day. Even when a place is signed it might not be correct...!