Nauru Travel Diary

From Houston to Sydney 2013

From Houston

to Sydney

2013

 

We woke to grey, cloudy, overcast conditions this morning, which were not really the incentive I had been seeking to get up early and get some sunrise photos.  It was actually very difficult to know precisely when sunrise occurred.

We had to check out of our hotel by midday as we were relocating to Liberia for this evening’s stay, the reason being that our flight to Houston tomorrow was scheduled to leave at 6:30 am.  This will require that we arrive for check-in at Liberia Airport by 4:30 am, and it thus seemed to make sense to stay close to the airport to avoid getting up in Tamarindo at 2:30 am to make the early morning bus trip.

After a leisurely morning having breakfast and packing, interspersed by forlorn looks at the cloudy skies outside, we checked out and took the minibus to our hotel, which was located across the road from Liberia Airport.  The trip, which took 75 minutes, was far from the smoothest trip of this journey, and the swaying motion of the bus combined with the driver’s constant on-and-off use of the accelerator made Di feel a little seasick.  Nonetheless, the countryside of small towns, sugar cane cultivation and small-scale cattle ranching made very pleasant viewing on the journey.

We shared the minibus with just one other passenger, a woman from Los Angeles who spends six months each year in Costa Rica.  She was returning home to California, and will be catching the same early flight as us to Houston tomorrow morning.  Her loud, slurred speech had an irritating element to it, as did her habit of eating crackers while she was talking, a practice that resulted in the front of her body and legs becoming thoroughly sprayed with hundreds of tiny sodden bits of biscuit that had been spat from her mouth by the time we reached Liberia.

For those who have been missing the daily postings of this travel diary (as there was no internet available at our hotel in Tamarindo), you will appreciate one of the immediate advantages offered by our hotel in Liberia – we finally have access to the internet once again, and we made the most of it to catch up on five days of being offline.

Liberia is a surprisingly small town for a place that has an international airport.  I suspect that the basis of the airport’s viability is the tourism industry of the wider Guanacaste province rather than Liberia township.  Nonetheless, so you have some idea of what the town of Liberia looks like, the four photos in today’s diary all show street scenes in the central part of Liberia.

Day 19 - Tamarindo to Liberia

Wednesday

24 July 2013