A GOOD NATURE.

A year ago, Costa Ricans were voted the happiest people on the planet. Or in research terms, 'reported to have the highest life satisfaction in the world'. What a selling point! Who wouldn't want to go to a country where the locals are more content than anywhere else?

From visiting Costa Rica (or the "Rich Coast"), I found out a whole lot more about this extraordinary place and its cheerful inhabitants. For one, they protect more of their natural environment than any other country on earth. A third of this little paradise nestled between Nicaragua (to the north) and Panama (to the south) is reserved solely for mother nature.

Could all of this greenery, as it were intended to exist since year one, play a part in their untroubled existence? I'd say so.

And secondly, they don't have an army. They got rid of it in 1949. So, unlike most other nations in today's world, they have no military, no armed forces, no organisation dedicated to fighting and killing. Remarkable. Although, what use would the happiest people on the planet have for being trained to hate?

With such vast amounts of natural splendor, it's no wonder I spent vast amounts of time in National Parks and Reserves. All of which were along the Pacific Coastline and all of which were as breathtaking as the next.

In the North, I hiked along a jungle road for 26km, catching quick glimpses of Capuchin Monkeys and intricately patterned snakes, in order to have the privilege of standing on a completely wild, completely undeveloped stretch of beach, whose wave is of the best in the world. It's called Witch's Rock, and the bodysurfing was magnificent.

Further South, again hiking through a National Park, I saw a wild three-toed sloth dawdling through the thick jungle canopy above me. These slow-moving creatures seem so perfectly suited to this mellow land, where there really is...no rush.

Then, while staying at Poor Man's Paradise, an aptly-named bungalow style hotel on the border of the Corcovado National Park (which National Geographic have called, "the most biologically intense place on earth", and where wild Jaguars and Pumas have been seen prowling the beach at night), I saw and heard from my room, the most beautiful of all parrots - the Scarlett Macaw. In the wild, these birds (which are on the verge of extinction) are seen in pairs. They choose a life partner and form a partnership so real that should the one die, for whatever reason, so too will the other.

But as they say, one must take all the good with the bad. And I happened to experience something pretty bad. An earthquake. An earthquake which measured 6.3 and whose epicenter was 10km away. However, while such disasters can cause huge damage and suffering, this one didn't. And in a dark, ironic way, this disaster was also appropriately natural.

It's good to know that a place like Costa Rica exists; protecting nature while the rest of us neglect it. And it is for this reason that I will most certainly return one day. Heck! there's an entire Caribbean coastline I am yet to see...

STARING AT THE SUNRISE.

Nicaragua.

It's just as it sounds. Exotic. Wild. And a very long way from home.

Nicaragua is a fantasyland. It's a place which, in the past, I would never have thought to go. It just sounded too distant. Distant in a way that I knew it existed, having heard the word in geography class, but it seemed more like a place Peter Pan would visit. Not me.

But today I am here. Today I find myself far, far away in the largest of the Central American countries. I can barely speak the language - just enough to ask the essential questions like, 'another beer, please'. I travel in chicken buses overloaded with men, women, children, sheets of corrugated iron, wooden furniture and, well, even chickens sometimes. I embrace the all day sweat, because there is just no other way. And I drink the coffee made from the beans I watch the man meticulously rake out on the concrete floor, for the hot Central American sun to bake. And it's all good.

On a trip like this, carrying everything I own on my back, moving from place to place just to "see what they're like", and experiencing new cultures and ways of life every day, I try to picture where I am positioned on a globe; where I would pinpoint myself in relation to the rest of the planet. It's a crazy notion when contemplating this on Playa Santo Domingo, which is a beach on Ometepe, which is an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, which is the largest freshwater lake in Central America. Or when the heavens open and a tropical downpour 'scatterdots' the Pacific Ocean as I swim in it for the first time in my life. Or while I shower underneath a 40-meter waterfall cascading down the side of a dormant volcano. It's a crazy thought to think about where I am, while I am doing these crazy things.

I am in Nicaragua, and Peter Pan is nowhere to be found. For, while this place is magical, it is also very real.