Just have a look at the map, where we have shown just some of the local spots. There are plenty more. We will continually add to this page more and more establishments as well as reviews.

Lonely Planet

Bekuo (an indigenous Bribri word, meaning constellation) is certainly Costa Ricas’s prettiest hostel, so it’s no surprise that one of the original owners studied interior design. Under the new management of Storm, who had the hostel passed down to him from his aunty Michelle*, the place is not only beautiful but has a fantastic buzz.

This is a hostel with an air of distinction. Peace reigns throughout as guests spend the day flicking through the pages of Allende and Marquez novels while idly rocking away in the garden hammocks. Stone ornaments set amongst pristine greenery and floral arrangements complete the tasteful look outside – be sure to check out the boulder-like Bribri stone sphere that was a gift from ex-Costa Rican President Figueres. Inside, there’s a homey sitting room and kitchen, plus a pool table – around which there’s the regular banter amongst the meeting travelers. Sundays are always fun when young owner Storm puts on a hearty barbecue or gets in a belly of tuna for everyone to make their own sashimi.

- Guyan Mitra Lonely Planet author

Moon Guide, Costa Rica

A spectacular addition to the backpacking scene,Hostel Bekuo is a conversion of a beautiful 1950′s home with shiny hardwood floors, clean modern bathrooms, a breeze-swept lounge with pool table, and an Internet and tv lounge. Walls of glass open to a garden.

- Christopher P. Baker

Stilvoll, Gunstig

Von auben unaffallig, von innen eines der geschamckvollsten hostels in san jose. schlichte zimmer asiatischem Touch. Betten mit gutten Matratzen

- Stefan Loose, Renate Loose

One that isn’t necessarily a guide book (but he should have written one) is from one of our guests travels around the world on a Watson Fellowship. Marc visited 15 countries over a year, and in the end, he made a list of what he loved the most and loved the least. this is what he said about Hostel Bekuo:

Best Hostel Staff: Hostel Bekuo, San Jose, Costa Rica

You can read all about Marc’s trip here.

* The story that Lonely Planet has is completely wrong, but what they wrote about our facilities is spot on.

Bocas del Toro in a larger map

Going to Bocas without stopping at Mondo Taitu is grounds for permanent exile. This is bar is cozy and has an interior bar and then a small outside patio where the young travelers of Bocas convene for happy hour and early drinks before hitting up the dance club. Happy hour is 7-8 with 50 cent beers and all drink specials are $1 off from 8-9. Dress is casual. Try the Naturalito, Mondo’s version of the mojito but with a lemon grass twist. Great place to meet people from all over the world and have a great evening.  The three guys that are the proprietors also own Hostel Heike down the road, and Luna’s Castle in Panama City, which is easily the best hostel in the city.

A visit to Bocas isn’t complete without a couple of day trips away from town.  Zapatillas Cays are two beautiful islands on a coral platform that are surrounded by reefs. Zapatillas Keys are located inside the Bastimentos Island National Marine Park.  The two islands are 34 and 14 hectares respectively. They offer beautiful beaches, clear waters, coral reefs and small, shady forests. The western island, Zapatillas Minor, is sometimes the base for scientists researching the marine turtle. The leatherback and the hawksbill turtles come to lay their eggs, in season, on these beaches.  Typically, you can catch a boat to Zapatilla for the day for $12-$15 per person.  BYOB.

Another great spot is Boca del Drago and Star Beach, on the opposite side of Isla Colon from the town of Bocas del Toro.  The truly hardcore will bike it all the way over to the other side along the only road that crosses the island.  Otherwise, a taxi will run you a couple of bucks, or you can take the bus that runs every hour.  Once there you’ll find tiny slices of beach pressed between the crystal clear waters and the mangroves and forest that cover the area.  Sloths hang out in the trees, and the water is littered with starfish of all varieties.

From San Jose in Costa Rica you can take a bus to Sixaola on the border 4 times a day from Terminal Caribe. From here you just walk across the rickety bridge to Panama.  This border can process your paperwork (check that your country does not need a visa).

From the Panamanian side, you can get a taxi direct to the boat landing or take a collectivo to Changuinola (cheaper) and from there a taxi to the boat landing at Finca 60 or a minibus to Almirante (it’ll drop you off near the landing). Then it’s just a boat ride to Isla Colon and the main town of Bocas del Toro. If you want to go to Bastimentos, take a water taxi.

The water taxi ride from Changuinola to Bocas del Toro costs $6 and takes 45 minutes.  It is very scenic, passing farms and and wood houses on stilts on a narrow canal for much of the ride, and is a highly recommended way to either arrive or depart.  The ride from Almirante is shorter and cheaper, but getting to Almirante takes long.  So it’s a wash. However, more boats leave Almirante more frequently, and almost never fill up, so we prefer this option.

For hostel owners and managers, life is about to get much easier.  A top notch property management system that is integrated with our booking engine is going to streamline your front desk operations.  There won’t be any more wasted time changing all of your availability one website at a time, because with our system, we’ll handle the allocating for you.  Change your allocation on hostelbookers.com, gomio.com, hostelsclub.com and many more automatically!

Sooooo many more features hostel owners are going to love, but we’re keeping under wraps.  Keep an eye on hostelunion.com for updates.

Costa Rica will bring to about 30 the number of countries, including Mexico and China, where Coors Light is sold. The Denver- and Montreal-based brewer is taking advantage of a growing trend toward light beer in countries that have leaned toward full-calorie brews traditionally, said Paul Mendieta, managing director for Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America.

The company may need to develop manufacturing in Latin America to accommodate growth of Coors Light, its best-selling brand, he said. Options may include building a brewery or cooperating with another brewer, according to Mendieta.

“As we continue to expand into new markets, it is definitely something that we plan on addressing,” Mendieta, 51, said in a Sept. 18 telephone interview. He declined to specify potential timing of such a move.

Brewing locally would cut freight charges, a “significant portion” of the cost of selling in the region, he said.

Molson Coors was unchanged at $48.10 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have lost 1.7 percent this year.

The challenge for Molson Coors is choosing markets without a dominant international competitor where consumers are already comfortable with the taste of light beers, said Erin Ashley Smith, an analyst with Argus Research in New York.

Market Challenge

“They don’t have as much international exposure as a number of beer companies they are competing with,” Smith said in an interview. “Long term, they are going to need to look outside the U.S. for some growth to be able to compete better.”

Overall beer sales by volume in Latin America surpassed those of North America in 2007 and will grow 20 percent by 2013, according to researcher Euromonitor International. The Coors brand, with almost 7 percent of Latin America’s import beer market in 2007, faces competition from Anheuser-Busch InBev NV’s labels.

Leuven, Belgium-based AB InBev’s Brahma and Budweiser brands together held 42 percent of the import market there, according to Euromonitor data.

Budweiser Expansion

“We are researching and carefully evaluating the best approach to expand Budweiser,” Marianne Amssoms, a company spokeswoman, said yesterday in an e-mail. “This is a mid- to long-term effort.”

Latin America’s growing middle class has brought a taste for light beer back from travels to the U.S., Mendieta said. Distributors in at least five South American countries have asked for Coors Light in recent months, Mendieta said.

Coors Light, known as the “silver bullet” because of its silver can, started selling in Puerto Rico about 15 years ago. It has since been exported to countries including Mexico, where sales grew from about 15,000 hectoliters in 2004 to 118,000 hectoliters last year, according to Molson Coors. North America and the U.K. are the brand’s largest markets.

Overall volume sales of imported lagers, which include U.S. light beers, grew 54 percent in Latin America in the six years ended 2008, while domestic lagers grew 34 percent, according to Euromonitor.

Light beer generally contains less alcohol and fewer calories than full-flavored beer. Coors Banquet has 5 percent alcohol and 142 calories per 12-ounce can, compared with Coors Light which has 4.2 percent alcohol and 102 calories.

Thermographic Ink

Coors Light is sold outside the U.S. as an import beer, fetching more per unit in China and parts of Europe, for example, than at home, Rob Borland, chief marketing officer for global brand and market development, said in June.

The brewer has marketed Coors Light overseas much as it has in the U.S. and Canada, using “Rocky Mountain Cold Refreshment” as its advertising tagline, Mendieta said. Printed in thermographic ink, mountains on the cans and bottle labels turn from white to blue when the package is chilled.

The company is curbing costs by translating existing advertising, instead of producing new ads. It introduced Coors Light’s “cold-activated can” in Mexico and Panama by re- editing a 30-second television commercial initially shown in North America, saving about $500,000, Mendieta said.

The packaging and advertising helped boost global Coors Light sales by 3.4 percent in the first half of this year as Molson Coors’s total beer volume fell 3 percent, the company said.

The Banco Central de Costa Rica (BCCR) pegged yesterday afternoon the buy rate at ¢¢585.90 and the sell at ¢595.37. The rate yesterday morning opened at ¢579.01 and ¢588.20, respectively.

Today’s rate is the highest ever recorded by the Central Bank since it introduced the “bandas cambiarias” – rate exchange bands – to set the daily exchange rate.

At some exchange houses the buy rate was ¢600 and sell ¢606.

The state banks were quick to follow the Central Bank change, with the Banco de Costa Rica (BCR) pegging the rate at ¢586 and 595.5, the Banco Nacional (BN) a little lower at ¢583 and ¢592.5, while the private banks like Scotiabank posting this morning an exchange rate of ¢585.5 and ¢595.50, while Citibank and the HSBC do not post the rate online.

A complete list of the exchange rate offered by the state and private banks are all listed on the Cental Bank’s website, which are updated within 10 minutes of an individual bank change to its rates.

The Central Bank on August 19 set the low and high for the band at ¢593 and ¢598. The bands are only a guideline for financial institutions to follow.

The survey of 2,130 U.S. doctors, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave the doctors three choices: private plans that use tax credits or subsidies to help the poor buy private insurance; a new public health insurance plan such as Medicare; or a mix of the two. Sixty-three percent of doctors supported a mix, 27 percent said they only wanted private options, and just 10 percent said they exclusively wanted public options.

“The result shows that physicians see this system is broken and needs to be fixed,” said Dr. John Lumpkin, senior vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sponsored the survey.

Costa Rica an example of ‘mixed medicine’
Costa Rica, a small Central American republic known for abolishing its army and protecting 25% of its land in national parks, doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to health care, but it has managed to cover most of its people.

More than 60 years ago, the Costa Rican government created a workers’ health insurance program that has, over the years, grown to cover more than 90 percent of the population. This system is the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, otherwise known as the Caja, and it extends to every corner of the country, although the majority of well-regarded public hospitals are in the capital city of San Jose, and outlanders routinely journey to the capital for specialized services.

The country also has highly regarded private hospitals, and Costa Ricans and resident foreigners who can afford to often choose to use the Caja as a backup to private care, which they pay for out of pocket or through international or national insurance.

Mixed medicine
Or they use both public and private health care. I met a man in the waiting room at Hospital Calderon Guardia (a public hospital) who was fully covered under the Caja but had up until then paid for private care–he wasn’t crazy about the Caja’s bureaucracy and long waits. But now he needed an operation on his hand, and he couldn’t afford to have that done by a private doctor in a private clinic. So he’d returned to the Caja fold and was trying to schedule his operation within the next decade. If he had the money for the operation, he said, he wouldn’t be there.

Other people will use the Caja for routine care–minor ailments, blood tests, and medication–but turn to private care when the going gets tough. One reason for this is that the sicker you are, the harder it is to navigate all the forms in triplicate you’ll need to see Caja specialists, and the more taxing will be the hours of waiting you’ll endure at every turn.

Well-trained doctors, lower prices
Doctors in Costa Rica, whether they work for the Caja, in private practice, or in a combination of the two, are in general very well trained. Many have studied in the United States, Canada, Europe or Cuba, where there are more doctors than anywhere else in the world. They keep up with developments in their field and often have access to the latest technology. Some doctors who work privately are associated with private clinics; others are not. Either way they can send you to private clinics for tests or operate on you there.

Prices at private medical clinics or hospitals are often beyond the reach of the average Costa Rican, but resident foreigners–who tend to have greater financial resources and are accustomed to higher prices–find the fees refreshingly low, often half or even a third of what one would pay in the United States. Part of the reason prices are lower is that malpractice lawsuits are rare here; when damages are awarded, they’re only enough to cover hospital bills and other expenses.