While I usually like to write about more important things than our touristy activities, I realize that most people that read this blog just want to know where we are and what we are doing. So here is a quick summary of our time in Costa Rica.
After leaving Panama we went to Dominical, a smallish surf town on the Pacific coast. At first we planned to be there one week, but ended up staying for two weeks. We got a good deal on a hotel room because we wanted to stay for a while and ended up meeting some nice people there. The guy we hung out with most is a semi-pro skier from France named Max. He is a real adrenaline-junkie type and was in Costa Rica to surf as much as possible, as well as "to make bungee jump, make jump out of plane" and other extreme activities. Max is a real solid guy and invited us and any of our friends to come to the French Alps - where he’s from - for a ski vacation anytime.
Next we headed to Jaco, what we hoped would be another charming surf town, but instead found an over-developed, over-crowded resort beach community. Because it’s the closest beach to San Jose, Jaco is the most popular spot for Costa Rican urbanites to spend a weekend. We got there on a Monday to avoid the weekend crowds, but we were gone before the next weekend because we found the place over-priced and just generally not the kind of place we were looking for. People in Dominical had also warned us that there were a lot of prostitutes, summing it up by saying that all the girls in the clubs and bars were just there to sell their bodies. While eating dinner one night we overheard a group of older gringo men talking about how "Costa Rican girls will fuck you til your eyes roll back in your head." At the same bar I say a large gringo with a big belly to match his big white beard leaving the bar after having dinner with his young Tica (Costa Rican woman) girlfriend and their baby, with them was the Tica’s parents who looked to be much younger than the gringo. I couldn’t believe my eyes as the Tica’s father loaded his granddaughter into the car and sat next to what would be his son-in-law if they were married, although the gringo looked like he could be his grandfather. Scenes like this painted Jaco as a pretty seedy place in our minds, so we opted to take off before the weekend parties started.
After Jaco we headed to Monteverde, a very popular mountain town. The crowds in Monteverde weren’t much better than Jaco but we were getting used to them. We were there mostly to do a canopy tour (zip-lines through the cloud forest trees) and not much else. The whole town seems to exist for these types of tours and we were swamped as soon as we got off the bus by people trying to get us to stay at their hotel and take their tours. Our canopy tour was a blast, although they didn’t warn us about the rappel drop and Tarzan swing until we were already strapped in and seconds away from a quick free-fall that brought a lot of screams from some and laughs for the rest of us.
Andrew had recommended visiting Volcan Arenal, the most active volcano in Costa Rica, and we decided to head there next. There were several options for getting there from Monteverde, including horse rides, a taxi-boat-taxi combo trip and taking a public bus that would take over nine hours. We took the taxi-boat-taxi which included joining a convoy of vans driving to Lake Arenal, loading into a boat with everyone for a trip across the lake the back into a bunch of vans to get to the town of La Fortuna. The volcano is one of the three most visited destinations in the country and prices reflected it. Our hostel was nice as there aren’t many backpacker hostels that have pools, but all the activities in the area were pretty expensive. We did a volcano hike that included dinner at the resort hot springs that cost $60 each. The hike was interesting because our guide was funny and informative, but we didn’t get to see the volcano as it was hiding behind constant cloud cover. We did hear it rumbling though. The hot springs were very deluxe and the dinner was great. We actually skipped lunch so that we could take full advantage of the buffet dinner.
After that trip in the highlands we headed back to the coast. Our first stop was Puntarenas where we spent one night before catching the ferry to the Peninsula de Nicoya where we went to Montezuma. All the guide books talk about how it was a quiet fishing village before a group of ex-pats moved in a made it a traveller destination. Now there is a nude beach not far from town (the first I’ve heard of in Central America) and loads of blonde haired kids running around town being chased by their single Tica moms. The place was very nice and we had an ocean view room and went to the waterfalls one day and the nude beach the next (there was no one nude there). We also did a boat tour to Isla Tortuga for snorkeling and hanging out on an idyllic beach. The snorkeling wasn’t great as the visibility was bad and there were tiny jelly fish that kept stinging everyone. Montezuma is the kind of place I could stay for a while, but there were no bank machines there and we were running low on cash. We tried to find a bus up the coast to Samara, but the state of the roads meant no buses would go that way. Our options were a $45 per person shuttle or a day-long trip back towards Puntarenas. We figured since we needed to go that way anyway we would just go all the way to San Jose where we could catch a direct bus to Samara. I also read in the Tico Times that there was a clown convention in San Jose at that time that would include public shows of fire-juggling so we wanted to check it out.
San Jose was quite a nice town though many people have told us not to judge Costa Rica by the capital. There’s a very nice pedestrian mall down the middle of the city that’s great for walking and people watching. The fire juggling clowns were a little rudimentary but still neat to see. We only wanted to stay for a couple of days, and that’s what we did before catching a bus to Samara.
Samara turned out to be pretty much just another beach town that was taking full advantage of growing tourism. Not that it wasn’t nice, but we have been through so many beach towns now that it would be nice to find a place that’s truly different. While in Samara we mostly lazed on the beach and read. I should say that a definite plus of visiting all these beach communities has been great seafood at cheap prices. Lately I’ve had shrimp dishes of every imaginable variety, and am just waiting for a restaurant that has lobster at cheap prices before I start ordering that regularly.
From Samara we went to Liberia, a large city in the north, where we would spend a night before making a run for the Nicaraguan border. So now we’re in Nicaragua and looking forward to taking Spanish lessons in Granada, exploring the volcano islands in Lago de Nicaragua, and some many other activities we have planned.
Pics from top are: Montezuma waterfalls, Jade exhibit at San Jose Museo de Nacional, MB & I on canopy tour in Monteverde and Puntarenas church.
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