Month: April 2016

From mountain to the ocean, the Pacific coast to be precise. A relatively painless drive down via a pretty good quality dirt road brought us eventually to Puntarenas, from where you catch a car ferry over to Paquera on the peninsula de Nicoya. It was 39C when we got to the quay, the first real taste of heat on the trip! Having an hour to kill before the ferry sailed, we got a bite to eat at a restaurant at the pier, mainly to keep an eye on the car parked there in the queue. You wouldn’t normally expect too much of a place like that but the grilled fish was to die for, one of the best meals had so far. The ferry was good, complete with DJ spinning 70s dance numbers, then we drove across to Montezuma village, foolishly relying on the GPS to show us the way. It knew some shortcuts, which had us driving through rivers and getting us well and truly airborne. Secretly I have to admit I enjoyed that ☺ It remains to be seen if Europcar agrees when I return it.

We checked ourselves into a cabin in what can only be described as a zoo. This was a full on casa, up in the jungle behind the beach, with two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and hall with a private deck of about 40 square metres with a jacuzzi in it,  and no neighbours within sight! There was a whole colony of iguanas living on the tin roof, possibly the stupidist creatures I’ve ever met as they don’t seem to realise they can’t actually get any grip on the pitched roof. As soon as they move, you can hear them slithering down uncontrollably whilst they try and manoeuvre themselves ready to jump onto a  branch. When they can’t make it they end up catapulting themselves over the edge and fly past your head on their way to an undignified landing on the deck.

Sky TV dish on the cabin roof. Can I not get away from there, ever?

An iguana on the roof, getting ready to make that leap of faith

Capuchin up in the trees

Apart from that there were howler monkeys and white throated capuchins everywhere, bats, white nosed coatis, who were none too camera shy like this fella.

A cheeky capuchin helping himself to a leak in our water supply

All of this is passing Slothy by. He doesn’t do much, but then hey, he is a sloth

Here’s the jacuzzi action

We left it full of water one night, and the evidence was there in the morning of a load of monkeys partying in it. They had been going around the corner to poop, very clean party monkeys

Then there were agoutis running around everywhere, basically like overgrown rats without a tail. White throated magpie jays used to come and have breakfast, which is to say come and have our breakfast. Also there were some vague chicken like things hanging out. More worryingly, Lisa saw a crocodile, thankfully not from the cabin, but a good 20 metres from it!

We hiked 40 minutes or so up the coast to Playa Grande, a big sandy beach popular with surfers and only accessible by that walking route, then checked out the waterfalls, a spectacular series of three tiers, all of which can be jumped off from a variety of heights and risk levels.

Most of the good pics of this are on Lisa’s camera, but with the combination of cables and bits and bobs I have here, I can’t get anything off that one at the moment. A square peg isn’t fitting in the round hole.

The grey dot, upper right,  is me ignoring all the advice and rock climbing the first tier of the falls.

Look closely here and you’ll see two figures, centre right, one is climbing and just above him is one flying down having leapt from near the top.

This is looking down the second tier which is the official jumping area. A crazy gringo is mid-leap

Montezuma was certainly a slice of chilled out beach life, but the time has come for a bit of a drive across the country to the Caribbean coast.

The road to Monteverde was our first real indication of why one hires a 4 wheel drive to tour Costa Rica. The first section was OK, just twisty mountain roads, but the last 40km or so was a dirt road, and much of it in questionable condition at that, sometimes steep, deeply rutted, gravely or sandy. A couple we met on the volcano the day before had driven the 4 hours or so to the night before in the dark, thank god we didn’t do that!

We settled in the village of Santa Elena and found ourselves a terrific cabin to stay in, here’s “Slothy” that we rescued from a market stall in San José who is now travelling with us, relaxing on our deck.

First stop that day was a coffee plantation, where they have also started producing chocolate recently, interestingly the coffee bean is native to Africa but grows better here, whereas the cocoa bean which is native to here grows better in Africa.

This is sugar cane, another product of the same plantation

The waterwheel powers a mangle which crushes and juices the cane

We got to make our own sugar, and here it is. We got top marks for ours in our group, nevertheless it’s now in the bin

The coffee operation is much more up with the times, the machine on the left grades the beans by size, the next one along shells them

The evening was spent loafing around town,  where it was cold enough that I had to wear my fleece and dig some leg extensions out from the depths of my case, followed by a night sleeping under a  blanket. Definitely not what I signed up for when we came over here!

Next day was the big event – a canopy tour, which is essentially a bunch of zip lines through the cloud forest canopy. The astonishing part of this is that I persuaded Lisa to partake as well! We chose the “original” tour from the four or so available in the area, which is either the first one of its kind in Costa Rica or the world, depending on which version of the story you believe. The main reason for going with this one is that it’s more focused on the views of the forest rather than the newer ones which are much more extreme in terms of length, speed and height etc, which are aimed at the adrenaline junkies.

They start you off on a Tarzan swing, a fairly small one as they go, but still gives you quite a rush, especially at early o’clock which is what this was. Butter fingers prevented me capturing the evidence that Lisa actually did this, but I did get a video of a random Irish girl in our group of four.

This is Lisa in full swinging a action, a somewhat blurry figure near the centre left of the picture

Next up were the 14 zip lines, the longest of which is 800 metres, captured here by one of the two guides. Apologies for my somewhat offensive beer gut which gets into shot at the end, which definitely needs a bit of TLC when I get home!

I almost look like I’ve done this before

Not sure the same can be said of Lisa ☺

The whole group, waiting for the remaining guide to zip over (he’s the photographer)

They also drop you down this rappel line off one of the platforms and you climb back up through the centre of a hollow tree which was rather cool.

Tempted though we were to stay one more night, in the interests of time we are pushing on to Montezuma, a traveller’s beach hangout on the peninsula de Nicoya on the Pacific coast for something just a little bit different…

We picked up our vehicle and bravely headed where no man has been before (OK, probably that’s not actually the case) by heading north from San Jose up towards La Fortuna, a base town for Volcan Arenal, a big volcano that used to be the most active volcano in the world I think, from a massive eruption in 1968 followed by almost continuous spewing until 2010. On the way we passed another volcano, Poas, which you basically drive up the crater and then can look down into it,  except we couldn’t as it was too cloudy that day. In fact, that set the tone for the next couple of days. The roads up there are very windy and not too well signed, which led to a 30km “diversion”, i.e. drive 15km, realise you’ve gone wrong and then drive 15km back to the junction you missed. Thank goodness we have a working GPS in the form of the phone with a local sim card to get us out of trouble, which amazingly has pretty much kept signal all the way so far!

Random waterfall along the way, a guy here was selling strawberries which were lush,  which is not something I say very often!

Shortly after getting back on track, we pulled into a low-key looking place on the side of the road for lunch, which turned out to be superb,  overlooking a big valley and they had a load of bird feeders set up at the tables, this is a violet sabrewing:

And these are something else, we’re not sure what, our cheatsheet of local fauna has let us down here:

Next day we did a 4 hour hike up Cerro Chato, another volcano nearby, which is a fairly steep climb up through rain forest terrain from a resort called the Observatory Lodge, followed by a rather steep descent down into the crater for a swim in the lake that now exists there. The water was pretty freezing, but a welcome relief after the humid climb up, and a first for me,  to be inside a volcano crater! There were a load of people up there who’d been duped by a cowboy outfit selling an unofficial route up there too which was apparently murder to climb, I think we could’ve sold our map several times over for an easier escape route for them.

This is the “easy” route, a sweaty hour or more climb up over roots and rocks

This is looking down into the crater from the rim:

There’s a nice little waterfall in the Observatory lodge grounds itself, which must get pretty impressive in wet season I should think

This is Volcan Arenal itself, in the distance, this is really the clearest shot I could get

The cloud isn’t really showing much sign of clearing up so we’re going to move away around to Monteverde which is basically the other side of Lake Arenal which is where a load of coffee plantations and, dare I say it, zip lines through the forest canopy are!

We’ve arrived! After a great flight to Atlanta, followed by a rather average one to San Jose,  we find ourselves in a gorgeous hotel in town, with a none too shabby breakfast

Which you’re forced to eat outside

Today has consisted of pottering around the city really, getting over the jetlag, which we think is 7 hours, but one can never be too sure. We did the national museum, which was a hotch potch of various things, including a butterfly sanctuary

There’s two of them in this pic, wishing each other a good day:

Later we’ve dropped in at the national theatre, a lavish affair paid for by taxes on coffee exports and rice and beans imports in the late 19th century

This was followed up by some free music in the park, there seems to be some kind of festival going on today

The streets are lined with wonderful street art everywhere such as this

It’s been a nice introduction to the country, surprisingly so as the city doesn’t really get good reviews on the whole. Tomorrow we’re picking up our 4×4 and taking ourselves off to the mountains with just a sloth for company (don’t worry, he’s not real)

We do have a phone number in case of emergency, +506 62818484