Costa Rica

Cahuita

Well, we love to plan, but we have an aversion to actually following those plans. Maybe its a phobia. I don't know.
We left Santa Elena on the early bus, with the intention of spending another night in San Jose and then heading to the remote Tortugero to see the sea turtles nesting. On the bus, we talked to a couple of Belgian guys who had really disliked Tortugero. The said it was expensive, and they felt like they were bothering the turtles. The recomended Cahuita, on the Carribean coast. This was on our list but not at the top. We thought about it and realized that we could catch a bus right to Cahuita that day in San Jose without spending the night. That clinched it. Beach time won out over nature watching.
Cahuita is an interesting little town. It is in fact very small (no bank) and is populated by about equal numbers of normal ticos (Costa Ricans), ticos of African descent who speak English with a Jamaican accent, and tourists. There are lots of hotels and restaurants, a couple of bars and a large national park. The roads are dirt and sand.
We used our usual technique of picking a hotel but then going with some random person at the bus station. This works surprisingly well. This time it landed us a Albergue Carlos, run by Mina and her husband Horacio. They are a very hospitable pair, and have a couple of cute kids. Our first activity after settling in was to go on a frog hunt with Horacio, who lovers to show off the local nature. The are quite a number of different types of frogs in Cahuita, and we saw most of them.
The next day he lead us through some of the national park, where we saw two kinds of monkey (a whole tree full of howlers), as well as many lizards, crabs, birds and insects.
There are two beaches, one with white sand, the other with black, and we had plenty of time to visit them in the six days/ five nights we were there. We spent quite a bit of time hanging out with a French couple who didn't speak any English. They had been there for several days already, and are still there now. I'm not sure if they plan to leave.
The big excitement here has been the Copa de Oro, which is a soccer tournament for Central America plus the US, Canada and Brazil. Both the US and Costa Rica made it to the semi-finals, and both lost in the last two nights. They play each other tonight to determine third and forth places. We watch Brazil snatch victory away from the US (ok, it was Brazil's under 23 team) and Mexico pummel Costa Rica at Coco's bar, a nice enough place with 2x1 drinks between 8 and 9. They may have given Vis food poisioning, so they actually get a big black X in our guidebook. We tried to stay quite through the US/Brazil match, as it was clear who the locals were rooting for.
More beach time. We rented boogie boards and caught some nice waves on the black sand beach. Then two nights ago, in the middle of the night, Vis starts feeling bad. Really bad. I'm not going to go into detail, but you know what I'm talking about. Lots of time in the bathroom. We were going to leave yesterday morning, but we decided to put it off. She spend the day sleeping, drinking water and trying to eat some food. Horacio provides a Guava bark infusion which may or may not have helped. By evening she's feeling much better, and by this morning we decided we're good to go.
For good measure, we change our plans again, and tomorrow we are off to the Pacific again, putting off Tortuguro for good this time.

cloud forest in santa elena

we spent three nights in santa elena, a touristy little town near a couple of reserves that are composed of ''cloud forest'', misty cloudy forest full of trees, and moss growing on trees, and plants growing on moss growing on trees. lots of vegetation, lots of moisture. also nearby santa elena is monteverde, a quaker settlement, the big attraction there was a cheese factory that we never made it too.

the canonical thing to do in santa elena is a ''canopy tour'' - you are hooked onto a zipline and go zipping across the top of the forest at very high speeds. unfortunately canopy tours are way expensive, and me and stephen are both wussies about heights, so instead we did something called the ''sky walk'', were you walk over the canopy of the forest on a series of wobbling suspension bridges. even that was pretty harrowing in terms of fear-of-heights... we may have spotted a elusive quetzal - we saw a largish red and white and green bird, but it flew away before we got a good look at it.

we also went on a long hike in the cloud forest reserve, and later saw lots of pretty butterflies at the jardin de mariposas. at the hostel one night we ended up playing some intense war and old-maid with an eight-year-old who was traveling in central america with her dad. the next morning we saw her waiting for the same bus as us and she asked us ''why are you guys wearing the same clothes as yesterday?". i sort of laughed and said it was because we were dirrty but i don't think she caught the xtina reference.

Volcanoes and more Vocanoes

Ok, there were only actually two. But they were both active, and I think that counts for something. The first was Irazú, which is outside of San José and once destroyed Cartago, which was then the capitol. At this point we were still staying in Orosi, so we aranged a tour through the language school/hostel where were staying, and ended up going with a couple of nice Dutch biologists and their very tall and very blond 8 year old son.
Have I mentioned the Dutch yet? They are all over this country. We have literally met more Dutch people than from all other countries put together, including the US. I know more about Dutch regional politics than a traveler in Costa Rica should. Locals keep asking me if Im Dutch. Its becoming a problem. And this keyboard has no apparent apostrophe.
Anyway, we took the scenic drive up to the top of Irazú, and peered into the noxious sulferous crater. A avacodo green lake the size of Walden Pond peered back at us, looking deceptively close. On the way in we saw our wildlife for the day, an apperently very tame white-nosed cody, looking like a cross between a racoon and an anteater near the park entrance. The way back took us past local sites of varying interest, a hydroelectric dam, an 16th century church, a woodcarving shop.
After five lovely days in Orosi, it was time to take our improved Spanish skills and move on. Back to San Jose and a carbon copy of our last visit there, and then a busride up to Fortuna and volcano number two. At first it was all little hard to be convinced that there was a volcano there at all, let alone one that blew up during the seventies killing 87. The cloud cover was thick and low and stayed that way for 36 hours. We ponied up the $25 a piece for the guided tour, with the promise of monkeys, hot springs and volcano views. The nature hike was a success with spotting of both howler and spider monkeys, but when we got back to the lookout, so close it had huge impact craters, and the volcano was still nowhere in sight. We all went to drown our sorrows at the hot springs. The hot water, lovely surroundings and swim-up bar certainly helped. Then when someone saw lava, the last part of the equation was present. Without my glasses it looked like a glorious orange splotch in the distance, but with them on, it looked like the natural fireworks display it was supposed to.
Today another bus ride on our way to Monteverde and Santa Elena.

Orosi

we´re doing a weeklong language class in orosi right now. its been a lot of fun because unlike many of the places we´ve traveled, the language school and hostel are full of other travellers. orosi is a small town in the middle of a valley, tons and tons of coffee is grown here, throughout the valley and even up the sides of the mountains.

the language course has been very helpful (i finally know the numbers in spanish, so now i can make correct change on the bus!) and the meals at the hostel have been good. the hostel has like four or five dogs, two cats, some horses, and a rooster that crows every morning to wake us. the walls here are pretty darn thin, and the showers aren´t always hot, but other than that the hostel is a sweet deal.

when we´re not in class or doing spanish homework there are lots of little day trips and hikes to do. one day we went to the local hot springs, which were very scenic right beside the river, with bamboo and plants all around. the hot springs weren´t super hot, but it was still pretty nice.

yesterday we went to the tapanti national park, which recieves the most rain of any place in costa rica. the hiking was OK but not great (very wet and muddy of course), but then we ate whole trout at a nearby restaurant/trout-farm and that was very tasty.

today we hiked to a local waterfall - maybe 30 feet tall in the main part? and then we were given a tour by Nano, this crazy guy who lives nearby and gives tours. I didn´t follow most of what he said, but he showed us lots of photographs of other travellers who had visited, then told several elaborate jokes in spanish, then spent a long while chatting to Stephen, primarily on the topics of drinking, smoking and women.

Meanwhile I played rummy with his 12yr old nephew, and played with this adorable 2 month old puppy they had that was unbearably tiny and cute. We ate bananas and drank coffee, he showed us his cows and their calf, and two ponds he had full of trout, that jumped up when he threw food into the pond. he also hiked us through the coffee fields on the side of the mountain for a bit, and talked about the process of growing coffee- all in all an entertaining experience.

tommorrow we´re off to see volcan irazu, then monday we´re heading back towards san jose...

Golfito

Originally, the plan was to spend some time in Corcovado, a large park on the Peninsula de Osa. As it turned out, this being the rainy season, that would have meant spending some time waste deep in mud, being eaten by mosquitos. We were also planning to go down to scenic Playa Zancudo, with its dark sand beaches and phosphorescent sea life. It turns out zancudo means "big mean mosquito." So we decided to skip it.
So all that was left for us in the south after San Vito was Golfito, on the Golfo Dulce. Formerly a booming banana port, this town has fallen on hard times. That is to say, it's already dead, but its limbs are still twitching a bit.
That said, we did have one of our nicest hotel rooms to date. Hot water, AC and real cheap. The town is stretched out along the coast, so we spent some time wandering, trying to find a place to eat that had some other people in it. This became enought of a problem that we ended up eating in the same Chinese restaurant two days in a row because it seemed to be the only place that had any people. We wanted to go to this huge place called "Bienvenidos a Pollo" (Welcome to Chicken) but there was never anyone there.
For our first and only full day in Golfito we decided to take a short boatride to Playa Cacao to check out the beach. When we got there, there was no beach, and we ended up having to walk basically through peoples yards to get to a low wall to sit on. We decided to walk on the dirt road away from the "beach" for a while, and upon our return, the tide, which must have been at its highest when we showed up, had receded a bit, showing us a thin strip of rocky beach. By then there was only an hour before the boat was going to pick us up, so we sat at the one niceish restaurant sipping fanta until it came. An adventure, but not really the fun kind.
We got our tickets to go back to San Jose for five in the morning the next day. I had this conversation with the woman at the ticket counter.
"Do you want the 5am or the 8am?"
"The 5am"
"The 5am or the 8am?"
"The 5"
"You're sure?"
Repeat about three times. We're pretty morning shifted these days.

One night in lovely San Jose, and we're at the Montaña Linda hostel and language school. We'll be here for the better part of a week, and the off north.

San Vito

We spent two days in San Vito, this pleasant little town up in the mountains, which was founded by Italian immigrants a few decades ago and is known for growing coffee. We stayed in this cute but slightly decrepit little cabin that overlooked a fruit orchard.

The main thing we did while in town was spend a day at the Wilson Botanical Garden, a very cool place with hundreds of species of palm trees, also lots of ferns, banana trees, bamboo, heliconias, and orchids (unfortunately not flowering this time of year). My favorite was definitely the bamboo, some of it was huge, thicker than your leg. Also in the garden saw a pair of agoutis, they are very large tail-less rodents, and lots of hummingbirds.

The other excitement in San Vito was the excellent Italian restaurant we went to both nights - we had a pizza with chicken and onions on it that was truly excellent -- its nice to have a break from all the rice and beans!

The Mountain

Well, its been almost a week since we've written. What have we been up to? We've been off battling the tallest mountain in this country, Chirripo (3820m). It was close one, but I think we beat it. After Manuel Antonio, we spent a night in the higher altitude and cooler town of San Isidro, leaving the next morning for the smaller, higher and cooler San Gerardo. We met some other travelers on the bus, some Dutch, some American, all who planned to climb the mountain the next morning.

The Dutch brother and sister decided to leave at 3 in the morning to try to get up and down in one day. The rest of us decided to leave at a more reasonable 5, when the sun came up. It was a long a grueling day, with starting at 1500m and ending at 3400m, a gain of well over a mile in altitude. It took us 7.5 long hours, and it started raining as we reached the lodge. We rested, recovered and ate at the spacious 60 person lodge, which is was very much in the alpine model, complete with kitchen, bunks and freezing showers. At 8pm it was lights out, and a horribly uncomfortable night on a hard bunk.

Up at dawn again the next day for the final 2hr hike to the hair-raisingly steep summit. We had planned to eat breakfast up there, but once we were up, all we wanted to do was get back down. It was drizzling again, so we packed and left immediately. It was as if we were in a cloud the whole way down. Thick, dense fog was all around. We may or may not have seen a monkey.

About half way down we both getting pretty cranky, and then realized we hadn´t really eaten yet, and we getting a little weak. We sat down and ate, and started back off. Soon, I noticed Vis limping a little, and she complained her knees hurt. We began moving slower and slower until at about 1.5 km from the trailhead we were practically crawling. At 1/2 a kilometer away we could go no more, and went down to get help. I got the teenage grandson of the owner of the hotel next to the trailhead, and we helped Vis the final short but steep distance.

We checked in to the nearby hotel, and decided to stay a couple of days until Vis felt better. We were both pretty confident it was just soreness and stress from the immensly long downhill, and nothing seriously wrong.

The next morning she was walking on level ground and going up and down slowly. After a day we were getting sick of eating all our meals at the over-salted hotel restaurant, and the town, which, while beautiful, is on a massive hill itself. So the nexty morning we left and caught the early bus back to San Isidro, where we stayed last night.

Today is Vis's birthday, and she's feeling much better, walking normally etc. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, all's well that ends well and all that.

Next we head further South.