My first week in Costa Rica

Welcome to my blog! This first posting is a little overdue, but I've been busy in my first week! My friend Sarah flew down with me (and just left today), and we trekked all over Costa Rica. Sooo, here's what I've been up to so far ...

Aug. 9
Arrived in Costa Rica! Our cab got a little lost getting to my apartment, probably because addresses don't really exist in Costa Rica. I don't even know if the street I live on has a name. Instead, I tell the taxi the general neighborhood and then say "cien metros sur de la gruta," which means, "100 meters south of the grotto," which is a statue of the Mother Mary randomly in someone's yard. Pretty much all directions are like this, although most tell you where they are in relation to the town's church or supermarket. Although downtown San Jose does have street names (translated to Street 1, Street 2, Avenue 1, Avenue 2, etc.).

Sarah and I took it easy our first day. We ate dinner at a nearby hotel that has a restaurant in it, and the food was excellent. I had my first taste of Imperial Light -- Imperial is the beer of Costa Rica. To be honest, it's not that great, but I'm used to drinking Bud Light, so it's a pretty fair trade.

Aug. 10
Woken by roosters. Seriously. At 4:30 a.m. I live up on a hill, which is great for the view and the cool breeze, but the roosters are no picnic, and I nearly go into cardiac arrest every time I walk up the hill from the bus stop. There's also about a billion stray dogs and cats in Costa Rica, and they apparently like to howl loudly in the middle of the night.

Anyway, Sarah and I caught a bus at 6:30 a.m. (!) to Monteverde, which is a cloud forest. A cloud forest is more or less a rain forest, but there are really low-level clouds that sweep in and out of it. It's only about 100 miles from San Jose to Monteverde, but the bus ride took us about five hours. Granted, we made a lot of quick stops on the way and one 15-minute rest stop, but the bulk of the time was lost to rocky, dirt roads. Someone needs to introduce Costa Rica to pavement.

We arrived in Santa Elena (a small town outside the forest preserve) and hopped on a yellow school bus to take us to the reserve. Overall, it wasn't supremely impressive. It looked a little like most forests I've been in, except there was more moss and greenery over EVERYTHING, and at one point it started pouring rain, and then we really felt like we were in a rain forest. :)

We stayed in a hostel for $10 a night per person, where a 12-year-old boy (with surprisingly good English) took our reservation and showed us to our room. It wasn't a bad room -- we had our own bathroom and, better yet, hot water, which is hard to come by in Costa Rican hostels.

Aug. 11 -- "Coolest day ever"
Today was the day we did the zip line canopy tour, and it was SOOOOOOO awesome. The same 12-year-old boy who checked us into our room advised us on which canopy tour to do. He suggested Extremo -- which happens to be the highest and longest zip lines of any tour company. After looking at the brochure, which boasts 14 zip lines, some as long as 2,000 feet and as high as 490 feet, we started to wonder whether we shouldn't have put our trust in someone who wasn't so ... well .... 12.

But we didn't plunge to our deaths, so it all worked out. You start out on some smaller and shorter zip lines, and then we got to the third zip line, and you literally could not see the end of it. We were standing at the top of one hill in the mountains, and the end of the line was attached to the top of another hill, and you had to zip line over a valley, hundreds of feet below. And to top it off, a cloud had just rolled through (remember this is a cloud forest), so when Sarah went on the zip line, she literally disappeared into the cloud. I just about peed my pants. We went back and forth over this valley four times, and we also repelled 90 feet and did a this "tarzan swing" thing, which is incredibly scary. Going over the valleys I switched between thinking "this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen" and "Oh my God, I'm going to die." Here's a pic of me coming through a cloud after crossing a valley (left) and a picture of the valley, where you can barely see the zip line at the top (right) :




After our three-hour tour zipping through the cloud forest, we went back to town and booked a jeep-boat-jeep ride to go to La Fortuna, which is a nearby town that is home to one of Costa Rica's most active volcanos (Volcan Arenal). A large lake lies between the Monteverde and La Fortuna, and if you took a bus around the lake, it takes about nine hours. We opted, instead, for the jeep-boat-jeep route, which is about 2.5 hours total. We took a minivan through the rockiest road you could possibly imagine -- I NEVER get motion sickness, but I started feeling really queasy after about a half hour. Then we hopped onto a boat (see below -- notice volcano in background):


We went to a Chinese restaurant with some backpackers we met in Monteverde. And we stayed in another $10 hostel with a private bathroom and hot water, and this one also had a kitchenette and fan. It was pretty nice, and we had a view of the volcano from our window.

Aug. 12
This was our day of rest. Sarah and I headed to the hot springs in La Fortuna, which have 16 different pools ranging in temperatures from 98 to something like 180 degrees Fahrenheit. I only stuck my toe in the hottest spring, and I'm pretty sure it would give you third-degree burns if you stayed in it for more than a minute. But the "cooler" pools were wonderful, and you had a great view of the volcano the whole time. Plus there are three different swim-up bars in the pools. Sarah and I got there when they opened at 10 a.m., and we stayed till around 7:00 p.m. I'd show you the photo of our pruney feet and hands that we took, except it's really gross, so I'll spare you. We were told you can usually see hot lava running down the side of the volcano at night, but all we saw was a steady stream of smoke coming out the top of it.

Aug. 13
We caught a noon bus back to San Jose the next day, and that took up most of the day. We somehow managed to find the bus we needed to take back to Ciudad Colon that night (the town near where I live) and then took a $2 cab from there. Another early night to bed and early wakeup the next morning...

Aug. 14
We had to get up for another 6 a.m. bus. Those who know me know this is quite an accomplishment for me to actually wake up for this. This time we headed south to Manuel Antonio park on the Southern Pacific Coast. This is a rain forest that borders white sand beaches. And the best part -- we saw monkeys in the trees! We also saw about a dozen lizards like the one on the right here (I think they were iguanas). We hiked around for a little while, and went in the water for a bit, but then it started raining (of course, being the rainy season, it's rained every day we've been here. But it's also been sunny every day, too). So we headed back to the nearby town Quepos and checked into a nice little hostel with the cutest old man owner. He didn't speak a word of English, yet he still managed to give us a 10-minute lecture on how we should get copies of our passports and be careful not to get our bags stolen and tell us which restaurants are good. He was really good at communicating with hand gestures and things. We hung out in Quepos that night, which has a lot of fun bars, and we even managed to find nachos and potato skins. mmm.

Aug. 15
We spent the day on the beach right outside Manuel Antonio Park, and we learned a very important lesson: when you're 10 degrees from the Equator, a bottle of SPF 30 doesn't do a whole lot. We both got burned, even though we used up most of the bottle. Some more pics of the park and the beach:


























We took the bus back to San Jose the same day.

Aug. 16
This day shall be known as the day the bus won. We'd been singing our praises the whole trip about how we'd been great about catching all our buses and finding the bus stops (which is not easy). So of course we had to have one day where we got it wrong.

We had heard the local buses were a bit tricky, to say the least. The girl in the apartment next to me is a Canadian teaching English down here, and she hung up a supposed bus schedule. The schedule makes no sense to me, and seems to make no sense to the Canadian girl, either. The schedule lists "Brasil" and "Trinidad" and she told me never to take the "Brasil" bus, but there were only one set of times, so I asked how you know when the bus is coming that's going in the right direction, and she didn't really have an answer for that. So, Sarah and I figured we'd take our chances. We did manage to get on the right bus that goes by my apartment, and we got off in Ciudad Colon. And we meant to hop on a bus that would take us to San Jose, but we got on it going the wrong direction. We thought it was a little odd when it started climbing higher into the mountainside, instead of descending to San Jose, which is in a valley. But we stayed optimistic. Perhaps it just goes in a circle, we thought, and it would descend down the other side of the mountain and go into San Jose. Turns out, not so much. We stayed on the bus for a full hour as we passed tiny little villages on the hillside, until finally everyone got off the bus, and it did a U-turn in what was evidentially it's finally destination.

I went to the bus driver and asked "San Jose?" and he laughed and shook his head. Then he said a whole lot of things that I didn't understand and pointed, and I was very confused, so I said "otro autobus?" (meaning other bus?) and he said "no, aqui." So I said OK and went back to my seat. The bus driver went back the way we came, and, lo and behold, in another hour we were back where we started in Ciudad Colon, but this time we were one block over, which is where we were supposed to pick up the bus. Sure enough, we stayed on the bus, and it went to San Jose.

Now I know.

We hopped off a little before San Jose to check out the Multiplaza, which is a shopping mall that looks a lot like it does in the States (a huge change from the mountainsides and dirt roads I was used to). I was ecstatic to find a Papa Johns, Subway, Quiznos, and Taco Bell in the food court. I know where I'll be going when I'm feeling home sick. :) There's also a huge supermarket that carries a lot of the same groceries I could find in the States.

There's also a movie theater there, and Sarah and I discovered that several of the American-made movies are shown in English with Spanish subtitles at the bottom, so we ended up seeing No Reservations (the new Catherine Zeta-Jones movie). Move tickets = $4. Medium popcorn and soda = $3. Awesome.

Aug. 17
This brings us to today. Sarah left this morning, and this is the first chance I've had to blog and upload photos. My other plans for the day involve doing laundry and setting up my apartment. Very exciting stuff, naturally.

I promise my next blogs won't be so long! I'll probably be writing on here pretty frequently, so check back anytime if you're curious what I'm up to! :) My landlord said he'll drive me around tomorrow so I can get a feel for where everything is. I'll let you know how that goes!