Costa Rica ‘08
My trip to Costa Rica began twelve hours before my flight left. In order to make the airport trip a little easier (and to give my car a free place to stay) I spent the night at a friend’s house, which happens to be much closer to the airport than my apartment. From there it was a quick drive to the airport. Once checked in I had some time to relax and read before boarding the first leg of my trip.
The flight to Houston seemed uneventful. It wasn’t until I’d landed as was waiting to disembark that I learned that we were half an hour late. Fortunately, our arrival gate had been moved to the one right next to my departure gate. I made a quick call to my uncle (who, along with his wife and my grandfather, had the same flight from Houston to San Jose) to confirm that the departure gate was the same, and walked the 100 feet to the gate. Just in time to have my passport double-checked and begin boarding.
Once we arrived, we marshaled our little group together and then proceeded through customs and out into San Jose. We met up with my parents, who had a shuttle to take us to the rental car place. Once there, we waited while my dad got all the paperwork done. I had packed my camera in the checked luggage, so I didn’t get any pictures of the airports, or my first view of San Jose, but I here’s the first picture I did take:
Once the paperwork was out of the way, we packed our Toyota Prado with our luggage and began the drive to the Pacific coast town of Jaco.
I’m going to take a moment now to talk a bit about the geography of Costa Rica. There’s basically this mountain range running down the middle of the country, separating the Gulf coast and plains from the Pacific coast and plains. San Jose is nestled in a large mountain valley, near the center of the country. My dad described the topology of the country looking as if it was made by someone crumpling up aluminum foil and then trying to smooth it out.
All that is just a long way of saying that the drive to Jaco covered some of the craziest twists and turns (and stunning vistas) I’ve ever seen. The trip down to Jaco took us about two hours, and we arrived just past six o’clock. Owing to Costa Rica being in mountain time, it was dark when we arrived. We met the assistant of the condo owner, who gave us a rundown of what we’d need to know. Things like, where to get groceries, where to eat out, and when we had to wear our hard hats.
You see, the condos were still under construction, and said construction could be shut down if an inspector happened by and caught anyone without a hard hat.
We got settled in and then went out to the Wishbone for dinner, a place we would revisit a few more times before the trip was over. The remainder of the evening was spent relaxing and going to bed early.
In the morning, we got up pretty early, and headed to Marea Alta for breakfast. Like most of the restaurants we went to, it had a cozy, open-air eating area where we could enjoy the pleasant morning air. On the way back, we went to a grocery store to stock up on food and alcohol. There we met a new fruit. Called quanabana (though we didn’t discover that until later), it was quite strange looking. As I was in full “tourist carrying his camera everywhere mode” by this point, I snapped a picture:
The rest of the day was uneventful, and the next morning my parents drove back into San Jose to pick up my sister and her boyfriend. When they returned, we lunched at the Wishbone again, and then met the construction foreman, who took us on a tour of the area around Jaco. Our first stop was a turtle preserve. Here, they took the eggs from the nest after they were laid and moved them to a safer area inland a hundred feet or so. Then when they hatched, they let them head for the water long enough for the baby turtles to afix the location of the beach in their heads, and then rounded them up and spread them out further along the beach. Less chance of being eaten.
After that, we stopped by another recently developed area for some drinks and a look out over a marina. We saw a lot of really expensive boats, including one that had a helicopter:
As it turned out, the foreman had a childhood friend who was working as a tour guide. He arranged for us to spend some time with him over the next couple days. Our first trip involved getting up early in the morning (which wasn’t too hard, as the construction crew also got an early start) and heading to a bridge over the Tarcoles River. There we took pictures of the many crocodiles and several birds we saw. From there we headed to Carara National Park for a hike through the forest. There we saw many birds and lizards.
The next day, we were off to Manuel Antonio National Park, which is a couple hours southeast of Jaco, near the town of Quepos. There, the entire group of us took a several mile hike, over what turned out to be very up and down terrain. It was well worth it though, in addition to some stunning views out over the Pacific, we saw monkeys, sloths, more birds and more lizards. We debated going for a swim, but decided it would be better to head to our next destination sooner rather than later.
That destination was Villa Vanilla, a farm that grows vanilla (of course) as well as a host of other spices. There we went on a tour of the farm. The first stop was the drying shed, where we saw real cinnamon, cocoa beans and vanillia beans. After that, it was into the farm itself, where we saw all sorts of plants, and got to sample a few things straight off the vine, so to speak. Let’s just say you haven’t experienced pepper until you’ve had one fresh.
Thursday was a day off, after the long hikes and early mornings of the previous days (though the morning was still pretty early thanks to the sounds of construction). Some people swam, some people read, and a good relaxing time was had by all. Friday we started fairly early again. This time our destination was the town of Tarcoles, on the river of the same name. There we got on a boat for a tour of the Tarcoles River.
We saw countless birds, and innumerable crocodiles, and I finished off my last two rolls of film (more on that in a future post). After that, some of the group did a canopy tour, while the rest took advantage of being on vacation some more. We capped off the evening with a drink at Villa Caletas, which is perched at the top of a mountain. The bar there is built facing west with a open amphitheater looking out across Nicoya Gulf. The sunset there was stunning. As I mentioned, I was out of film at this point, so I’ll have to link you to one of the pictures my father took:
The next morning, I began my trip home. My aunt, uncle and grandfather were leaving an hour or two before I was, so we shared a taxi back to San Jose. After seeing them off, I went to my gate to wait for boarding to being. The flight back was quiet (apparently I missed some excitement by not leaving on the earlier flight), and I arrived in Houston in the mid-evening. As I wasn’t leaving Houston until the morning, I’d reserved a hotel room at the Airport Marriott. There I spent the remainder of the evening watching TV. The next morning, it was back into the airport where I boarded my flight to Cleveland and arrived home.
Be sure to check out the rest of my pictures!
This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Non-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.