Costa Rica

Not only was our method of travel into Costa Rica something that we had not been accustomed to over the last 5 weeks or so, but the relative normality & civilization of Costa Rica took us a little by surprise. As the wealthiest of the Central American countries with the most prolific & developed tourist industry, there are times when Costa Rica can feel like a tropical state of North America. Whilst Spanish is still the primary language, English is widely spoken, the buses resemble human transportation means rather than agricultural & livestock transportation & the roads have a form of order & structure not seen since Mexico.

We landed in San Jose & headed straight to the Pacific coast, first to a port town called Puntarenas, before catching a boat across the Gulf de Nicoya, over to the Nicoya Peninsula & planting ourselves in the bohemian surf town of Montezuma.

After a bit of a torturous accommodation hunt (we are back in hellish heat & humidity territory here) we finally found a beautiful old colonial style wooden house - like something from Out Of Africa, right on the beach - which was basically a family home where they rented out a couple of rooms. We then proceeded to do…well, very little actually for a couple of days - exactly what you are meant to do in places like this. We had had a pretty full on few days of traveling leading up to getting here & were glad of a chance to just relax a while.

On day 3 we decided it was time to actually do something, & took out some sea kayak’s from the guy who owned the place we were staying & paddled our way out into the Pacific along the coast. For the most part the sea was nice & calm, until we got to a surfing bay where Claire got caught by a wave & quickly surfed her way into shore (unintentionally i may add!), quickly followed by the rest of us in a less than stylish manner - with the exception of Leanne, who inadvertently caught the perfect wave & cruised in like a total pro, losing her paddle & sunglasses on the way but laughing hysterically the entire time!

Unfortunately we are on a little bit of time schedule in Costa Rica, as we have another flight to catch on Sun 31st May out to Colombia, so Thursday we decided it was time to move on & made our way back onto the main land to Monteverde

Monteverde is a place up in the mountains, full of cloud forest, Volcano’s & known as the epicenter of the Costa Rican ‘Canopy Tour’ industry. Which basically consists of a series of steel cables being strung between trees, across valleys etc that you connect a little pulley & harness to & make your way around the forest on - otherwise known as zip-lines. The company we went with boasted having the longest & highest cables in the world, so off we went. It was great fun - a few of the cables were about 600 meters long, one of which was actually 1km long, stretching right across valleys, we were often 200m off the ground just hanging from a harness whizzing across the sky! Below the longest zip wire across the valleys... 1km and 200m up!

Claire & I then went on a tour of a coffee plantation in the afternoon which was really interesting, seeing what a convoluted, labour intensive process it is to actually get our daily caffeine hit to our tables.

The following morning Claire & Leanne took some horses out for a tour of the countryside before we jumped in yet another bus to head back to San Jose to catch our flight down to Colombia.