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Home > Travel > Costa Rica
San Jose
We arrived to San Jose in late morning and a few hours to kill before
our bus to Arenal. We got coffee outside the Gran Hotel Costa Rica on
the main square, and then we ventured out on a little walk. We
checked out the pretty lobby of the National Theater right across the
street from the Gran Hotel, then walked to the Jade Museum (quite
pretty), through several parks and past a few government ministries.
Our guidebooks made San Jose sound like a crowded bustling large city,
but we found it rather small.
Arenal
 Our first destination outside of San Jose was Arenal, the area around
the Arenal Volcano and the town of La Fortuna. Arenal used to be a
forested hill, until it blew up in 1968. People in the town below
renamed the town to "La Fortuna" as they were the lucky ones who
survived. In fact, they now benefit from the tourism that Arenal
attracts. It's a classical cone shaped volcano with constant steam
and smoke rising from the top, and lava flows visible at night. Also,
it warms up the local river, so several hot springs resorts were
created around here. Ironically, a number of hotels, including some
of the spas, were build on the side that used to have views of the
lava flow, but the flow direction changed 2 years ago and only one
hotel now has direct lava view.
We arrived at night so we didn't see right away how beautiful our
hotel setting was. The hotel itself, La Catarata Eco-Lodge, was a set
of simple cabins, but they were situated in a beautiful garden with a
pool and direct view of Arenal. We fell asleep to the hum of cicadas
and woke up to the singing of a thousand birds – and a rooster. The
place has a covered outdoor patio for reception/restaurant and we
could watch colorful birds fluttering around while we ate our
breakfast and drank our papaya milkshakes.
The first day we walked some 2 kilometers up the dirt road to  La
Catarata, the waterfall, which falls into a perfect swimming hole.
Very refreshing. After a yummy lunch back at our lodge, we took a
trip to the volcano, which included a 30-minute forest walk at the
foot of the volcano, some time watching the lava flow after dusk, and
then a 3-hour visit to the hot springs. The walk was nothing much,
but we saw the montezuma oropendola (midsize  black birds with long
brightly yellow tails; they swing around the branch like a pendulum,
hence the name) and a couple of toucans. We caught the oropendolas on
camera in their hanging nests. The lava flow was cool – they volcano
is very active, spewing new lava down its sides every few minutes.
The best part was the hot springs though. Of the several choices, we
chose the most established and famous one, Tabacon. Our guidebooks
said it was pretty kitch, and some reviews on trip advisor thought is
was crowded. We founded it a bit of both, but well within expected
limits, and we thought it was great and very relaxing.
The next morning, we took a guided tour in a private forest reserve
that includes a number of hanging bridges – suspension bridges back
and forth over a beautiful valley. The lush green forest was very
beautiful, but the most exciting part for us was seeing a snake on a
tree just 10 feet away, and then seeing howler monkey (though from
pretty far away). We also saw a pretty blue tanager, and a motmot.
  
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Monteverde
Our next stop was Monteverde for 2.5 days and 3 nights. The area,
just on the other side of Lake Arenal, is known and visited for its
beautiful cloud forest. We were here during very sunny weather, but
most often this forest is hidden in low clouds that produce a
microclimate encouraging high biodiversity. Unfortunately, much of
this area had been clear cut for farming (coffee, dairy), but several
nature reserves are now reclaiming this land and restoring the forest.
We stayed at Las Orquideas, a small hotel in Santa Elena (the slightly
bigger neighbor  of Monteverde). Las Orquideas is at the southern edge
of town, just a short walk into the center of Santa Elena, and has a
beautiful view over a valley and down towards the Gulf of Nicoya from
its porch. The best part about the place, though, was that coatis
come to eat breakfast leftovers on the porch every morning, and they
are very cute. We could watch them munch away right from our window.
 We visited all 3 nature reserves in the area. We spent most of our
first day wondering through the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. It's pretty small, but the perimeter trail (somewhere around 6km) took us
several hours because we kept stopping to marvel at the sights and
take pictures. There is also a side trail to see the Continental
Divide, a point from which you can see the mountains and valleys that
drain towards the Atlantic, and then in the opposite direction, a view
of the Pacific in the Gulf of Nicoya. The trees in this forest seem
to serve as hangers for everything else, from moss and lichen to
lianas, orchids and other exotic plants. We were surprised at how
well maintained the trails were (true for all other reserves we
visited in Costa Rica). In the Monteverde Cloud Forest, we didn't see
any wildlife other than birds, but those were worth it. The more
exotic ones for us were: the black guan (like a black peacock without
a tail, except this one's a better flyer than a peacock), an emerald
toucanet (a small and very green toucan) and collared redstart (a tiny
yellow and black guy with red on his head). David was so concentrated
on catching the toucanet on camera that he stepped off the path and
tumbled into the rainforest
  
That evening we visited the Ranario (a frog-arium with live Costa
Rican frogs and toads on display). We only got to see the nocturnal
ones at this hour, but this included the Gaudy leaf frog, national
frog of Costa Rica (green with orange feet).
The next day we did the Costa Rica must-do, the ziplines.  We went
with a company called Sky Trek. They put you in a harness, take you up
a hill in a suspended lift, and then you go zipping back and forth a
lush green valley all the way to the bottom. They have 9 cables, all
pretty far up above tree tops. Despite Iva's initial fear of this, it
was a lot of fun for both of us. When we were done with the zipping,
we took an hour to walk through the surrounding forest. The trail was
Sky Trek's version of hanging bridges and was beautiful.
Back in Santa Elena we visited the Serpentario (an exhibit of live
snakes), which was just okay, and then the Orchid Garden, which had
very few orchids in it. However, they did have one that was quite
impressive, the size of David's head (see photo).
That evening we took a guided walk in the Children's Eternal Forest.
It was started with a purchase of land funded by Swedish school
children, but now grown quite large through donations fro m around the
world; 50% of the entry ticket price goes to purchase of additional
land, with the goal of protecting animal and bird migration corridors. 80 bird species migrate here from North America. The walk was in an
area called Bajo del Tigre, mostly secondary forest (reclaimed some 40
years ago from farmland and now doing quite well – though it has another 120 years to go before it comes primary forest again). We
walked in the dark with flashlights for 2 hours, trying to find
wildlife in the dark. We saw a few sleeping birds, small and large
crickets, a click beetle (fire beetle, with two spots shining so
bright that you could read by that light for several hours in pitch
dark), an agouti, two sloths way up in a tree, and two orange-knee
tarantulas. The tarantulas were quite impressive.
Our third day in Monteverde, we spent an hour and a half walking in
the third of the local nature reserves, Santa Elena Reserve. It was
very  pretty, though not as stunning as the Monteverde Cloud Forest.
We didn't see much wildlife here except for a cute little black guy
with brightly yellow feathers on his thighs (the yellow-thighed finch
as it turned out). While waiting for the bus to go back to Santa
Elena, we saw a couple of hummingbirds (one was the violet sabrewing
hummingbird). Oh, and a large pig walked by quite nonchalantly, the
peccary.
From the Santa Elena Reserve, we went straight to the lecheria, a
local cheese factory. The town of Monteverde was started by several
Quaker families from Alabama seeking to avoid the draft in the US
around 1950. They clear cut some forest and started to make cheese,
buying milk from local farmers. The cheese is pretty good, and they
make awesome milkshakes with various tropical fruit flavors (our
favorite was guayabana). However, the tour of the factory was a bit
disappointing, not to mention the realization that the grassy slopes
that the cattle grazed on were once rainforest.
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Manuel Antonio
We spent the last day and a half in Manuel Antonio on the Pacific
coast. Manuel Antonio national park is one of only two areas left on
the Pacific coast of Central America where primary forest still comes
all the way to the shore.
This area is much more trafficked and featured hotels cover the
spectrum of quality. Our own hotel was near to the park entrance and
set back into the jungle a bit. We were woken both nights by howler
monkeys that sounded like they were directly outside our window.
 The first morning here we took a kayaking tour through the local
mangrove forests. We've seen mangroves in Florida, but those are much
smaller. Mangroves in Costa Rica were the height of regular trees
with large and small channels through them. One narrow channel took
us to a place that looked like the insides of a cathedral with
beautiful pillars (see photo). We paddled around with a small group
for about 2 hours. We saw lots of green iguanas in the trees, the tail
of an anteater, a woodpecker, a tiger heron, and a white-faced
capuchin monkey. There were colorful little crabs on every tree, root
and branch sticking out of the water.
  In the afternoon, we put on lots of sunscreen and went to the public
beach one block from our hotel. When we had enough of that, we had
drinks at an open air restaurant across the street from the beach, and
stayed there all the way through a gorgeous sunset (which Iva captured
about a 100 times using Rahul's camera). We then went out to dinner
at the gorgeous Si Como No hotel.
Our last day in Costa Rica we got up early to hopefully spot wildlife
in Manuel Antonio National Park. Having just come from Arenal and
Monteverde, we found the park itself unimpressive, but it did have
gorgeous beaches and great lookouts. Since you have to pay to get
into the park, these were emptier than the public beach in Manuel
Antonio, and we were the first people there. So we had this gorgeous
sandy beach with coconut palms and our own personal iguana to watch
all to ourselves. The water was quite warm and we took plenty
advantage of it. We eventually did a walk around the park and saw a
troop of white-faced capuchin monkeys. They were quite cute and
unafraid of people. When we reach a second beach, a monkey tried to
steal food out of a guy's backpack – kind of sad to see.
   
After showering and checking out of our hotel, we had lunch near the
beach and then took a shuttle to Alajuela, near the airport. The town
of Alajuela is grittier than the rest of our stops in Costa Rica, but
we did a little walk to see some of it and then had dinner in a small
restaurant near our hotel.
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And that is it.
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