Driving in Costa Rica

We rented a car and drove around the central valley for three days and it was crazy. We had maps, but you never know where you are on the map, so don't know where you're doing. Scott drove the whole time (thanks, Scott!) and I navigated. It was a pretty stressful experience. Luckily, most of the roads that we drove on were pretty good, but the drivers are crazy and we kept getting lost. At one point, we tried to take a shortcut and you can see that 'road' here. It was CRAZY! Talk about backroading - that's what we were doing. We had to go so slow and passed horses and cows along the way. We ended up taking a lot longer to get to our destination, but it was a great story to have. I don't think it's so bad in other places, but around San Jose is quite difficult.

Paos Volcano

We drove up to Paos Volcano, which is another active volcano pretty close to San Jose. I'll tell more about the driving experience in the next post. The volcano was awesome and we got there early enough so that there wasn't too much cloud coverage. It has been active for many many years and has changed a lot over time. At times, it is dry and people can walk in the crater area. Other times, it looks like calm water, but currently, it's very active and you can see the gas coming off. There is also another crater nearby that is just filled with water like a lake. It's not very hot, but has a lot of acid in it from the volcano.

More at La Paz

There was also a great snake exhibit at these gardens. Berny, the guy there who knew everythign about the snakes was a really nice guy. Hi Berny if you're looking! This snake here is the Fer de Lance, which is the most aggressive and dangerous in Costa Rica. We did learn that very few people actually die from snake bites, though. So we need to be careful, but not afraid to do things. There was also a frog area where we got to see many more frogs, but this time not behind glass. There were a few really beautiful waterfalls that this time we didn't have to hike to. It's almost more fun to hike to them, I think, but this is a great place for people who can't do that. It was gorgeous.

Heaven on Earth

We went to a place called La Paz Waterfall Gardens that would be my heaven if I could choose one. It was absolutely amazing. There was a butterfly area that is the biggest in the world and they had SO MANY amazingly beautiful butterflies. They were everywhere you looked. I had a big blue morpho on my nose and we had a video of it with it opening its wings, but the video got messed up somehow. So you'll just have to imagine from the picture. Scott had a little kid on his hands for a while because of my excitement. I was going crazy! I have never been so excited in all my life. Scott got some great pictures of butterflies - there are only a few here.

Best quality coffee

We visited the Doka Coffee Estate which has been around and owned by the same family for 3 generations. It was a great tour and we learned a lot about all of their processes of growing and making coffee. Costa Rica is the only country that uses this one type of plant only - making their coffee the highest quality than anywhere else. They also have 3 separate qualities of coffee that come out. Unfortunately, the 3rd quality is sold mostly within Costa Rica, so much of the coffee we get down here is not great. We did have some of the first quality while we were at the estate though - yummy! Our guide shown here (Cindy) was great! They don't hardly any electricity here at all. Everything is done in the old style way. They have 1500 people from Nicaragua that come down during the coffee picking time to pick only the red berries. This also keeps the quality quite high. I guess it gets pretty crazy around there because they come and bring their whole families. There is definitely some prejudice against these people as they come in and many cause problems. It's the typical issue with the lower class.
We read something before coming to this coffee estate saying that Starbucks is coming down to Costa Rica to 'teach the locals' how to make high quality coffee. This is BS as Costa Rica is known for being the ones that produce the highest quality coffee. Starbucks is likely just trying to come down and get cheap coffee so they don't have to buy it from Doka anymore. I'm sure it won't taste as good if they do!

Hotels in Costa Rica

This is in part for people who may look at this site and want to visit Costa Rica and in part for us to have so that we do not forget. Here is a list of the places we have stayed so far and if we recommend them. Keep in mind, we are on a very tight bugdet, so these are not places for those who want resorts.

San Jose:
Pangea Hostel - this one was okay, but we have recently stayed at Costa Rican Backpackers hostel, which we like much better. You can stay in a dorm or have a private room and the grounds, pool, computer room, and TV room-restaurant are great.

Tamarindo:
Cabinas Marielas - we loved it here and stayed for 6 nights. The people that come through are very fun, the rooms are cheap and the location is probably the best in Tamarindo.

Liberia:
Hotel Guanacaste - we were not big fans of this place. It was not very clean and much too expensive for what was offered.
Hotel Liberia - we liked this hostel much better. IT was very cheap, the rooms were clean and the location was better.

Rincon de la Vieja:
Most places up here are more resort-like so they are expensive. One that was over our budget, but not too terribly expensive is Hotel Hacienda Guachipelin. It is very nice, but know that you will have to get up early as there are many animals that start making noises even before sunrise.

Monteverde:
Cabinas Vista al Golfo we absolutely loved. It is super cheap, the owners are great, we felt very safe and the views are amazing. I highly recommend this as a place to stay in Santa Elana (near Monteverde)

Arenal:
Hotel Dorothy - this is a place that is relatively new and not well advertised yet. It was off the main path with spacious rooms and super cheap. It was not as clean as other places we have stayed, but we were happy there for a couple of nights. Not all of the desk staff speaks English, but as long as you know a little Spanish, you are okay there.

I will update more as we stay in more places. We have decided not to take the bus anymore for long distance trips. On one, I got my wallet stolen. Yesterday, traveling from Arenal to San Jose, there was another girl on the bus who had the same backpack as mine. She accidentally took my bad when she got off and I got hers. Of course we didn{t realize until we got back to our hotels. Luckily, I had a tag on mine with an e-mail address and we were in cities nearby each other, so we were able to swap them relatively quickly. It was a completely honest mistake and if I had gotten off the bus first I would have done the same thing, I am sure. This is just a note to be careful when traveling on the public buses.

Pura Vida!

Arenal

In the city of La Fortuna, next to the Arenal volcano, we did some spelunking (hello Mooner) and a tour of the volcano area. The caving was pretty cool and as you can see here, we got pretty dirty while down there. We had to literally get on our belly and move like a snake through one part. We also had water up to our thighs at one part of the tour. There were tons of bats and the picture of the holes in the ceiling are actually made from bats. The caves themselves were amazing, but I was not able to get any great pictures of this. I had only been in caves in Tennessee before, but these all had electricity, so it was nothing like this caving experience. Some of the bats were vampire bats, but they do not eat the blood of humans. Most only eat from small birds and some from larger mammals like cows, etc. There were blood droppings from these bats in the cave. There was also a lot of bat dung, which I am sure we had all over us when we came out. It was a great experience! Well, not necessarily the bat dung, but you get the picture.










The Arenal volcano was more incredible than I can really explain. It is very active and is constantly spewing out rocks that are incredibly hot. At night, we were able to see the rocks coming out and as they broke apart, they caused red fire that we could see. We ate at a steak house one night and for 2 hours sat and watched the volcano erupting - very cool! It was dormant until 1968, when there was a huge explosion causing quite a bit of harm. The thing that is the most harmful from the volcano is actually the avalanches that can be caused by the rocks on the side of the volcano coming down. There is no lava, but only red hot rocks coming out of this volcano, as opposed to the one that we saw in Hawaii. We have now seen 3 active volcanoes in only a few months and plan to see 2 more over the next couple of days! We are going to become experts in the world of volcanoes soon.











We also went to a hot springs here (Baldi), but as we are supposed to be roughing it, I will not widely advertise that here. :)

Insects are our friends

As I can tell many people are getting scared at all of the insects we have been seeing, I want to add a message about how insects are really our friends. Of course, I have always loved butterflies, but I am even starting to love spiders now! I know you probably cannot believe it but look at the pictures of me holding a giant tarantula! I loved it! Talking to the guides down here, I am learning how safe spiders really are. There are not any down here that will kill you or even hurt you very badly. Most of them will not even bite you. For example, tarantulas are actually very safe! We have seen some other very large spiders and guides have picked them up. This is really helping my fear of spiders! I think I would even get a pet tarantula when I get back, but we have learned that too many people take these spiders from the wild and there are so many fewer of them out there now! Spiders are needed to kill these other aweful bugs that we have learned about. The guides at the butterfly museum were actually more afraid of other much smaller and more normal insects than spiders! The scorpions are really not bad either. They curl up as soon as they know you have seen them and will not crawl on you and bite you in your bed. The only thing to be careful of is to shake your shoes out before putting them on. See? Maybe this place will cure these fears after all! The butterfly garden was great and all of the guides were American. Maybe I will become a tour guide in a butterfly garden at some point in my life. Okay, just another one of my maybes that everyone can laugh at. ;-) I do need to add another little diatribe here, though. Our tour guide at the butterfly museum (who is a volunteer) started talking about something at the end of our tour that Scott and I had just been talking about the night before. This has to do with gas and the pollution that it causes throughout the4 world. Butterflies are not nearly as rampant as they used to be precisely because of the pollution caused by gas in cars. So think about your vehicles before you buy them and how good the gas mileage is in them. Think before you drive when you can take public transportation - save our butterflies!!!!











We also went to a frog pond, but the frogs were all behind glass so it was not as impressive. Most of the really colorful ones are actually tiny - like the size of a little toe - well, maybe not my little toe.

Sounds of the forest

See a video of the cloud forest. This was near a stream, so you can hear the stream, but also hopefully you can hear all of the wonderful bird calls. There were so many!

Morphos Restaurant

We went in this restaurant that must be the best one I´ve ever been in. It was called Morphos, which is the most beautiful butterfly out there and had butterfly stuff EVERYWHERE! Scott loved it too because it had the best burger he´d ever seen.