Costa Rica – A Summary

Our first stop in Central America has been a breath of fresh air, reinvigorating us after four months of South America. The relative ease of doing, well, just about anything, gave us some confidence back that we’re not actually idiots, just South America doesn’t work the way we expect it to. It’s also marked a new approach of having to just hope things work out, but also really having to scale back our expenses and our standards, to be able to afford to be here.

It’s a country we’re glad to have experienced, but it’s also one we’re not totally confident we’d recommend to others (unless you’ve won the lottery, or are comfortable living off making all your own meals and dorm-life). Sure, we’ve had amazing experiences, but the amount you have to spend here to just survive is pretty limiting, and that amount could go a lot further in other countries. We think we’ll have to wait until we experience the rest of Central America to really call our judgement on it.

For the first time, we learnt almost nothing about the country or the local people (called Ticos), with tourism firmly focused on the local flora and fauna instead. However, staying in dorms really gave us the opportunity to meet some wonderful foreigners, and we hope we remember to never rule somewhere out just because it might mean having to live a bit uncomfortably for a bit.

In all, it’s definitely been worth it, and I am really glad we got to come here… but I’m also very happy to be back in a private room and be able to afford to treat ourselves with a proper meal out every so often!

Costa Rica – The Drawing of the Three

Highlights (Alex): Paradise Beach of Manuel Antonio, pushing myself with rafting and cliff-jumping, bobbing down the turquoise river between giant rocks in Poza Los Coyotes

Highlights (James): Rafting as soon as the nerves melted away, big up Chizo! Seeing all the creatures and critters in Manuel Antonio National Park. The mysterious cloud forest of Monteverde.

Lowlights (Alex): threatening man in Puntarenas, pre-rafting fears, the heat

Lowlights (James): The Manuel Antonio waterfall, aggressive beggars, the heat

Takeaways (Alex): anything is possible when I put your mind to it, whether that’s rafting, jumping off a cliff, or not sleeping well for a week, there can be magic in discomfort. Heat is a huge impact on mood/tolerance/patience/enjoyment. Sadly, another huge impact on how much you can enjoy this country, is how much money you can spend in it, almost nothing was free and very little was cheap/affordable, even to us Brits.

Takeaways (James): Don’t be distracted by news of the outside world, the wars, the inflation and all the rest that’s beyond our control, enjoy what’s in front of you in your world. The thought of something is often so much worse than the reality, waterfall jumps going wrong, rafting being terrifying in the mind, but once you get over the fear they’re the best experiences. Costa Rica is very much geared towards tourism and services with no mention of the history at all.

Description (Alex): Stunningly beautiful, shockingly expensive, incredibly diverse

Description (James): Green for the palm trees, the jungle and the cloud forests. Green for the dollars you’re going to spend a lot of here. Green for the snakes, the moss on the sloth’s back, the leaves the monkeys eat.

Entertainment:

TV & Film: Slow Horses

Books: The Dark Tower – The Gunslinger, Motorcycle Diaries

Podcasts: LSE Lectures – Dementia and Decision-Making, More or Less, Criminal, This Is Love, Desert Island Discs, Behind the Bastards, Freakonomics – Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia, Things Fell Apart, Talk of the Devil, You’re Dead to Me

Cutting Room Floor:

• Leaf-cutter ants don’t eat the leaves they take back to their nest, they leave them to rot and then eat the fungus.
• The sign telling us about the cloud forest, and how one dead tree feeds countless other plants that grow from it, ending with the very profound line of, “nothing dies, it merely transforms into something else”
• Whilst there are some bus terminals/stations here, we largely had to wait by the side of the road with no signs or timetables and just hope the bus showed up eventually. Even in the bus terminal of La Fortuna, there was no timetable. I don’t know what we’d do without the Internet telling us when things ran or how to get anywhere.
• The hostel worker telling my tour pickup that I didn’t exist when I was sitting right there, and then I had to pay for a taxi to catch them up. Thanks mate.
• The huge array of passive aggressive signs in Sloth Backpackers (compared to the lovely wholesome ones in Planet B) that just made you feel uncomfortable whatever you did
• That everywhere else we’ve been has never had so many signs, and yet everyone managed to behave just fine
• The Manc telling us about how she felt the urge to throw the cucumber at the wall, and so did. The hostel owner watching the CCTV was not impressed.
• Latin American hotels using flourescent green wall paint. I don’t know why this is a thing, I saw it a lot in Peru and Bolivia, maybe it was like avocado bathrooms in the UK, and it’s just too bright to paint over
• The hostel managers who seem to work every hour of the day, every day, respect
• Our raft-mate, who spent more time looking around at the scenery and day dreaming than actually rowing, “what’s that over there?” as we tumble down the next rapids
• The beautiful sight of the water rolling down the rocks on the river, like a huge water feature
• Having to walk part of the rafting route due to a concrete block ripping rafts part of the way down
• Feeling like our raft guide Roberto could easily run that route backwards, with his eyes closed, whilst we just sat back and did nothing. I suspect he just shouted commands to make us feel like we were doing something, when really, it was him doing it all himself
• Jesse in Dodero offering to wash a few things randomly
• Our random bunkmate wearing a United shirt but had nothing really to say. My one chance to give James some actual football chat instead of me nodding along blankly
• Celine giving us lots of tips for Nicaragua
• Another bunkmate telling us of her travelling on her own whilst her husband went home because she loves travelling and he doesn’t. Another inspiring lady who isn’t letting anything hold her back, including her own husband, good on her
• Enes, being an all round inspiration, and reassuring us there’s still plenty of time in our lives, it’s on us to make the most of it, and not let money or comfort or loneliness or time get in the way of what you really want to do, there’s ways around all those things
• seeing the beautiful butterflies in poza los coyotes, a bright blue one a woman from the USA tells us is called a Morpho butterfly, but also orange ones and yellow ones, and a dark blue dragonfly with orange and red face.

More of the gorgeous Manuel Antonio beach:

Monkey in Manuel Antonio:

The giant macaw:

Chilling in Planet B:

Some motivating signage in Planet B Hostel:

Next to this one was one instructing along the lines of “say what you need to now, you never know when it’ll be too late”… love you family!

A Piña Colada with orange juice, actually quite tasty:

Some discouraging signage in Sloth Backpackers, the sadness of point 3, which we unfortunately experienced in Puntarenas, and then meant we were reluctant to accept help from anyone, including the taxi driver who was actually helping us wait in the right place for our bus:

Some impressive wind-farms up in Monteverde, would love to know how they got them up there!

More hummingbirds:

Another edition of James pointing at things hidden by clouds. This one is where you can see the continental divide (“where the Atlantic and Pacific Slopes divide“), apparently being able to see Pacific ocean from here:

What I presume to be a strangling ficus, that grows down and around its host, suffocating it through a lack of light and ability to photosynthesise, as it lives on once the original tree dies and rots, providing nutrients for the now stable on its own ficus:

Seeing beautiful, vibrant orange and purple flowers on our way out of Monteverde:

The upside-down cloud forest, with roots growing from the top-down:

Leaf cutter ants hard at work:

A cute little fern:

Weird plant that looks like something from science fiction with its tendrils coming out of this pod:

The photo of us at the volcano, promise it’s there:

Clouds that looked like a web draped over the top of Arenal on our final morning:

Us bobbing about in Poza Los Coyotes:

A painfully slow and sweltering border crossing, maybe airports are the way to go after all, at least they have aircon…: