Tuesday, September 16

Costa Rica has shown us two faces and left us with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it's a beautiful green country (the Costa Rica Marketing department has renamed the rainy season to "green season", don't you just love those Marketing people? :-)) with a lot of rainforest, rivers, green mountains, steaming volcanoes and two coastlines. We have enjoyed looking into the steaming, acid, green volcano crater of Poas, and looking at the fuming Arenal volcano, hearing it rumble several times. That one was also very special at night, when we went closer to it and saw the red lave stream down the hill (this happens all the time, don't worry).
Funny to see were the ladies in sexy clothes showing their beautiful decolletages, but also expanding into all other possible directions (and trying to fit in small sized clothings while actually needing extra-large).
We've also enjoyed the refreshing mountain air in the so called "Off-the-beaten-track" destination Monteverde (everybody had to get off the bus a couple of times because otherwise it wouldn't get up the hill, but there are some very upscale lodging possibilities once you get there).
A great thing to see were the enormous Green Sea turtles that came to the beach near Tortuguero (turtle village) on the Caribbean coast to lay their eggs. There were so many, we literally almost stumbled over them! And even though we liked having a day without rain for a change, the heat and humidity were unbearable and we left early the next morning, to end up at the (rainy) Pacific coast that evening.
There we visited the Manuel Antonio National Park, a beautiful little park right on the white-sand beaches. In high season, it is supposedly so busy that you feel as if you're walking in a "See-a-Monkey" Disney theme park, including the concrete paths. But now, in low season, it was almost deserted which was wonderful. We saw screaming howler monkey's, lazy sloths (=luiaard) hanging in the trees (they say they are so lazy that when their baby falls down they're even too lazy to go down and pick it up!), a beautiful waterfall in the middle of the jungle and many different beautiful flowers.

On the other hand, Costa Rica was to us very expensive. Not compared to Europe, but certainly compared to South America. It's also very western, with a large influence from the United States.
The Caribbean coast is difficult to reach and in parts underdeveloped, but the Pacific coast is lined with sky-high hotels and apartment buildings and large billboards telling you in English to "buy this land" and "invest in this real estate property".
Costa Rica has no army and is visited by a lot of young and inexperienced travellers, but we have never felt as unsafe as near the busterminals in San Jose.
Most buses are modern and very cheap, but the owners do fit almost 60 seats in one bus so even Marloes had trouble fitting her legs in. None has airconditioning and with high temperatures and a humidity as if you're in a sauna you can imagine that we weren't looking forward to our 6-hour drive to the border (although it helped a bit that the bus left at 5.30 in the morning). The Costa Rican immigration office at the border with Nicaragua is very modern with computerised passport checkings, but it's not allowed to use the road to cross the border, so you need a 1 hour boatride to cross it. Although we didn't really care because it was a very scenic ride.


All in all we had a good time and saw beautiful things. Some people ask us if we're not tired of travelling, but we aren't. Our pace slowed down a bit and sometimes we long to be home, but we were looking forward to see the next country on our trip: Nicaragua. And as the Costa Ricans always say: Pura Vida! (= cheers, hi, bye, thanks, etc.)