Costa Rica (belated)

Sorry to leave everyone hanging!  I know you´ve been waiting with baited breath for the most recent installment (yeah, right) of our adventures, but it´s actually been a little difficult to both get the time to update the blog as well as find an Internet cafe.

So now we´re actually in Bogota, Colombia and about to start the third leg of our trip through this exciting country.  After we purchase a few kilos of cocaine and some automatic weapons, we´ll be all set.  Of course, I´m only joking.  You know, it´s funny, all the dramatic generalizations that people have about countries they´ve never set foot in.  We had innumerable warmings about how dangerous Mexico is and even how the Mexican people don´t like Americans.  Yeah, uh, not so much.  There are definitely very dangerous places in just about any country one would go to and it´s certainly advisable to avoid those places, but our trip has been just about totally devoid of anything dangerous (other than our crappy rental cars) and anyone wishing to do us anything but kindness.

Well, so I don´t have much to report about Colombia yet (and please notice that it´s spelled ColOmbia and not Columbia....we aren´t taking a vacation at the outdoor clothing company) so I´ll let you all know how Costa Rica went.  I´ll break it down into the four parts that we had time to check out - Manuel Antonio on the coast, Monteverde in the cloud forest, La Fortuna near the Arenal volcano, and (briefly) the big city of San Jose.

Manuel Antonio -  Just down the road from the town of Quepos, we stayed near the Manuel Antonio National Park in a pretty blah hotel called Arenas Cabinas or something.  The hotel was mediocre and we should have stayed at the hostel down the road.  C'est la vie.  The cool thing about our hotel was that it was just a couple hundred meters from the entrance to the National Park.  We ended up doing a guided tour of the park, which turned out, despite my skepticism, to be a fantastic choice.  The guide carries along a set of telescopic-ish binoculars and can spot the most well-hidden wildlife that normal human beings would have zero chance of seeing.  We saw both two and three-toed sloths, a raccoon, some frogs, cool spiders, and even a Jesus Lizard (the creature, not the band, you crazy punk rockers, you).  Good times despite the pouring rain.  I also tried my hand at surfing the next day with one of the locals as my instructor.  I suck, even though Leann got some pictures of me standing that make it look like I know what the hell I´m doing.  God bless you, misleading technology.  Other than a pretty brutal walk up a massive hill to get some cash, a quick trip to Quepos to get bus tickets, some grubbing down, and extensive soccer watching, that about covers our time in Manuel Antonio.  We caught the most indirect and winding series of busses of all time and made our way through the mountains to....

Monteverde -  Now this is a pretty cool and unique town.  It was settled by Quakers from the United States back in the 1950s or 60s and has tried to balance its massive tourist appeal with a more ¨green¨, ecologically responsible ideology.  We stayed at a neat little place called Pension Santa Elena, pretty much a cool little backpackers joint.  Anyway, we tried our hand at zip lining (easy and fun), which included a fast ¨Superman¨ ride where you zip along facing down, hands out, a la Superman.  The last leg of the zip lining tour was an attraction called a Tarzan swing.  Now this thing was f´n cool.  You climb across a hanging bridge to a kind of a cage where they strap you in various ways to a long bungee-ish cord.  They open a small metal gate in front of you, instruct you to bend your legs, and you step out into relative nothingness.  The free fall only lasts a second or two, as you plummet 75 feet or so before the cord catches and swings you back and forth a few times.  Now, I´m not normally the type to scream or squawk when I ride rollercoasters or the like, but this thing elicited a primal noise from inside my diaphragm or somewhere that came out sounding like a Neanderthal mating call.  Heart aflutter I waited for Leann to complete her ride, which she admirably did despite a distinct fear of heights.  My woman is pretty much a badass (even though she did do it with her eyes closed and a scary grimace on her face).  In Monteverde we also took a nighttime tour through a portion of the rainforest called the Children´s Eternal Forest.  This area is run and maintained by a non-profit which is funded by schools and children from all over the world.  Only about 5% of the reserve is available to see by the public, as the company decided to maintain virgin wildlife and ecology over touristic income.  Cool stuff.  Anyway, we got another guided tour here and saw the biggest tarantula on the face of the planet.  This thing was way bigger than our guide´s hand.  We also saw a bunch of other neat wildlife (how neat is seeing firefly larvae in the dark all over the ground when you turn your flashlight off?), including a poisonous pit viper, some walking sticks, and the Mot-Mot bird which makes tons of different calls and apparently harbors no fear of human interaction.  Walking around the rainforest while it´s dark is a pretty exceptional experience and definitely unlike anything I´ve ever done.  We spent a couple days in the Monteverde area, getting the lay of the land, cruising around, meeting some backpackers from all over the world, and then booking our next leg of the Costa Rica adventure in...

La Fortuna -  Upon recommendation from an employee at the last hostel, we stayed at a cheapy hotel in La Fortuna.  It was Ghetto, capital G intended.  Oh well, we only stayed a few sleepless hours until a van picked us up to ----- wait for it, wait for it ---- go white water rafting for the entire day!!!!  Wooooo!!!!!!!!!!  This was tons of kickass fun and was a very professionally run adventure.  I´d had some dire warnings from a couple raft guide friends of mine (looking at you, Keenan) to make sure the trips were safe.  This one was safe and just plain awesome.  We left the hotel a little after 5 in the morning and drove a long way and hit the water maybe by 8:30 or so after a quick breakfast.  We were delayed en route by a protest blocking the entire highway.  Kind of annoying for us as we had to walk through the pouring rain, leaving our van behind, but when we hit the actual protest we realized that people were protesting increased taxes on water use.  A little humbing for me, especially since I´d only been thinking about how it inconvenienced my experience.  OK, humble pie sufficiently eaten, we all got some quick lessons about safety, how to raft, etc.  I´ve been rafting a bunch of times but it´s been a while and the refresher was welcome.  The waters ranged from class 1 to class 4 rapids.  Not too intense but just enough to keep the blood flowing.  Every time we´d emerge on the other side of an especially rough patch of rapids, our guide would lead us in a high five with our paddles as we yelled out ¨Pura Vida!!!¨, the national motto of Costa Rica.  At the end of the rafting trip, a van took us down to.....

San Jose -  We only stayed two nights in San Jose at a very nice hostel called Gaudy´s and the first consisted of crushing tiredness and very little else.  We were operating on minimal sleep, exhaustion from the 6 or 7 hour rafting trip, and were just beat.  Leann was a little under the weather so she hit the sack while I did a little exploring, grabbed some grub and a beer, and picked up a few snacks and drinks for our room.  The next day was mostly spent trying to negotiate our way to and through a San Jose hospital.  Never fear, fair friends, all is well with your intrepid travellers.  Leann´s been getting a bit of the stomach bug for a while now and we´d just had enough of dealing with it.  To boot, she had a weird rash on her face.  We went to the hospital, which also had clinics, a pharmacy, and various other medical services.  This place was state of the art and very impressive.  The doctor was great and assured Leann that her weird face rash was probably just from wearing the wet chin straps either on the zip lines or the rafting trip.  She got her blood taken and it was discovered that she had elevated white blood cell counts, indicating a virus.  A few prescriptions and we were on our way.  Way to go, Costa Rican medical care system.  Our last night in San Jose, I went out to meet an old high school friend of mine, Chris Morris, for a couple beers and some dinner.  Leann took it easy in the hotel.  Chris has lived in Costa Rica for 8+ years and is pretty much a Tico (Costa Rican) by now.  It was great to catch up and he even gave me a brief tour of downtown San Jose, which is both picturesque and bustling. 

That takes us to the San Jose - Bogota trip, which went off without a hitch on the airplane side of things.  We got to the Bogota airport, changed out some money, and grabbed a cab to the hotel that we´d booked in advance.  Yes, booked in advance.  We got to the address the hotel had provided and there was no sign indicating that it was a hotel.  We rang the bell.  Nothing.  The cab driver called the hotel´s phone number.  Nothing.  Uh, not good.   This hotel has a branch in New York, which I also had the phone number for, and so I went to an international calling cafe and called them.  Yeah, turns out they just spaced our reservation or something and went out celebrating Colombia´s Independence Day (which was yesterday.....que viva Colombia!) instead of manning the hotel.  Fuckers.  They told us to wait for 40 minutes and there´d be someone back at the hotel.  Moreover, they´d compensate us for our inconvenience by giving us the night for free.  Cool, right?  We sat in a restaurant with all our gear and camped out for a while, splitting a plate of chicken and rice and a couple soft drinks.  After around an hour, we went back to the hotel and rang the bell again.  Nada.  So now we´re on the street with all our bags and the day is turning to night and the people appear to be getting progressively drunker and more sketchy as night approaches.  Screw this.  We jumped a taxi back towards the airport and ended up ¨having¨ to stay the night at a Holliday Inn.  Now, this place is seriously fancy and definitely not the kind of place we can really afford.  Oh well.  It was nice to not have to negotiate weird smells and partial hot water showers for once.  As Leann said, great for morale, not great for the bank account.

We have a couple hours before we catch a shuttle back to the airport and then head to the coastal Colombian city of Cartagena.  Not 100% sure what we´ll be doing there (aside from not staying in a place nearly as nice as this Holliday Inn).  Weather promised to be yet more of the same --- rain, rain, rain.  So we´ll probably be doing less beach stuff and more museum / cultural type of stuff. 

Hope all is well with all of you and yours.  Catch up with you soon with the next installment!  Laters, adios, hasta luego, whatever floats your personal boat.