Pura Vida

The trip to Costa Rica ends in Seattle-type weather, a steady rain, though quite a bit warmer. The rainy season began a few days ago, and, predictable as clockwork, about 4 p.m. every day the rains come for 2-3 hours. It kept everything a bit cooler for the past few days, though, which was nice.

We left Parismina for a three-hour journey that turned into a two-day battle with every form of obstacle the Costa Rican travel gods could throw at us.

As we headed back to the Central Valley, a traffic jam on the main road caused us to divert on a more scenic path that would also take us around San Jose traffic. It also took us down a road that was completely shut down by what we were told was an accident. We backtracked to a scenic little city called Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, where we decided to find a hotel and try for Heredia the next day. Should have been no problem, as it was less than 100 km away.

No problem? Right. In the morning we drove back down the road where the accident was, and this time the area was clear and wide open. Until, about 30km later, with no warning, the road was closed. So we backtracked about 100km to the spot of the original traffic jam, and headed up the mountain on an eerily empty road. Empty because, a few kilometers later, we found out the road was closed by a mudslide.

So we backtracked another 50km to the road we had taken from Cartago toward the east coast, a narrow two-lane highway now the main thoroughfare for every semi going in to San Jose. We spent about five hours doing a 100 km journey just to get to Cartago. The good thing was we got to visit the church at Cartago again and see La Negrita. The thing, I kid you not, is about 18 inches high. The stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap comes to mind.

The other downside of this little misadventure was it forced us, and by us I mean me, to drive through San Jose in Friday rush hour traffic at 4 p.m. (refer above to what time the rain comes every day now). Nerves frayed, and never knowing exactly where we were going because there are no signs and Costa Ricans only give directions with their arms (even to each other, I noticed), we somehow tracked down a sign to Heredia and, after two more hours, found our hotel in Heredia. The second day's journey took almost 11 hours and ended about 80km from where it started.

Heredia was great, a college town with a gorgeous cathedral and parque central, where we found a festival and market. In the morning, after taking in more of the town, we headed back to Alajuela and gave back the rental car in one piece. Not much else to do the rest of the day, as most things were closed for the May 1 worker's holiday.

Today, the final day of my journey, we took the bus in to San Jose to see the sites. There are so many buses from Alajuela to San Jose you just queue up and, when one bus is full, it leaves and the next one pulls right up. Great day to visit San Jose, as it was cool and, being Sunday, the crowds weren't too bad. We saw a couple churches, walked around the center of the Costa Rican government and went to the Museo de Oro, which has gold trinkets discovered in the area, some dating back 1500 years or more.

So that pretty much wraps it up. Hope you enjoyed, hope you all make it some day and experience pura vida, and hope to see you all in the states soon.

Slow creatures

For the first time, travel plans have gone slightly awry, so I have a little more time than expected to catch up on the blog, but only after a wonderful day amidst the slowest creatures nature has to offer.

We left Cahuita early yesterday and made a stop off for a great tour at a sloth sanctuary. Yes, you read that correctly. About a half hour south of Limon is a little place just off the highway that has dedicated itself to preserving sloths.

After seeing a couple sloths in trees from a long way away, it was nice to be able to get up close and see them, pet them. There's some video of the babies below if I worked this right. Sloths smile — who knew? The tour also included a canoe trip down a river, where we saw one sloth and a wide variety of birds, lizards and bugs.

But the main goal of the day was to find a way to the elusive Northern Caribbean coast. Once you get a few miles north of Limon, the coast is cut off from the mainland by a river, so it requires a boat to access. After 90 minutes in the car and another hour bumping along a road, we caught a water taxi to Parismina, the less known (but more easily accessed) cousin of the more famous Tortuguero.

After about an hour in this small fishing village, which has about 400 people, we learned a few important facts. First, the turtles come to the beach to lay their eggs at night. Second, a guide is required to take you along the beach. To protect from poachers, the police patrol the beach at night to protect the turtles, and they don't like to have strangers out there without someone from the town. Volunteers also come from all over the world to both Tortuguero and Parismina to help move the eggs, either to a hatchery or just around the beach, to keep them from the eager hands of the poachers.

We got extremely lucky with our guide. A young American woman (from Orcas Island, incidentally) was very helpful with information and also mentioned her boyfriend was one of the guides. It turns out her boyfriend, Jerry, is also one of the founding members of the group La Asociacion Salvemos Las Tortugas de Parismina (check out www.parisminaturtles.org for more info) and was a wealth of information during the tour.

We left shortly after 9 p.m. and, after walking along the beach (black sand, incidentally) for about an hour, we finally stumbled upon the biggest turtle I have ever seen, a leatherback looking for a place to lay her eggs. This creature was the size of a large coffee table and weighed about 800 pounds. She flopped around on the sand slowly, using her fins to dig holes in the sand. She never laid any eggs, but we spent an hour watching her until she returned to the sea.

We leave this morning on our way to Heredia.

Here is a video of some baby sloths (hit play below)

Cahuita and Panama

It is very difficult to stand in any spot in Cahuila, turn 360 degrees and not see some image of Bob Marley somewhere.

The Caribbean side of Costa Rica is very much a blend of both the Caribbean and Costa Rica. This little town, which sits right next a national park that includes both a forest and corral reef, is populated by as many Jamaicans as Ticos, and the majority of the music you hear played about town is reggae. The residents are in general much darker-skinned than the rest of the country.

We stopped here, about halfway between Limon and the Panamanian border, as a close jumping off spot for a day-trip to Panama. The weather here is not too hot, but extremely muggy, and you develop the perpetual layer of sweat almost immediately. The people here are very friendly and the town quite lively despite this being the offseason.

We awoke early to head to Sixaola, which contains about the smallest border crossing I have ever seen. One office and an old, rickety one-lane bridge leads you into Panama. Only one truck can cross the bridge at a time, and it looks like the thing could give way at any moment.

This crossing was far more simple than the Nicaraguan one, and Panama didn't even require a form. We were introduced to a friendly taxi driver named Salvador, who took us around Changuinola, the nearest city of any size to the border.

Primarily because of the Canal, Salvador informed us, Panama has a great deal of American influence. The Balboa is traded at 1-for-1 with the American Dollar, but we never saw one. All transactions were done in US money. Gas is measured in gallons, and the price is about the same as the US.

We wandered about a rather non-descript downtown for a couple hours, then Salvador took us around to see a Chiquita packaging plant and, on my request, the local baseball stadium, where he proudly told us Yankee Mariano Rivera (the Michael Jordan of Panama) once pitched.

Possibly because of the heavy American influence, Panama didn't appeal to me the same way Nicaragua did. It seemed a little wealthier, though not as well off as Costa Rica, but didn't have the character. It's ill-advised to judge a country based on one city for one day, of course, so will have to return and get a better feel at some point in the future.

Next up: Sloths and turtles.

Cartago

Now, back to my tale of dramatic religious conversion. Well, not really. And a word of warning right now — this post is more of a history lesson than the others. The most lamentable tragedy of Cartago, or something like that.

Upon ending up in Cartago, a lively, bustling small city about 25km southeast of San Jose, we found ourselves with a nice balcony view of what turns out to be the holiest Catholic site in Costa Rica (Lonely Planet's words, not ours).

La Basilica de Nuestro Señora de los Angeles is a gorgeous building, about the fourth church of that name to occupy the central square over the past 400 or so years. Cartago sits in the shadow of Volcan Irazu, which has been a thorn in the city's side, burying the place several times over the past few hundred years since it was Costa Rica's original capital. Most recently the volcano erupted in 1963 during JFK's visit to the country and buried the city in a half-meter of ash.

The basilica survived that. It was first destroyed by Irazu in 1635. Then 1723. Earthquakes did major damage to the city and the church in 1841 and again in 1910. There is a black statue of Mary (La Negreta) that has survived all of them, and every August Ticos come from all over the country to pay respects. We went to part of a Sunday night service, which was packed and had wonderful music. I could understand about half of what the priest was saying. Lots of stuff about how great God is and all that.

The town also has a nice set of ruins of a convent they finally decided to stop rebuilding just a few blocks away from the church. Otherwise it is a very friendly, bustling place that extends quite a ways to foothills in the east. We had a wonderful time, in no small part due to a lack of humidity we had not felt since landing two weeks earlier.

All in all, a wonderful 16 hours or so spent and a great reminder of how you can end up in interesting places with no planning or forethought.

Next up, the Caribbean coast and Panama

The calls of Montezuma

As I sit less than 100 yards from the holiest site in Costa Rica, having just returned from mass, I feel cleansed, though that has more to do with the first non-humid night since arriving in Costa Rica.

But first back to the beach. After two days basking in lovely Samara and Playa Carrillo, we made the unnecessarily clockwise journey around the Nicoya Peninsula to Montezuma, the beach that time forgot. If you look on the map and wonder why you just don't drive straight down the coast, it turns you have to pay attention to tides when you take that road, so we went the long way.

Montezuma was just as described, a hippie beach enclave. Almost immediately we met the town pot dealer. One of the signs of Costa Rica's relative wealth is the lack of people on the street trying to sell merchandise. This did not apply to our friendly pothead, who offered bud every time we passed him.

The second day I took a boat ride out to do some snorkeling nearly Isla Tortuga. After signing up for the excursion, I learned to my chagrin the island is not named as such because it has turtles, but because the locals think it looks like a turtle. Saw some small fish, many colors, but nothing noteworthy. The boat ride up and down the coast made the trip worthwhile, though. The jungle goes right up to the beach most of the way around the peninsula.

After leaving Montezuma and taking the ferry to Puntarenas, we headed south (technically it's more east I think) along the Pacific Coast in search of a non-touristy city. Came up snake eyes on that roll, as we ended up in Quepos, near Parque Nacional Miguel Antonio. Saw a ton of howler monkeys, even more iguanas, some small-dog-sized-but-rodent-looking things, assorted lizards, and a pretty cool crab.

Still in quest of a non- touristy city, we curled back inland for what turned out to be a much more vertically challenging drive than anticipated. Highway 2, the part of which is the Pan-American Highway, climbs up a mountain for, no exaggeration, 50 consecutive kilometers, maybe more. One lane, each way, nowhere to pass, and buses and trucks climbing at a conservative 30km/hr made for a long drive, but I don't think I have ever seen more beautiful scenery. The lush, green foliage mixed with the clouds we drove through made for a spectacular combination, and the view when not cloudy (I'm told) extends to both oceans.

The day finally ended in Cartago, a decidedly normal city I'm looking forward to exploring in the morning. I will include more about this very interesting church in my next post.

Nicas, Ticas and Ticos

Greeting from the beach. For those of you with Day 9 in the when will Eric get a sunburn pool, congratulations. With the sun directly overhead, it becomes more important to remember sunblock for the shoulders.

But such is the price to pay at the beach. We are in the town, and I use the word loosely, of Playa Samara on the Nicoya Peninsula, about 100 meters from a beach. We are also few miles down the road from Puerto/Playa Carrillo, which is just gorgeous and had fewer than 10 people spread out over a couple miles when I got there this morning. Perfect day for being at the beach, though quite hot and muggy the moment you leave it.

But I should back up a bit. Since I last wrote, all of about 24 hours ago, I have had four days worth of fun. For those of you good at math, yes, I got a bit behind and am now catching up. After leaving Volcan Arenal, we traveled Northwest up to the edge of Costa Rica, preparing to go to Nicaragua, and stopped in a cute little colonial village called La Cruz about 20km from the border. For those of you who have been to Panaji (Goa), India, you have a good feel for La Cruz. The "major" highway went from perfect to very rugged for about a 30km stretch, which seems to be the pattern here.

For those of you not familiar with the relationship with the relationship between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, things aren't particularly cordial, so the border is actually quite an effort. After getting off the bus at Peñas Blancas (the border), you have to fill out a customs form to leave Costa Rica. You then walk about a kilometer with no signs or anything to direct you to the Nicaraguan customs, where you fill out the exact same form again and wait in line to enter, pay $7 for your visa and go in. Going back you do the reverse, paying only $2 to leave Nicaragua.

At any given time, as it turns out, about 10 percent of the people in Costa Rica are illegal Nicaraguan immigrants, and the Ticas (Costa Ricans) are not pleased about it. The Nicos find better paying work across the border. It seems very similar to US/Mexico relations.

Nicaragua, from the short time spent in Rivas, is wonderful. Rivas is a very lively and bustling little town. The downtown market was packed on a Monday morning, with lots of horses, motorcycle zipping around and people selling just about everything. The country is noticeably poorer than Costa Rica. Streets are not as well cared for and there are more people trying more aggressively to get you to buy stuff, though no more so than typical in Mexico.



Of greatest interest to me, however, was the quite impressive little minor league baseball stadium. Frente Sur Rivas is a team in the Campeonato Nacional de Beisbol Superior, which as best I can understand is the Triple-A of Nicaraguan baseball. Judging by the ages of the players, mostly born in the mid or early 1980s, these are not pro prospects, but the stadium is quite nice. I've included a picture here. The grass is well cared for in most places and the stands look quite new, putting it on par with many professional stadiums in the U.S., though not major league caliber.

Yesterday began the beach portion of the trip. We headed over to the Nicoya Peninsula (the one on the Northwest corner) and found the driving very easy and better signed than other places. I'd been expecting a long bumpy section by the end getting to the beach, but everything was paved.

Well, finally caught up. It's nice to have wifi in the room, though we leave for Montezuma tomorrow, so who knows. Air conditioning is the greater priority.

Monteverde and Volcan Arenal

Greetings once again from Costa Rica, here after a trip through the Monteverde Cloud Forest and to view the eruption of a volcano, the one whose name you can spell.

The cloud forest was interesting, sort of a combi- nation of a rain forest and a temperate forest, in many ways combining the best of both. Though the rain leads to thick, lush foliage with quite a few ferns, many of the trees are covered with moss. The climate was very mild and the threat of a downpour was always there. The climate was a typical Washington/Oregon spring overcast day, but about 10-15 degrees warmer. Also saw a quetzal, though it was facing the other direction.

The night tour was actually more interesting, and we saw quite the assortment of insects, frogs, as well as a sloth and a tarantula. They have a beetle that is solid gold in color, almost like a C3PO version of a regular beetle. The sloth was at quite a distance and barely moved.

From Monteverde we bumped down the hill again, then took a gorgeous scenic drive around Lake Arenal to La Fortuna on our way to Volcan Arenal, one of a number of volcanoes throughout the north-central portion of the country. We saw a treefull of monkeys on the way. The lake is gorgeous.

Volcan Arenal is the one that still spits out rocks of lava, though, which you can see once it gets dark and hear throughout the day. They have a nice observation deck, though as we found out later you can just pull off to the side of the road and watch the same thing. Spectacular, though seeing it from above would be far more impressive.

Next up: Nicaragua and the West Coast

Greetings from the Cloud Forest

I am writing just a few kilometers from the Monteverde National Reserve, the most famous of several cloud forests. What is a cloud forest? That will have to wait for the next post, as the tour doesn't start until tomorrow morning (early of course).

Am just finishing up my third day in Costa Rica, and am having a wonderful time. The weather has not been too hot yet, though fairly muggy, but have been in the mountains or at higher elevations the whole time.

Until today I was in Alajuela, a small city about 15km NW of the capital, San Jose. Alajuela doesn't have a lot to recommend it, but it is less hectic and provides good access to a number of very interesting places. Costa Ricans in general are taller and have lighter skin than Mexicans. Prices are fairly comparable in most cases to the United States.

On the first day I took a taxi up to a small town in the foothills called Zarcero, a picturesque little town of about 4,500, I'm guessing at about 5,500 feet (Alajuela is at 3,000). The parque Francisco Alvarado, in front of the 1895 Iglesia de San Rafael, was quite impressive — lots of bushes carved into the shapes of dinosaurs, archways, faces, etc. Wonderful town, not too hectic, at least by poorer nation standards.

Day two was a visit to Volcan Poas (Pwouss), one of several active volcanoes in the area. After a bus ride up the mountain, the short path takes you up to a spectacular view of the crater from above. The volcano continually belches steam and emits a sulphur smell when the wind blows the wrong direction. Still an amazing view, and there is a nice walk to a crater that's become a lagoon.

The third day began with the rather daunting task of first renting, then learning to drive, a car in Costa Rica. The traffic here is far better than India, and better than Mexico. Getting out of Alajuela proved challenging, but the highways are pretty good. The road up to Monteverde was not, extremely rocky and slow going, and fairly steep uphill with quite the drop off to the side of the road. Still, arrived before dark, which was the goal.

I just got back from a spectacular night tour, but will save that description for the next time, as I'm tired and must get some sleep. The cloud forest beckons at 7 a.m. tomorrow.

Cheers,
Eric

Getting ready for Costa Rica

It's amazing how empty a packed backpack can be when you're heading for the tropics. Nylon clothes and Tevas make for a very light pack and a very happy backpacker.

Yep, gonna dust off the old blog, fill the tires, oil the chain and get ready to describe three weeks of exploration in Central America's eco-playland. I'm encouraged by the fact the blog went so well for the first three weeks in India, so I'm hoping I'll manage to keep it up for the duration of this trip.

The plan is to see volcanoes, howler monkeys, tortugas, black-sand beaches and the occasional urban setting, as time allows. I'll try and throw up the occasional picture as well. Let me rephrase that. I will try and upload the occasional picture as well.

If you have any suggestions for places to go or things to see, please leave them in the comments.

Cheers,
Eric