Category: Costa Rica

Today, we went for luxury!

La Fortuna is one of the touristy spots of Costa Rica, so even if our hostel is pretty cheap (at least for now, while it’s low season), most activities here are way over are usual budget. But as we’re just at the base of a volcano, we did want to try one of the local thermal pools. There is just one problem : they are mostly inside luxury hotels, so pretty expensive.

But we discovered a neat trick. Some of those hotels also organize zip-line tours in the canopy near the volcano, which at the end include a free day pass to all their installation. So you can get the canopy tour and thermal baths for just a little more than the thermal baths only entrance fee.

So we started the day (by having a big breakfast) by an hour and a half zip lining through the jungle next to the Arenal volcano. It was really cool, some of the zip lines reach 500m long and on some you can get as fast as 60km/h !

As we were a small group we even got to do the Tarzan swing. And no, you don’t have to have been raised by monkeys to do it! You won’t get an explanation, but as we’re super nice, we (Alice) edited a short video for you guys 😉 .

At the end of the tour, we did get our bracelet granting us access to the hotel amenities. And it was quite a shock for us, we’re not used to such luxury, but we definitely made the most of it! So first we tested all the 15 thermal pools and 2 swimming pools, ranging from 25 to 38°C, along with the water-slides (up to 65m long!) and hydro-massages. It was really nice and exactly what we needed to relax after the canopy tour.

It was easy to spot the poor tourists that did the canopy tours partly to get free access to the thermal pools and the rich tourists that actually sleep here. Try to guess which ones have the big cool fluffy towels and which ones have the stinking travel towel? 😉

Well anyway, we were totally made as cheap tourists at lunch. As the luxury hotels with thermal pools are next to the volcano, they’re a bit far from town, so we couldn’t get back there to eat a casado (literally married man’s lunch, the standard rice-beans-chicken-juice). And the restaurants at the hotels were slightly (but just slightly 😉 ) over our budget. So we ate our bread, ham and liquid yogurt on a bench, near a couple turtles.

Because yes, not only has the hotel several thermal pools (and a spa, stables for the horses, etc.), it also has a lush garden full a tropical plants, like a jungle, but a very well organized one and some local animals. So we saw turtles, crocodiles (well, sadly they didn’t seem very happy to be in a cage…), butterflies (doesn’t beat Mindo, but still nice), and leaf-cutter ants (no surprise there, we saw them all over since the beginning of our trip!).

Now it’s general knowledge time! There are a lot of leaf cutter ants in Costa Rica, so much that it is estimated they cut between 12 to 17% of the leaf growth in the country annually. But they actually don’t eat the leaf, they use it for their own form of gardening. They bring it underground and use it as fertilizer to grow a special fungus they love to eat!

After this after-lunch stroll in the hotel’s gardens, we tried the thermals again before getting back into town in the late afternoon. In town we managed to book one of our next adventure : a horse ride to our next destination (but I won’t tell you where now 😉 ). We also found gnocchi and thyme, so tonight’s student-style cooking night!

That’s all for today. We hope the sky will clear up tomorrow morning, so we can post a few nice pictures of the volcano. It is the main attraction over here after all!

P.S : another small game for today (an easy one this time) : Can you spot the crocodile?

Today, we walked a bit in San Jose and went to La Fortuna.

San Jose is the capital, half the population lives here and there isn’t much to see for us. It is told to be dangerous, but we didn’t get into any trouble and since we had some time on our hands this morning, we walked in the streets (of the neighborhoods we knew were safe). We searched for an ATM and it was quite the quest but we finally got what we needed. Here, the currency is the colones but there are so many tourists that most ATM also distribute dollars, so we can pay almost everywhere in dollars (not for very small amounts, but for accommodations and tours for example) with an acceptable rate. Thank you American tourists.

The streets are broad, with reasonably wide and incredibly high sidewalks (you can feel that rain doesn’t fool around here). The center feels European enough, with a few old buildings, a few recent ones and chain stores in one or two pedestrian streets. The taxis are red and the people very helpful and nice. After trying out 6 ATMs in total, among which only 2 gave us money (one had colones, the other dollars) it was time to get to our bus. We traveled for 5 hours again, and arrived in La Fortuna.

Less than 10 years ago, the main attraction was the active volcano where people could take pictures of red glowing lava. During this activity period, the whole region got into tourism, and when the volcano went back to sleep… the region carried on ! Since there is everywhere nice jungle with animals, hiking trails on volcano sides and thermal baths that remained active, the tourists keep on coming (us included). Furthermore, we are nicely surprised by the quality of services we have encountered and the prices (we expected to be bankrupted very fast according to other travelers but since it’s low-season we’re really okay !) so now we have a nice room with volcano-view (during the day) and the best kitchen we’ve encountered !

See you tomorrow ! X

Today we finally moved from our chilled little island of Bastimentos.

And it is again a day with a lot of transportation (so for photos, you’re gonna have to wait a bit more). We took a boat to Bocas, followed by another boat to Almirante, on the coast, than a minivan to the border and finally a bus to San Jose.

As if it wasn’t long enough, the minivan to the border actually went the other way at first to drop off some of the passengers at a military camp in the mountains above Almirante. At first we did wonder why we were going the wrong way, but at least we gone some nice view on the sea and Bocas from the heights.

The border crossing was easier than expected. We though we might have some trouble entering Costa Rica as we don’t have a bus or plane ticket out of the country, but our (very worn out) plane tickets from the States to France where apparently enough to prove we weren’t planing on living too long here.

Once at the bus station in Sixaola, Costa Rica, we were told the next bus to San Jose was at noon and would last 5h. The watch showed 11:30pm, so we thought half an hour of waiting wasn’t so bad. After a couple minutes of reading we suddenly remembered here it’s GMT – 6hrs, so it was actually an hour and a half of waiting ! For those of you wondering, no, there is no daylight saving time here, so we are still at a 7hrs offset from the french time.

Otherwise, the bus to San Jose lasted a little over 6 hours (no surprise there, we’re kind of getting use to the discrepancy between theoretical travel time and real travel time 😉 ). At first we followed the shoreline closely, next to Puerto Viejo and its strange but nice black sand beaches. We won’t stop there because we’ve already spent a week in the Carribean, on the Panamanian side, so we prefer to get some fresher air more to the center of the country. After the port town of Limon, the road goes full west towards San Jose, and once the many container stocks passed, we went through very dense looking forests with once again impressively huge bamboos looking as if they were gonna fall on the road like a tsunami.

So tonight we’re in San Jose, a bit higher up and fresher than the coast (well, it’s still pretty warm, you only need a light jacket at night). We have 67 dollar cents left in our pocket (yes, we might have been a bit tight on budget to leave Panama 😉 ) and haven’t gotten an ATM to work yet, so we still don’t have any Colons. right now we’re chilling at the hostel bar, pretty neat (and we just had a flaming juggling demonstration!). So we get the blog up to date (who said we were late ?! :p ).

That’s all for today. We probably won’t stay in San Jose for too long, but we’ll tell you that tomorrow !