FIRST WEEK IN COSTA RICA

FIRST WEEK  IN COSTA RICA

I arrived in San Jose about 8pm and went through Immigration ‘no worries’ and the shuttle took me to the Backpackers in the city for $22. Pretty good one, but my private room was pretty close to the nightclub and so it was pretty hard to get some sleep.

Spent a couple of days in the capital, that I found nice enough, after the negatives I’d heard about it. It probably helped that I was there for a weekend and it was fairly lively around the malls and markets. No 3G network available for non nationals made my IPhone purchase in LA redundant but you know, you hardly need a phone with such good internet access available.

While I was there I went on an all day tour that went to the Doka Coffee Plantation for breakfast and then onto the Poas Volcano which was very impressive with a diameter of  1300m and lots of bubbling steaming acidic water down there. After being blown away by that biggie it was a great surprise to go onto the highlight for me, at the La Paz Waterfall Gardens. This place had it all and a brilliant buffet lunch. There were lots of animals and birds and butterflies and then a settlers house with oxen before the descent down to the waterfalls of which there are 5!! A couple couldn’t be accessed because of damage to the tracks by the last earthquake toward the end of last year.

Dad was a worry, back in hospital in Australia with pneumonia, but all I could do was move on and hope he got better. So my next move was to Montezuma on the bottom of the Nicoya Peninsula and that wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The bus left San Jose at 6 am and descended off  the Central Plateau at about 1350 m down to sea level and the heat was amazing down there and it didn’t help when we reached Puntarenas and found the ferry was on strike! So we had to wait for a different company sailing to a place back up higher on the peninsula and catch that and reconnect to a bus there to take us to Cobarno and change to a local clanger to take us down the steep descent into Montezuma.

It was all worthwhile because this place has a laid back hippyish feel to it and I stayed in a brilliant rundown hotel? right on the beach. Knocked around with a couple of people met during the bus trips and had fun dining out and going to the local waterfall and swimming in the very hot sea. We actually compromised and found where the stream met the sea and had a mix of temperature there that was good. During the first walk into the waterfall a big troop of white faced monkeys moved through across the path so that was a big treat.

There was better news about Dad during these couple of days so when the 20th of January arrived I was off on the bus to Santa Teresa to visit Freddie and his Mum.