Journal #3-
6 August 2013
Tuesday, 8:45 a.m.
Alrighty folks, time to re-cap! We've been covering A LOT of ground lately in our trip!!...
Miller Time sent a friend to retrieve us from our Portobello cabin and take us back to Panama City to the bus station. We made it to the station by around 8:00 p.m. last Friday night. You can picture the bus station as more of a mall, with an attached grocery store, shops & a food court. All the different bus/transit companies go in and out of the same central place. While Pear and mom waited with our big backpacks in the bus terminal food court and scouted out our dinner options, I went over to the grocery store & bought us more snacks, water, and loaded up on car sickness meds for our long trip (I'll never travel by bus EVER AGAIN without car sickness medicine of some sort, which is the lesson I learned the hard way after throwing up for HOURS on our 24-hour bus ride to Machu Picchu in Peru a few years ago!). We ate veggie pizza and salad stuff, then waited until about 11:30 p.m. for the TICA bus. Most of the others on our bus were local Panamanians, Costa Ricans, or Nicaraguans, although we did meet 1 girl from Germany & another couple from Sweden. I was pretty content to take my little bonine pill, and I passed out until the police started boarding our bus as we came closer to the Costa Rican border. The border crossing process went -in a nutshell- as follows:
- Police get on bus & check everyone’s passports.
- We drive a few more minutes...
- More police get on bus & do the same thing again.
- We get to immigration to exit Panama- we unload all our stuff from the bus & all go into a room with all our bags.
- They open & check each bag & look at passports again.
- They bring in really cute looking golden retriever to walk around and sniff all our belongings for drugs.
- We put our bags back on the bus & go get in line.
- The wait x 40 people = ~45 minutes.
- Immigration asks me a total of one question at the window, “What is your profession?” (hmm, I'd heard that there'd be a little bit more interrigation than that, but I'm not complaining), takes a photo, checks passport.
- So where did our bus go at this point? We don’t really know. We asked some people & they basically said – "on the other side" (Of where? The border?), so we proceeded to walk across the border. Where IS the border? I don’t know. People ahead of us were already gone so there’s no one to really follow. So we just start walking, ask a policeman along the way, he says to just keep walking & we’ll see it... Hmm, okay, so we keep walking. We walk through an intersection with traffic on all sides, which looks like a random town- far from what you'd picture when you think of crossing an actual 'border'. Then we see our bus & get our luggage back off the bus. Then we wait in a different immigration line to get into Costa Rica.
- Of course, they check our passports too, and documentation, & ask me how long I’ll be in Costa Rica.
- Wait in another line. They open & check our bags again. Finally, we get back on the bus.
- Oh wait, but of course the police has to stop us a few more times periodically and each time guards get on & off our bus, they check our passports again.
- x 2 hours total = we’re finally officially in Costa Rica! Yippee!!!
Then we stopped an hour later to eat lunch & then rode for about another 5-6 hours, where we reached our “temporary “destination: SanJose’. Taking a taxi to our hostel was an easy 10 minute ride and very stress-free. Of course the taxi driver made sure to warn us about the area we were going to: "esta MUY peligroso!" Luckily, I’d read that it's very common for taxi drivers to makeup stuff in order to get you to go to a different hostel where they have connections. Paris didn’t get that memo so she seemed a bit concerned about his 'that's a super dangerous area you're going to!' comment and kept asking the driver a bunch of questions. I filled her in later. Nonetheless, our hotel was in an awesome area & was no less than AMAZING! Hotel Casa del Parque near the National Park, for those of you who plan to visit San Jose... you must stay there! Beautiful giant room with 4 beds, a beautiful VEGETARIAN restaurant, & all in a gorgeous historical house. All for a whopping $11 per person. We’ll be returning there next weekend when we do our airport runs ;)
7:00 the next morning, Sunday, we’re waiting for our shuttle to arrive (which we soon found out that we paid way too much $ for! Dang it!) and then had to call the company because they went to the wrong hotel and couldn’t find us. By 8:00, and with the help of hotel staff, we were found & on our way to La Fortuna, with about 8 other Americans - an easy 3 hour ride.
We soon found out, upon arriving to La Fortuna, that our hotel was more outside of town than I’d thought and lacked regular transit to reach it. Luckily... our driver took us all the way up there- and yet I couldn't help but think that for the money we'd overspent on that fancy shuttle, he better have!
We arrived on top of a mountain, overlooking a vast lake, Arenal Volcano, and Cerro Chato which was another volcano right next to it. We’re currently staying in a super cool spot that’s tucked away in the jungle. They have a resident chef who serves amazing all vegetarian cuisine - breakfast ~ $3, dinner family-style where you get to learn how to actually make the dishes and eat all together ~ $12.50.
Sunday night he (Kelly is the name of the chef) taught us how to make falafels & last night we made sushi rolls. I can’t even describe the food- it’s THAT good!
It has an SIT-ish vibe up here (if you're familiar with the graduate school I went to in Vermont), slightly earthy/hippie. We’re staying in an old army tent (but it’s revamped & an interesting space) overlooking the jungle. Right now I’m listening to howler monkeys which kind of sound like distressed old toads.
Mom hurt her knee pretty badly Sunday afternoon as we were walking around the hotel property :( She could barely walk & has a severe limp. She didn’t fall or anything - it had been hurting for the past few months and she even had it checked out before she came. The doctor said nothing was wrong, but like I said, all of the sudden it just stopped working really & for the past two days she hasn’t really been able to walk :(
A van/small bus comes up to our hotel twice a day that we can take to get down to town- it’s $6 total per person round trip. Sunday night, we let mom rest & Pear and I went down to the free community hot springs which was PACKED with people and a very cool place. Lots of different natural hot springs in the forest. Paris kind of fell down a little waterfall at one point, but we made it out okay.
Then yesterday we hopped a ride with a family from Montreal-Canada who were going hiking at the same place that we wanted to go, Cerro Chato! So we ended up hiking with them all day long: a dad, mom, and their 16 yr. old son who was a really funny kid who liked to jump everywhere!
THIS HIKE WAS NO JOKE! Even if mom had been in full health there’s no way she would’ve been able to do it. Hell, I could barely do it! It was an absolutely gorgeous day though, the first with no rain in this town for almost 2 weeks we'd heard others say. It was Sunny, beautiful & we hiked for about 5 hours. Super steep incline, crawling up part of the way holding onto branches, etc. Then when we got to the top, you had to basically rock climb straight down for about 20 minutes. When I say straight down, I’m talking STRAIGHT down!
Then we arrived at a lagoon lake at the very top of the volcano where Paris and some others swam for a bit & we ate some lunch. Then it started to look like rain so we booked it on back out of there: rock climbing up, hiking down, & got back to the central observatory where we started just in time for a downpour of rain! It was awesome that we missed the rain completely because we would've been in the middle of a mudslide for sure on that volcano if we'd been hiking it in the rain. The dad’s name we were hiking with was La Chance (they speak French) and it was true that he was our “good Luck” (chance) charm!
Then we went back to the hot springs for about an hour even though we felt totally exhausted from the hike! But wow! Was it worth it! Best hike I’ve ever been on to-date!
Then Kelly made sushi with us last night. Terrific! As usual! And we chatted with some others over dinner-a French guy who’s an expert wildlife photographer, a german couple who lost their (well his) luggage at the San Jose airport a few days ago flying in, but they delivered it to him all the way up the mtn!, a girl from Baltimore who’s been traveling and camping around Costa Rica for the past few wks/months; and some other guys from, well somewhere, who spoke English and German too. A great, eventful day, then we headed back to our tent and crashed as mom was telling me a story about something - hmmm… I need to ask her what she was saying now that I’m thinking about that.
Last night it stormed all night & the fresh air and breeze from inside the tent felt awesome. The only downside was that we all had to pee in the middle of the night & didn’t want to walk to the bathroom in the middle of a thunderstorm - my mom hobbling and me just not wanting to get muddy and drenched. We waited as long as we could stand it, and then at about 4:30 in the morning, it stopped raining for a few minutes, my mom and I jumped up at the same time & hurriedly hobbled down the gravel road to the bathroom. Paris went in the bushes earlier I think ;) Then we made it back to the tent in less than 3 minutes when it started to storm again!
This morning we’ve had a pretty steady rain and I haven’t even made it outside yet because I’ve been writing this for the past two hours with my jungle view from the tent & the sound of rain and howler monkeys on and off again. I suppose it’s time to go and I should see if the internet is working so I can send Noman a message & tell him we are alive and well!
Signing off from up on a jungley mountain surrounded by nature, volcanoes, & all happy things and people! :) Pura Vida!
...Oh, one more random funny thing! I told Paris this morning, “Hey Pear, tomorrow is your birthday!”
And her reply was “Yeah?! What day is it?”
Hmmm… captain obvious strikes again! 😊
