Our departure from the civilization
known as Costa Rica is going smoothly, I write to you today from inside the air
conditioned cabin of the international Tica Bus. Although having our own
vehicle for a week was awesome, almost like turning 16 all over again, being
back in the bus is kinda comforting, like we’ve returned home or something.
Besides, finding your way around busy cites with a ridiculous amount of unmarked
one-way streets can become frustrating.
So…they just turned on a loud
action movie on the bus, normally this is great, but this one in only in
Spanish with no subtitles (we asked), even without understanding most of what’s
being said it’s hard to not watch it when the speaker is above your head.
Speaking of movies, interesting thing, there’s a English movie out called
“Redemption 3” , this must be the most popular movie in all of Latin America…it
has been playing on 5 different buses and boats, I can damn near recite the
entire thing for you now.
So, we covered a lot of ground in
Costa, I believe I left off while waiting for the ferry to Puntarenas, ride was
rainy but smooth and we got into Jaco about 2hrs after reaching land. Jaco is
an extremely well developed beach town, we’re talking high rise condo’s, atv
tours on every corner, surf lessons for $50/hr and an endless number of hotels.
We also took a trip over the Los Suenos Marriott, an incredible development
with a beautiful 4 star Marriott, a very ornate building with winding swimming
pools and impeccable grounds. A small casino on site and then surrounded with
maybe 1000 residences, condos and houses, some of the golf course, some close.
It’s obvious why these places are so developed, the area is beautiful and has so
much to offer…it’s the same kind of feeling I had when I first went to the beach
in Santa Monica in January, it’s like duh…no wonder everyone wants to live
here. Even though many other Central American countries have similar beauty and
activities, very few have them in such close proximity, making it a great
vacation destination for people with only a week or so to stay. Our stay in
Jaco was pretty chill, the trip to the Marriott was probably the highlight,
because of the rain most everything else was not an option.
From Jaco we continued south to
Quepos, a town near the entrance to Manuel Antonio National park…the park is
Costa Rica’s 2nd smallest national park , but probably the most
densely packed with wildlife. Most people spring for a guide to see all that
this place has to offer, Sophia and I wanted to get some exercise so we skipped
the guide and set out to jog out with the plans to walk back. We reached a
peninsula (oh yeh, this place is mountainous, but right on the beach), hiked
around a bit on trails utterly destroyed from the rain of the last week and
found ourselves on some of the coolest, most secluded beach coves I’ve ever
seen. We started our walk back from there and saw lots of wildlife, jesus
Christ lizards, a sloth, tons of white faced monkeys, one baby howler monkey, a
crazy raccoon looking thing with a long nose and big rabbit looking thing
(don’t you like my technical descriptions)…this place is like being in a zoo
without the fences.
After a couple hours in the park it
was time to head back the hostel get cleaned up and continue on to our next
destination. Without an exact plan of where to go that day we ended up in Playa
Uvita, in hostel called Toucan owned by a guy from Tennessee. One of the
highlights of this place is turtle hatching…Sophia is gonna cover that , so
I’ll stop there.
So…had a great time in Costa
Rica…moving every day, means packing and repacking everyday and that starts to
get old, but it was really cool getting to see so much in such little time…the
longer we stayed in Costa the more I liked it.
Now onto Panama, which sounds like it’s gonna be incredible, we have 3
or 4 spots picked out to visit and then it will be time to load onto the sail
boat and head for Columbia! Can’t wait!
Brett
