Costa Rica Part 1: It's an adVENture!

Day 1 - Sunday 12/7/2008

We arrived early at the airport for our flight out of Austin…plenty of time to grab some breakfast. We love us some Maudie's migas so the choice was obvious. OMG! Yuck – they were nothing like the yummy migas at the real Maudie's. It was like scrambled eggs cooked for an hour with some mushy canned peppers. It's really too bad since that may be the first Tex-Mex thing people new to Austin/Texas might try. If that was my first impression, I wouldn't be too excited about trying Tex-Mex again after that….

9:15a – 10:15a Short flight: Austin to Houston *First-Class* Nice! :-)

10:30a – 11:15a Hanging out in the Continental Airlines President's Club…..I was trying really hard to fit in with this smug crowd, but Bobby didn't seem phased one bit by it. He was just happy to get some internet access. (Boy is this going to be a long week…..)

11:22a – 3:00p 3.5 hour flight: Houston to San Jose, Costa Rica *First Class*

WOW! Do those first class people know how to travel or what!?!? Hot wash cloths for face and hands – a nice touch. The food was amazing and the wine was free-flowing. They even provide tiny salt-n-pepper shakers with every meal. Cute. I even made Bobby take a picture of me sitting in First Class. :-)

3:00p – 3:30p Immigration & Customs lines….and of course Bobby making friends with the people in line with us.

3:30p – 4:30p Hertz Car Rental - We had reserved a Daihatsu Terios – a 4x4 compact SUV, but they were out and since we were Texans, put us in their biggest 4x4 – a Hyundai Terracan Turbo. The car reservation itself was $185 for the week, not so bad…but after you add all the fees and service charges, the total for the reservation was $580. OK fine, but now we had a bigger question: Should pay more $$ to rent a GPS? After the car reservation total jumped about $400 in a matter of minutes, and after a few minutes debate about the $15/day GPS rental, we decided not to rent the GPS. We validated our decision with the plan to make this trip our "Adventure"!

And yes, I kept annoyingly saying "It's an AdVENture!" (with stress on the 2nd syllable) for many miles down the road… That phrase would come back to bite me in the ass for the next few days.

4:30p – 1:30a Driving from San Jose to Arenal Volcano Observatory Lodge.

Yes, that comes to 9 hours driving after 4.5 hours of flying…not to mention the few hours in the airport and car rental place…

So this is the run down….

Obviously, we left the Juan Santamaria Airport feeling cocky without a GPS. We headed west on the Pan-American Highway 1. Due to no signs anywhere, we missed our exit by about 1.5 hours. When we finally realized that we were nowhere near where we needed to be, we stopped to ask some locals for directions….truly testing my espanol skills for the 1^st of many times to come.

They pointed us in the direction that we had just come from so we turned around to backtrack. After feeling that we had missed our exit yet again, we pulled over to ask a hitchhiker where we were. He spoke no English, so I had to use my Espanol penqueno and my Costa Rica map to figure out where we were and how we needed to get to our destination. He confirmed what we guessed…that we had missed our turn (again) by about 45 minutes, and he told us how to get to the correct road….I think. I know he kept saying “BIG SIGN” …ha! In return he asked to be dropped off about 10 minutes away…in the direction we were heading. What the hell do we have to lose at this point anyway???

So yes, we picked up a non-English-speaking-Costa-Rican hitch-hiker in the dark in a foreign country. Brilliant.

Luckily, he didn't pull out a knife and stick it to my throat, and demand all our money. He probably just felt sorry for us. I think he may have been more scared of the crazy-ass, stupid Americans than we were of him. He did help us find the road and the BIG SIGN we were looking for, and we were now on our way….only running about 2.5 hours later than planned at this point. Oh, and by the way, the BIG SIGN was the size of a street size, barley on the road, and with no light.

Now on the correct road and heading in the right direction we chalked the wasted 2.5 hours up to being part of the adVENture. No biggie….(that will come later)

Now let me explain something, Costa Rica is known for its terrible road conditions. What is not as well-known (for some crazy reason) is the complete lack of signage along their major roads…that would be the paved ones. The roads rarely connect. If you take the wrong road, you don’t just find a connecting road to get you over to the correct one……you turn around and go back to where you started when you took the wrong road.

So here we are heading north on the CORRECT road towards the popular tourist destination: Arenal Volcano next to the town of La Fortuna…at least I THINK it’s La Fortuna. I notice on the 3 different maps that I am navigating between that there is another town called Fortuna. However, on some maps it’s called La Fortuna, and the one we are heading to is also called both Fortuna and La Fortuna…depending on the map. Great! This makes the adVENture even more challenging. When we are actually blessed with a sign, it says Fortuna…..now if we only knew which freaking Fortuna it was referring to!?!?!?!?

There are two other signs that we were blessed with about two hours into the twisting, turning, foggy, rainy drive. These two signs are both in the middle of the road, written in Spanish of course. Using my pequeno Espanol skills, I determine the signs say “road closed”. Using the context of the signs being in the middle of the road of course doesn’t hurt. Nevertheless, we have a choice to make….keep going or turn around?

Side Note: Before the trip, my husband & I separately researched travel in Costa Rica. We both had read that roads are sometimes closed due to construction, high water, mud, or whatever else. But most of the time you can get through the road with a 4-wheel drive vehicle. Since we did have a big 4x4, we decided we would probably be ok on this “closed road.” Besides, wouldn’t the hotel we had reservations at warn us about the main road from the airport being closed???

On we went….about another hour further on this twisting, turning, dark, foggy, rainy drive…that is until we found where/why the road was closed. The bridge had collapsed. There was no bridge or road at all. Shit. Now officially annoyed and completely avoiding the “adVENture” word, we turned around and backtracked…3 hours.

Back at the fork in the road where we started on the closed road, we are completely exhausted, drained, and paranoid about messing up any more. Did I forget to mention we have not had phone/internet service since we exited off the Pan-American Highway hours ago?!?!?

Before starting up the other road, we find a “roll your own” cigar shop, the only thing open anywhere around, and stopped in for directions. Again, no English spoken here. So here I go again with my pathetic Spanish. The kid working the cigar shop draws me a map and promises that the other road is not closed. Bobby asks about the price of a cigar to say thanks, but when he calculates the cigar is over 80 bucks, he changes his mind. Besides, we may need all our money to get to where we need to be….who knows!?!?!?

So here we go again….now taking the long road to get to the hotel that we should have been at hours ago. This road is just as twisty and bumpy and now it’s even darker and more rainy and foggy. Fun Stuff. We are exhausted and sleepy so we aren’t talking much at that point, we are just keeping our eyes peeled for signs and potholes and motorists who have decided to simply stop in the middle of the highway.

YES, for all sorts of reasons drivers just stop right on the highway – all over Costa Rica. We assumed they got cell phone service and stopped to make calls, or they were lost like us, but mostly we realized they were just sleeping. There were no shoulders on the roads, or rest areas, so people just stop wherever they are when they get tired….or bored.

Three hours later we FINALLY arrived at the town of La Fortuna…or just Fortuna….whatever. We know we are at the correct town, whatever the name….due to the volcano signs we are now able to follow. I have held my bladder for HOURS now and I can’t take it anymore. There are no places open after midnight in town…except for the places I have no business walking into this late. So just outside of town we both desperately get out in the rain and marked our territory in Costa Rica.

Our hotel is 10 minutes past town and 15 minutes up, up, up the volcano on the bumpiest road in the entire world! Thank goodness we peed before we started up that road….I would have surely lost it.

It’s about 1:30am when we get to what must be the entrance to the hotel…”What the hell?!?!?” There is a gate at the entrance that was dark and chained and locked. Neither of us was all that surprised really….with the way the rest of our day had gone. So we got some towels and clothes out of the suitcases to use as pillows and blankets, and got as comfortable as we could as we called it a night.

After driving 9 hours, Bobby was completely exhausted and went to sleep quickly but woke up many times through the night. I was tired, yet fidgety so I had a much harder time falling and staying asleep. It was truly the longest night ever.

(Yes, this was the painful part of the trip that I am just now ok talking about.)

Day 2 – Monday 12/8/2008

I woke to sounds of birds, looked at the clock to see that it was only 5:30 am, but the gate was open. So I woke Bobby and we drove through the gate and up to the front office of the hotel. It was still closed and no one was around, so we tried again for another snooze. About an hour later we woke to cars driving by so we stiffly made our way to the reservation area and found the Pure Trek Canyoning tour guides there waiting to whisk us away for four fun-filled hours of Waterfall Rappelling and Hiking through the rain forest. I explained to them that we drove in late, had not even been in our hotel room yet, and were in no shape for any activity…much less a highly active one such as rappelling. I didn’t even have to mention to them that we were in dire need of showers….I’m sure they could smell us. The guys were super nice and asked that I call the main office to see about changing our tour time. I called and the guy on the other end was very compassionate about our ordeal and said there was no problem to move us to the 12:30 tour time. Since we had already paid for this activity, this was the best news I had heard in a while.

We wolfed down some breakfast (yum, black beans & rice with eggs), then we headed straight to our room for showers and a nap…in a bed. Glorious.

We woke up four hours later feeling so much better and ready for some adVENture! So we headed to the Pure Trek Canyoning office for some lunch (more black beans & rice), then we jumped on a bus that took us to a 4x4 truck.

The group of five tourists and five tour guides transferred to the bed of the truck, which drove us about 20 minutes down a bumpy ranch road to their gear-up spot.

They loaded us down with rappelling equipment, and then we walked about five minutes to the first waterfall. At the top of the waterfall, we got our short course on how to rappel, and then it was our turn. We actually rappelled on the side of the first waterfall. Complete and Total Adrenaline Rush!

There were five rappels in all. Some were long and others were really long. Some were straight down with your face in the waterfall. On others we were able to jump to the outsides of the waterfall to at least keep our faces out of the waterfalls. (Can you tell I have an aversion to getting water in my eyes?)

When I was all drenched and cold, and walking to the next drenching I realized how glad I was that we had not done this at 7am that morning. The afternoon was much warmer, thus a much better experience.

After the five exhilarating waterfall rappels we hiked about 20 minutes up a mountain and back to the starting location where the truck was waiting to take us back to the bus. Overall, an amazing experience that I would absolutely do again. In fact, Bobby has a friend who does rappelling in the area, and we plan to join him as soon as the weather warms up in the spring.

After a rough days drive and an active afternoon of rappelling and hiking, we were already feeling that we deserved some relax time. So we headed to the hot springs at Tabacon resort. This place was amazing – so peaceful and relaxing, exactly what we needed. We started at (of course) the swim up bar where I had a few lava flows. YUM! Then when we decided to wander around and check out the rest of the hot springs. As we were closing our tab the bartender informed us that “Happy Hour” was about to start at the bar on the other end of the park. 2 for 1 -- Hellz Yeah!!!

Along the way to the other bar, we tested the warm temps of a few more hot springs and waited for HH to begin. After a few too many lava flows and too long in the hot pools I started feeling a little dizzy and, well….drunk. So we got out and cooled off and headed for the dinner buffet. Need Food. Los frijoles y el arroz más negros por favor.

After dinner we tried out the last three hot springs that we had not been in yet. After a little more of this relaxation, exhaustion of the two previous days events hit us again. We headed back to our hotel to pass out…in a real bed.

Day 3 – Tuesday 12/9/2008

After a full night’s deep sleep we woke up ready to truly turn this vacation into what it should be….a FUN adVENture.

As we packed up our suitcases, we noticed a funky smell in our clothes. Bobby recognized it as sulpher so we traced the funky smell back to the swimsuits we wore at the hot springs the night before. We packed those separate and tried to wash the sulpher stink out of those suits many times in the next several days…eventually we gave up and threw the stinky sulpher-saturated swimsuits away.

We headed down the volcano road to the zip line place. It was only supposed to be a 20 minute drive from our hotel. So why in the hell have we been driving 45 minutes?!?!?! I bring out my Espanol skills once again and ask a cute runner chick where the Sky Tram place is. She pointed back the way we came and told us dos bridges and then a BIG SIGN. Oh Hell…freakin’ big signs.

So backtracking we go….back to the BIG SIGN. Not sure how we both missed that. Whatev. So we get there just in time to miss our 7:30 zip line group. We had to wait around there and go with the 9:30 group. Ok, we can deal with this….at least we are not still in the car. Bobby is especially happy because he is getting crackberry service…something that he has not had for a couple of days. I noticed that the twitching subsided as soon as he heard the beeps for incoming emails.

The Sky Trek place was first-rate and the ziplines were a blast! The tour included 8 cross-sectional cables that together have a total length of 2.8 Km with a distance from 30 to 760 meters, and from 20 to 200 meters of height. The cables go above and through trees, where if the weather permits it, you might see the gorgeous Arenal Volcano. Due to clouds, we only saw the bottom half of the volcano.

We only got down the road about 5 minutes from the zip line place when we see a couple of cars stopped on the road and people taking pictures of something high in the trees. So of course, we got out to see. Howler Monkeys! So freakin’ cool! And, they were howling at each other!! I took tons of pictures and we watched them chase each other and swing from branch to branch.

Then we got back “on the road again” and headed down a different highway to our next destination: Manuel Antonio.

To Be Continued……

Coming up next…….more MONKEYS!!!

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