This Holiday season meant another year out of the country, but I got to travel to some amazing places.I spent the first part of the trip in Alajuela, Costa Rica, which is a small city. It's actually closer to the national airport than San Jose but a lot nicer, so it made a great starting off base. I got to have my favorite "refresco de mora" which is a somewhere in between a juice and a smoothie and my flavor of choice, blackberry. There is a beautiful church there with really interesting architecture.
The next day we headed off to the Los Angeles cloud forest preserve. The views were amazing and we hiked in the protected forest. We saw some pretty birds, coati's, an agouti, and very neat plants. They also had hummingbird feeders near the lodge, and we must have spent 2 hours watching them and trying to take pictures of all the different species. There were so many of them just zipping around.
After that we moved onto La Fortuna which sits right near the Arenal Volcano. While the views are spectacular, the town and atmosphere are so touristy. People there are cut-throat for business and will try to do anything to get you to book an overpriced tour. But we managed to avoid that drama and did our own hikes. We went to a huge waterfall that you had to climb about 15 minutes downhill to reach the base where you could swim in the ice cold water. It made for a refreshing dip after the 2 1/2 km hike uphill we took to get there!
The next day we had to figure out how to get to the border of CR in order to cross into Nicaragua. It was a bit tricky because normally you take a bus all the way from San Jose but we were trying to cross over from the north. After a taxi, bus, taxi again, our taxi driver managed to get us on a international bus which meant we could make it into Nicaragua that day (for a price of ourse). This was worth it because we saved about 5 hours waiting at the border which was swamped with people trying to get home for the holidays.
No comments:
Post a Comment