Sorry guys, for some reason our blog for Costa Rica didn't appear...so here it is...a little late I know. We were in Costa Rica before Ecuador and before Galapagos....SORRY!
Costa Rica - San Jose and Manuel Antonio
We arrive in San Jose on Easter Sunday (at Last!), the place was a ghost town… We spent the next day organizing what we were going to do in Costa Rica, swimming in the hostels’ pool, and shopping – Steph replacing her scratched and busted sunglasses and me replacing my worn through thongs – after only 3 months!
Manuel Antonio National Park
The next morning we head by bus to a beach town called Manuel Antonio, with Costa Rica’s smallest National Park of the same name. We stayed for 4 days. We arranged a guided tour of the national park and a jungle night tour. Our hostel was really nice, set in some thin jungle…animals are everywhere. Butterflies, squirrels, lizards (including some very big green iguanas), and all sorts of birds. A really nice setting. The hostel was spread out down a hill that ended up in a nice pool at the bottom. The view from the pool was pretty nice too! You could see jungle to one side, down through the hills to the ocean in front and some lazy goats and cows wandering around on the other.
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| We have had worse views for $20 a night.... |
The national park was awesome. The guides carry around these bad ass telescopy things (or as Steph wanted me to write… awesome telescopes) that enable you to see the animals really well and you can even put the camera lens up to them to take photos…awesome.
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| Toucan through the telescope...not bad |
We got to see what we came here for - TWO AND THREE TOED SLOTHS AND TOUCANS…..all are crazy looking animals. We were really glad we took a guide, as we were tossing up about whether or not to. We would of seen very little, definitely not what we went to see. We would be walking along talking to the guide and he would casually set up the telescope and have a perfect view of an animal that you could hardly see with your bare eyes….money well spent! We ended up seeing 5 or 6 sloths, including a couple with babies – they are the strangest looking things…They are nocturnal so they were mostly inactive, apart from when one of the babies climbed away from its mother, so the mother had a bit of fancy maneuvering to do, albeit at a snail’s pace.
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| Three toe sloth |
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| We saved this tiny little turtle from a hungry lizard |
We were due to travel back to San Jose on Friday, and found out by chance that you needed to buy bus tickets the day before, so, off we hopped to Quepos (the small town neighboring Manuel Antonio) to book tickets. We were second in line and we waited, and waited, and waited…After some pointing, nodding and smiling we eventually we worked out that the computer was not working and we would not be able to buy the tickets…. “Hay un problema con la computadora” . We seem to be having some trouble with buses. We decide to come back the next morning to do it.
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| Healthy dinner in San Jose, we found beer on tap for the first time!! |
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| Strange Costa Rican architecture |
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| Red roof? |
We made a quick trip back in a taxi to get some late lunch before our night jungle tour, at a place called El Avion (the plane) and was literally a restaurant/bar built on top of this ex US military plane…interesting. There was also a place called something like ‘the cart’ which was built around a train carriage… don’t ask me how either the plane or the train got there!
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| El Avion - strange |
The jungle night tour was also really good. Our guide Bryan was lovely. We saw squirrel monkeys, a caiman, an owl, heaps of different frogs and lizards, and all sorts of creepy crawlies – tarantulas, horse killing spiders, wolf spiders, scorpions, crazy mean looking spider scorpion things, centipedes… it was soo humid in the forest at night it was like walking through a massive spider filled sauna. We all came out very hot, muddy and sweaty!
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| Steph likes picking things up off the ground...She is not strangling it just avoiding it's razor sharp mouth blades |
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| A Tarantula and our guides finger |
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| Scary looking Scorpian Spider thingy... |
Later that night we received an email from our Galapagos dive cruise operator telling us that the boat had some minor engine trouble and the cruise would be starting from a different island . No biggie, luckily we had to book the Galapagos flights through a travel agent so a few emails later we had changed the flight…Was a blessing in disguise as it meant the operator would pay for transfers to and from the airport, and we would spend the night somewhere with a little more to do.
A little later that night we received another email telling us that one of the three Ecoventura fleet boats (the 2nd cruise we were to be on) had run aground and would be out of service for at least a month – we were due to be on one of the three boats but we did not know which one. At the time we didn’t think much about it as it was one of three boats and we were cooking dinner after returning from the jungle night tour. I shot off an email to our travel agent to confirm what was happening.
We woke up early the next morning and flew down to the bus station, stumbled through some bad Spanglish and ended up with tickets for the 2:30pm back to San Jose. We checked out and spent the rest of the afternoon on email after we had found out we were due on the boat that was now out of service. What are the odds of both boats we booked on to have problems!!!! Anyway, we eventually sorted it out and ended up with a massive upgrade to a fancy boat that costs over $5000 a week!!! Nice…….I even have to wear trousers to dinner!
