Travels

The weeks leading up to Christmas 2024 were tiring, especially for Sarah (whose work was hard and long).  I had a few medical things to take care of, which is par for the course for me at the moment.  I'm refusing to let myself believe it is down to old age!  

Sarah had Christmas parties and concerts, Christmas art at school and Christmas decorations to put up.  I had a staff gathering at one of our administrator's houses, which was nice.  We also had some Christmas events with the church and with the folks from the Chat Cafe.  It all seemed strange to be celebrating Christmas in the sunshine - I know I've done it a lot in the past, but I'm clearly out of practice.

Christmas is a big deal in Costa Rica.  It is the end of their academic and financial year, things really slow down - schools and universities close for a long holiday and the weather is (meant to) be really good.  I say 'meant to' because this year there has been an unusually high amount of rain. 

We took advantage of the long holiday and did a great trip around the south and west of the country.  

We got up at the crack of dawn on the 22nd December and headed (via Uber) to the bus station to go Monteverde.  We arrived and were worried because there was a really long queue and we thought we only had about 15 minutes before our bus was due.  We edged our way to the front of the queue to get through the ticket barrier, only to be turned away - we'd arrived an hour earlier than we needed to!

After a four hour bus ride, we arrived up in the mountains in Monteverde.  This is a nice little town on the edge of the cloud forest.  The highlights here were doing a night walk (where we saw lots of birds sleeping in the trees, and some bullet ants! (so called because their bite is meant to be as painful as getting shot)), and having a walk across the hanging bridges which are suspended high up in the canopy in the spectacular forest.  You really get a bird's eye view from the bridges.  There wasn't much in the way of wildlife to see here - except in one cafe in the forest where the owner had suspended bird feeders around the place, filled them with sugar water and had managed to attract a lot of hummingbirds.  The birds were so intent on getting to the sugar water that you could stand inches from them as they were feeding.  The forest is the highlight, and it is fantastic. 

The other thing that quite literally hits you in the face in Monteverde is the fact that it is in the clouds.  This means that every few minutes a cloud passes, bringing its very fine rain (patas de gato (cat's paws) as they say here), then clears again leaving you in warm (not hot because of the altitude) sunshine.  You get used to it after a while.

After a few days in Monteverde, we got into a shuttle bus and headed to Manuel Antonio.  If you've been keeping up with the blogs, you'll remember that I've been here before - so, for once in my life, I had the opportunity to guide Sarah around somewhere.  

We had a beautiful view of the sea across a lush green valley from our hotel balcony.  One morning I was in the room getting ready and Sarah called me out to the balcony because she'd just seen two scarlet macaws flying across the valley.  By the time I'd limped there (sciatica still playing up), they had gone.  I was gutted (but less gutted later - keep reading).  The main thing to do in Manuel Antonio is to get the local bus down to the national park and go for a walk around there to see the birds and animals.  It is a lovely forest again (a rain forest rather than a cloud forest this time).  The other thing to do here is to just go and soak up the sun on one of the lovely beaches and we had good weather for a swim.  

I mentioned earlier that this is meant to be a season of good weather.  Well, we got caught out in the rain more than once - and when it rains here, it really means business.  So we got a bit damp on a few occasions.  When the sun comes out, though, its about 30c, so things dry quickly.

When we started to plan this trip (a long time ago), I read a book called 'Monkeys Are Made Out Of Chocolate'.  It is about an American guy who took over a farm and decided to rewild it to help look after the local animals and plants.  The farm is at a place called Hacienda Baru, and this was our next stop on our trip.  It is a bit in the middle of nowhere, and so it took a while to work out which buses to get, but we eventually managed it.  When you arrive there are about ten rooms, some are independent cottages (like ours), others are just a room.  There's a small swimming pool, a dining area, and the rest is as it should be - natural and wild.  

We went on two walks from here.  One in the evening, and one in the early morning.  We saw some interesting birds - lots of black iguanas, a snake, a mud turtle, agouti and a few pecary (wild pig).  It wasn't the most spectacular wildlife sighting (that's still to come), but it was very pleasant nonetheless.  By this stage of the holiday we were feeling like we had been fully immersed in nature, which is a great stress reliever and we were in full holiday mode.

Another fun thing at Hacienda Baru was the waitress.  She was very friendly and didn't seem to care much about anything other than having a good time and giving her customers a good time.  On the first night that we ate at the restaurant, we didn't realise that the pricing of the food and drink meant that we were automatically buying into a deal whereby we could order a main course and cocktail for a set price.  We ordered the cheapest beers and a plate of food each, only to have the deal explained to us as we were paying.  I said that this wasn't really fair as we'd have gone for a nicer drink if we'd known.  The waitress, bless her socks, let us have a free cocktail each and gave us a massive discount on the food by way of apology.

The second night we went to the restaurant (there were no other places to eat in the area), she made sure we knew what the deal was - a choice of any cocktail and a plate of food for a set price.  She then went away and brought us two large cocktails that she'd chosen for us.  Then, once we'd drunk those, she went and poured us two large glasses of quite nice wine, and then, at the end of the meal, she gave us a shot of liquor each, too!  All for the set price!  

We woke up the next morning with slightly sore heads.  We got into a shuttle bus and headed for a place further down, close to the Panama border, called Sierpe.  There's not much to do here apart from getting a boat out to Drake Bay.   

This trip involved a 45 minute boat ride in a smallish speedboat, down a wide river, past the mangroves and the brown boobies, into the open sea (which was quite choppy, and not sciatica-friendly), and eventually to Drake Bay.  The boat stopped about 20m from the shore and everyone jumped out and waded to the land.  Good job we'd been advised to wear sandals, or our hiking boots would have been very wet!

Drake Bay is a small town that seems to be purely set up for tourists.  There are no real roads here (hence the boat), and a steep, muddy track leads from the coast up into the town.  Our accommodation was on one of the corners of this twisty path and had a great view across the bay.  The hotel came with the added bonuses of two gorgeous, really friendly dogs and a balcony with a fantastic view.  We went on a lovely walk along the coast and it was here that I finally got to see some scarlet macaws.  They are hard to miss, being large, colourful and noisy.  

We spent a day snorkelling around a nearby island here, too, and were fortunate enough to see lots of colourful fish, singrays, green turtles and white tipped reef sharks.  It was a fun trip, but there were a lot of tourists and you had to keep one eye on the fish and one eye on the other tourists, or you'd keep banging into people.  It was sad to see that there had once been some nice coral here, but it had lost its colour and been damaged, unfortunately.  Still, the fish seemed to be alive and well.

The real reason why most people head to Drake Bay is that it is the launch point for trips into the nearby rainforest area known as Corcovado Park.  This, apparently, is the most unspoilt area of Costa Rica.  

Getting to Corcovado involved taking another boat from Drake Bay for about 40 minutes to the beach of Corcovado.  It was bumpy again - my sciatica really doesn't like bumps.  The boat dropped us off a few metres out from the land and we jumped into the sea and waded to shore.  

Corcovado Park is a very slick operation.  There are 250 tourists a day allowed into the park, and some only come for a day trip.  We were there for a night at the Ranger's Station.  This is a well-organised area with two large dorms, each bed with its own mosquito net (which is very necessary).  There is a large dining room, cold showers and a small terrace overlooking the park.  It is all highly regimented.  Dinner at 6, lights out at 8, up at 5.  Don't be late.  Stand here, eat this, drink that, put your plates there... we were kept in order throughout the stay by our very passionate, knowledgeable and military style guide.

We did four 5km(ish) walks into the forest.  Well, Sarah did, I sat one of them out as my leg was playing up.  The forest floor is really muddy in places and you survive getting a very wet foot by hopping from tree stump to rock to tree root and trying to keep your balance.  Fortunately, this was only in a few places.

The animal and bird life here is quite spectacular.  We saw a tapir, which was sleeping under a bush.  This is a really rare animal (only 4,500 left in the whole world).  We also saw all four types of monkey that are found in Costa Rica (squirrel, spider, howler, cappucin), loads of birds, agouti, pecari, sloth, crocodile, cayman, iguana, and, of course, the beautiful forest.  

The whole holiday felt like it lasted a long time (as we packed so much in), but when we got back to San Jose (very tired, muddy and thankful for decent showers, less humidity and our own bed) we realised we still had over a week's worth of holiday left!  We did some more interesting things with the rest of our free time, but more about that in another blog.