Monkeys, Volcanoes, Bike Rides and Snakes

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Crossing Into Costa Rica

To cross into Costa Rica we needed to take a boat from Bocas to Almirante on the mainland, then a short taxi to the bus-station (we were in fact taken to the wrong bus-station, but our bus passed it, fortunately), then a bus to the border town of Changuinola. It had been pouring with rain for most of the journey but was thankfully clear and sunny by the time we got to Changuinola.

This border crossing was one of the more interesting we've experienced in Central America. Notwithstanding the problems at the immigration office, the actual crossing was quite fun. It involved walking across a dilapidated old bridge that crosses a big brown river, making sure to step over the big holes, and not into them and consequently into the river. The bridge is wide enough for one automobile, but takes traffic coming from both directions, as well as all of the walkers.

The chap at the Panamanian immigration office really did not like our passports and the fact that they had no entry stamp in them. Consequently he refused to exit-stamp them. We persisted and persisted, as we knew that it would only lead to more issues at the other side (as the chap actually told us this), but he wasn't budging on his position. Luckily there was a local guy there that spoke both Spanish and English, which was fortunate as we had trouble understanding the official's Spanish, and he was very helpful in sorting it all out. It didn't help that the official got very angry and was shouting (not at us, we don't think - all we could make out was 'I'm hungry! I'm hungry!!' - perhaps it was near his lunch break and he couldn't be bothered with the hassle), but after quite some time of sitting in the office waiting and not knowing, he gave in, once we had provided photocopies of all our documents for him, and we were off and out of Panama. We had absolutely no problems at the Costa Rican border.

Puerto Viejo

We took a shuttle bus into a town called Puerto Viejo with two Chilean girls, two Argentinian guys, the possible girlfriend of the driver and her pal. After waiting for around an hour to set off, and stopping while the driver bought lots and lots of plantains, we were in Puerto Viejo, our first Costa Rican stop.

Puerto Viejo is a small town on the Caribbean coast full of American expats running hostels and restaurants, backpackers (the fire-spinning dread-locked kind) and surfers. The locals seemed to form a minority here, and as such it is a bit of a strange place. It does have some beautiful bays and beaches north and south of it, and some jungle immediately inland full of wildlife. Thus we spent our time here cycling up and down the coast, stopping for swims and snorkels in the sea, spotting monkeys and toucans in the jungle, and trying not to eat and drink too much as this was twice the price it was in Panama. We also saw our first sloth here, which was fairly easily spotted as it was asleep, with it's sloth baby, up a tree in the courtyard of the place that we were staying. Not quite in the rainforest, but it was a wild sloth!

Alajuela and Volcan Poas

Costa Rica has a lots of very interesting-sounding places to visit, and a highly developed tourist infrastructure. But due to the cost of everything here compared to the other countries in Central America, the time that we had left (as we have bought flight tickets home), and other travellers' experiences we decided not to dwindle, and to pick our destinations carefully from a choice of many. Therefore, after leaving Puerto Viejo we spent the next two nights in the plain town of Alajuela in the central highlands.

Alajuela is Costa Rica's second biggest city, after the capital San Jose (though only has a population of 160,000 according to our guidebook), and doesn't have a lot to offer in itself, other than being very close to the airport, and very close to an easily visited volcano, Volcan Poas.

Poas can be driven up, and you can park your wagon 300 metres away from the edge of the crater. It is volcano tourism made very easy. We took the first bus of the day, but only arrived mid-morning as the driver stopped at a souvenir shop for a very long time (probably getting kickbacks). After the very short walk to the crater, we were greeted with the fantastic site of 30 tourists' backs and a wall of white cloud. It was quite a sight. It didn't actually seem as busy as it could be, and there was plenty of space to commandeer for when the clouds finally parted (as they did roughly every five minutes, before blanketing us all again), and the view was quite incredible. Looking down into the crater, past the colourful foliage lining it, you see a barren and craggy expanse 320 metres down (I didn't measure this, the figure is in the guidebook) with a steaming emerald lake sat towards the back. There are signs here to remind you that this is a volcano and to walk down into the crater would be very silly indeed. After admiring the view we walked the forest trail and admired the many birds in the trees up there at the altitude of 2700 metres. The volcano has a 40 year active cycle, and is still very much active, with sulphuric emissions and whatnot, and often it is closed to visitors for safety reasons. But all was calm and well at the volcano when we visited.

In Alajuela we finally posted our passport applications, after a very long treasure hunt (the DHL office being the treasure - very well hidden it was too, in the back of a department store!), power cuts in the DHL office and more passport photos (Sarah's ones were creased, and mine had red eye, so we got more here, but they were too small, so we got some more that we hope are ok! If anyone wants any pictures of us looking like busted drug smugglers, (there are no UK style check your hair in the mirror booths, but a person with a digital camera in a sweaty room!) we have lots spare! The standard is 8 photos each time for some reason...).

Osa Peninsula

Next up was Golfo Dulce and the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica's 'mini-Amazon' in it's South East, not far from the Pacific coast Panamanian border. We had heard that, as well as being the wettest place in the region, the wildlife here is in abundance and incredibly diverse, and the setting absolutely beautiful. There are only a handful of small towns on the peninsula, as well as the national park which covers a lot of the interior and one coast.

It being a bit far away, we only managed to get so far as a town called San Isidro el General before we had to stop for the night (Costa Rica has a lot less buses than every other country we've visited, we think possibly because people are more well off, and therefore more people have cars). It poured with rain here pretty much the whole time, but I don't think we missed a whole lot by not seeing the town, so we watched the cable TV in our hotel room (American programs with Spanish subtitles - learning Spanish even as we relax!), enjoyed a nice cheap (for Costa Rica) rice and beans dinner and set off early the next morning on a painfully slow, hot and bumpy 6 or 7 hour bus ride to Puerto Jimenez, the main town on the peninsula.

We spent one day and night in Puerto Jimenez. It rained massively for the second half of the day, turning the roads into rivers, but we did get to see and hear lots of scarlet macaws in the trees, and have a nice walk the next morning with two dogs that latched on to us. We walked through the mangroves spotting lots of red and yellow crabs, through a small village with lots of cows and other dogs on the periphery of the jungle, and back along the black sand beach, replete with hopping black vultures, all the while being careful not to tread on the absolutely thousands of crabs scurrying around.

We wanted to go next to a small town in the interior called Dos Brazos del Rio Tigre, however the bus we were waiting for never came. We decided to take a different bus 4km out of town to the turn off and attempt to hitch-hike. We had a companion for this, a chap who lives in the town and wanted to get back. However it is a very small place at the end of a road, so the hitch-hiking idea did not work too well. In fact, after waiting for 4 hours, the pick-up truck-bus came the other way, about to head into town to pick up the punters and head back again, so we got on his truck and were soon back in Puerto Jimenez. It was a long and hot four hours, but perhaps we gained something in the way of patience. Anyway, about an hour before it got dark we were in the very small village of Dos Brazos. We wanted to stay at a place here called Los Mineros as it was too late to walk the 45 minutes through the jungle to the only other option in the area. However Los Mineros was empty. No people, no chairs at the tables, the only sign of life being an outside light on, a few dogs, a cat and a pair of shoes. But no-one around. With it getting dark in the small village we found ourselves in, with no option to return to town, or to stay anywhere else, we sat and pondered our situation. We hadn't come up with any feasible ideas when the proprietor came bounding in, much to our relief.

Los Mineros started out life as a miners camp (the area was not long ago a big gold-mining area, but due to the ecological devastation caused, this has now been banned on any large scale), hence the name ('the miners') complete with bar, brothel and cells for unruly miners. The two cells are now a toilet room and a shower room, and the brothel rooms are rooms 1 to 4 (we were in a small hut, built since). Jimmy (or possibly Johnny), a local man that frequented this place in his youth (in fact losing his virginity to a lady of the night in room number 2 at the age of 12 as he recollected to us) bought it with his French fiancée later when the mining had ceased, turning it into accommodation and a bar/restaurant. He was a really lovely man who made us dinner (some fancy kind of rice and a steak of some sort...) and sat with us, talking into the night. It was very nice food, unfortunately we had already had dinner and steak isn't so good for vegetarians, but Sarah was delighted to have a second dinner!! He was very excited as his fiancée was returning the next morning after a month in France.

The next day we undertook two hikes. The first entailed following the river upstream a good many kilometres through the jungle, passing a couple of gold panners trying their luck in the river, and crossing the river (at it's deepest it was up to our thighs) around 30 times in total. The scenery was absolutely beautiful here, and we had a real sense of being off the tourist trail. At times we thought we weren't on any trail at all! This hike had been recommended by Jimmy, as was the second, which took us up an incredibly steep hill onto some private property and into a dead end. We're not sure what went wrong there. So we set off on another, found on the map of the other accommodation option in the area. For this we were joined by a lovely but very smelly and flea-ridden dog, that due to physical similarity to my parents' dog (not the fleas and the smelliness of course!), and our present location, we named Jungle Harvey. He followed us around the village that afternoon and evening, through the jungle, up hills, walking along rivers, down a stream that led to the top of a waterfall and along the river to the base. I don't think he gets much love from anyone as he really took a shine to us. It started to pour with rain later that evening, so perhaps because of this Jungle Harvey slept on the wooden veranda outside our door of our cabin. However when we woke up the next morning he was at the foot of our bed!

We saw three snakes in total that day, the first one of which was huge, and being held by a local guy who had just overtaken us on the path (I'm kind of glad that he did!), the second of which I discovered while walking a few metres behind Sarah, it's head squashed but still writhing. We're not sure what happened but you can only guess! The third of which was quite small and scurried in front of us late in the dark and rainy night. The other notable thing about this area was the incredible cacophony made by the different frogs once it got dark. It was like a million different science fiction films playing at once in surround sound.

Leaving the next morning, Jungle Harvey followed us to the pickup-truck bus, then followed us in as we got in! We were the only passengers, so after getting him out and beginning to drive off, he ran after us and followed us for what we worked out must have been around 8 km! It was very sad to see him follow us for that long. Every corner we rounded we felt he had given up and gone home, but after not very long his ginger frame was back in the picture running towards us.

Our next stop was Bahia Drake (or 'Drake Bay' so named because Sir Francis Drake came here in 1579). To get here we took a bus out of Puerto Jimenez (after our truck bus from Dos Brazos into town) to a small town called La Palma. There we took a truck to the turn off for Bahia Drake, intending to try our luck again at hitch-hiking, but knowing that there was a bus scheduled for 2 hours later! However, our luck was in, as a very nice family from Los Angeles picked us up. We had been waiting about an hour and a half (another very quiet road), drying our shoes and socks in the sun and throwing stones at a plastic bottle on the other side of the road when they stopped. They asked us where we were going and if it was nice there. I said that it was supposed to be so they decided that they would visit and invited us in for the ride. The road was unpaved and really tested their rental car. There were many rivers to ford as well. After driving for over an hour we were around 5 km out when we reached a very wide and much deeper river (up to mid-thigh), which stopped us in our tracks. To deep to cross in the car, we were stuck. However, the bus was not far behind, as was much better equipped for the crossing. So we all got in the bus for the last 20 minutes or so. However, this bus was waiting at the town for 10 minutes before returning, and was the last of the day, so unfortunately the American family only had 10 minutes in the town.

Drake is more of a village than a town, built up the sides of a steep hill surrounding a black sand beach that semi-circles round a very pretty bay. Jungle surrounds the village and the wildlife is supposed to 'spill' into the town. We certainly saw lots more Scarlet Macaws. We stayed here at a place where the chap let me borrow his guitar, the first time I'd played since January 18th! It was emotional...

One day here we undertook what turned out to be a very very long hike along the coast. It involved walks through the jungle (but never far from the sea), and across lots of wild beaches. We also had to pass through a rather swanky resort. The area was really beautiful and we saw lots of white-faced capuchin monkeys, howler monkeys and even a pizote! A pizote, properly named as a long-nosed coatamundi, is part of the raccoon family. They may be as common as mosquitoes, I have no idea, but it was the first one that we'd seen and a lovely looking creature. Unfortunately we were adopted part of the way by another dog, one that really did not like monkeys! It's snarls and growls made them al scamper back into the trees. At one point on this walk Sarah thought that the mud-bog looked like a good place to walk and nearly got swallowed up by it! But she is thankfully fine, she just has rather muddy boots and trousers.

It rained so much here in the evenings I thought someone had picked up the bay and turned it upside down above us. The steep roads turned into fast-flowing rivers and if you ventured out you were soaked to the skin in a second. This also made the water in the bay really murky. You would swim and not see your hand an inch below the surface of the water. It was so murky that should you be having a conversation about crocodiles and hammerhead sharks while floating around (these are plentiful nearby apparently) and something that later turns out to be Sarah's outstretched foot pokes you in the murky water, you could get quite a nasty fright. Theoretically.

San Jose

Finished with our adventures in this 'mini-Amazon', we headed north. We took a boat out of Bahia Drake, out of the bay and into another, through some very tangled and dense mangroves, then up a river surrounded by jungle for most of the way to a town called Sierpe. From here we took a bus to our old pal San Isidro el General, waited around a bit and then caught another bus to the capital San Jose. Here we stayed a night in a big backpacker-tastic hostel where they ring a bell at the bar at a certain time and for an hour the jagermeister shots are halfprice. However since we were in the habit of waking up at the crack of dawn, hiking all day then heading to bed early on exhausted from the walking we did not drink a lot (or in fact any) of the jagermeister shots here. There was however a huge free-standing fan in our room that allowed us to dry our walking boots out very well. We didn't stick around though. We went to a vegetarian restaurant for breakfast, one of the only things capital cities are good for round here (though we stuck with the classic 'gallo pinto' - fried rice and beans with fried plantain, though this time with soya-ham, cheese and salad) and got on a bus pretty swiftly for La Fortuna, a town up in the north of Costa Rica.

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Photos

There It Is!!
Volcan Poas Crater Lake

Vulture At The Beach
Puerto Jimenez

White Faced Capuchin Monkey
Bahia Drake

Sierpe River Landing
...and a bit of Costa Rican wisdom