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Published: September 24th 2010
Priorities
We saw this quite a few times on route to Quepos, houses surrounding a football field - coolAs I said last time just after midday on September 6th we crossed the very easy and organised border crossing of Paso Canoas into Costa Rica. I know we only spent 7 days in Panama and if we had more time I would have loved to have gone and visited Bocas del Toro and the San Blas Islands as well as Santa Fe (north of Santiago) and perhaps some of the Volcano areas or the town of David, but time is just not on our side and cut throat decisions had to be made and this was the case for much of Costa Rica also.
So arriving in Costa Rica we immediately jumped on a 20 minute bus ride to the town of Neily, where in turn we waited for 2 hours to then catch another bus, about 5 hours this one, to the beach town of Dominical. This meant, tragically, that we chose not to visit the Corcovado national park in the Osa peninsula. Tracy has been before and so has my friend Mark and both describe it as excellent in terms of the flora, fauna and the wildlife, especially at night when you hear the
Dominical
The beach shot! howler monkeys. Both also described it as very challenging as you have to carry all your stuff with you, this to be honest didn´t bother me so much, more the wet season weather did making the trails a lot harder to walk apparently along with being soaking wet, which I didn´t fancy, to top it off it requires three days to hike it and we just didn´t have the time, but it´s on the list of things to do in the future if we can.
Dominical Dominical is a pretty small, quiet, beach town, it has dirt and mud roads, it has a pretty nice beach with some stalls on it selling hammocks and other beach gear. The town has countless places offering surf lessons and for the most part it has quite a laid back hippy/backpacker feel to it, indeed only one hour after arriving sat at a bar eating some food and having a drink one of the locals was trying to sell me some illegal substances.
For our part though it had little to offer as I can´t surf because one, I have a broken arm and two, I tried before and I am
Woody woodpecker
We saw him at Manuel Antonio, he was demolishing the tree crap it, so Tracy I decided that it would be just that one night in Dominical for us and instead we would move on to the town of Quepos for the Manuel Antonio National Park. Before catching the bus to Quepos at mid day we did wander round Dominical, which took about 30 minutes, and took in the whole ambience of the place in day light, I could see how for many this place could be heaven with the beach and the surfing and the few bars and as I said it has very laid back feel and in some respects is very charming, but it wasn´t for me at this stage.
Quepos Two hours further north of Dominical is Quepos and in we arrive to the Wide Mouth Frog Hostel in the early afternoon. The hostel is pretty cool, it´s full of other young backpackers, it has it´s own pool, a pretty decent kitchen and wifi, but the owner is just taking the piss I think and raking it in. We paid $30 for a private room (bunk beds) without a bathroom. A private bathroom was an extra $10 and you could have air-con too, if you
Manuel Antonio
Toucan - Apparently quite rare to see them in the park wanted it, for, you guessed it, an extra $10. So $50 for your own room with private bathroom and air-con, for $30 we got, which we have since discovered is pretty common in Costa Rica (and Nicaragua), cold water showers. I mean we paid $15 in Dominical which got us a private bathroom with hot water, similar price in Boquete and a bit more Panama city, but then it is the capital, $30 the guy is having a giraffe. He told us he was leaving in 6 weeks to move to New Zealand, no doubt with the millions he has made on extortionate room rates, oh and he was an English man, though I can´t remember where from. Unfortunately, though the town is quite sizeable, pickings are extremely slim and the owner has got is sewn up as there are no other hostels in the main town, just hotels playing to the wealthy Americans who visit, so it´s Wide Mouth Frog or nothing, begrudgingly we paid it for two nights.
After the shock of the hostel price, Tracy and I did a little orientation of the town and had a walk round, we took in the beach and the
Manuel Antonio
Baby bats - They were really small main streets. The town as I said is pretty sizeable and though it is a beach town, it is chalk and cheese to Dominical, it has paved roads everywhere, its expensive and it doesn´t have a laid back feel to it. What it does have however is the Manuel Antonio national park next to it and the following morning that is off where we went, not before that night however having a couple of beers in a local sports bar in town to get over the shock.
Manuel Antonio National Park The Manuel Antonio national park must be only 15 minutes from Quepos. It cost us $10 each to go in and though a guide is not obligatory we sucked up the $30 fee and took one for the 2.5 hour trail. You could see the trail has been touristified, don´t think that is a word, but everything had been developed to make it as easy an experience for the tourist as possible. The walks, at least the main one, is wide and paved, such is the work that has gone into the place I could almost visualise a golf cart with some large or old passengers on
it travelling round the park as if it was almost a ride at Disneyland. In some respects I thought this ease and development took away from the whole experience and beauty of the park, that said though I did enjoy the tour with our guide and the beaches there were very beautiful.
I would recommend paying the price for a guide as they do spot a lot of animals and birds that you/we wouldn´t notice, on top of this they bring telescopes with them that they allow you to look through and take photos through, if you can manage it. This day we saw sloths, numerous white faced monkeys, squirrel monkeys, raccoons, agoutis, numerous birds including toucans and even a big boa constrictor snake. The highlight though, for me, had to be either seeing a woodpecker, which our guide didn´t spot but his telescope really did help to see it, or hearing, more than seeing though we did see them, the howler monkeys. They made quite the roar, it was very pleasing to be there to hear that.
After saying goodbye to our guide, we undertook another trail known as the Cathedral trail. This was much more like
Manuel Antonio beach
One of the beaches, very pretty a normal trail in that it was more of a mud trail, though it had a lot of black rubber steps, it wasn´t paved and was all covered over by the canopy of the trees. The purpose of the trail is that you supposedly get a few great birds eye views of Manuel Antonio park. Having undertook the trail I don´t think it was worth it as the views were not that great and with the heat we did it in we were sweating buckets, we did see a few cool animals though.
We stopped for lunch in the park back on the main trail and we had numerous raccoons and white faced monkeys try to get our food, indeed one raccoon did grab Tracy´s plastic bag whilst she was holding it, it frightened the life out of Tracy but the raccoon was out of luck as she had eaten all her food at this point.
We did jump in the Ocean at one point, again a raccoon attacked my bag whilst in the water, which was pretty warm and nice, certainly it helped cool me down but the current was pretty strong and at one point I
Cool Lizard
In the Manuel Antonio park went head over tit. Anyway around 3pm we decided to leave the park only to discover the main exit was under water at high tide and so we had to take a little row boat ride. The boat was pretty rickety to say the least and at one point the guy doing the rowing saw a big wave coming and jumped into the water to steady the boat, I am thankful for this as it might have toppled over, but I was soaked from head to toe from that wave, I might as well have swam across.
That evening we did little, basically we were relaxing and killing time, we watched it rain for a bit, ate dinner at the hostel and I had a few drinks at one of the sports bars in town where I got hit on by about 10 different hookers, it ceased to be fun and almost became a little worrying after the third time and it wasn´t even 9pm.
That was it for Quepos, at those prices we couldn´t afford to stay and so we grabbed another bus, which is becoming all to regular an occurrence again, this time at 7.30am to
White Faced Monkeys
They may look cute, but they were a big pain at our bags Puntarenas, from here at around 11.30am we grabbed another bus to the town of Liberia some 80km from the Nicaraguan border arriving at 2pm or so. Again we missed out a couple of key things in Costa Rica, on top the already mentioned Corcovado, we also decided not to visit the cloud forest of Monteverde. Again I was a little disappointed but as always time was against us and we visited a cloud forest, though not on the same scale by all accounts, in Panama at Boquete. The real thing we missed out and this time due to timing, as opposed to not enough time, of the full moon, was the Arribada in Ostional on the Nicoya Peninsula. The Arribada is the name given to an event where thousands upon thousands (literally) of Olive Ridley turtles (female) almost storm the beach like an army at the same time to lay their eggs, it only happens between September and December each year and between the three quarter moon cycle and full moon cycle, after full moon you have had it for two to three weeks until it gets round to the three quarter cycle again. Guttingly enough we only missed this
Powerfull Waterfall
Tracy at the second waterfall at Rincon de la Vieja by two days, but two was all it took and as I said it wouldn´t occur again for another two to three weeks and we couldn´t wait that long, but I am sure it would have been a magnificent thing to see.
Liberia & Rincon de la Vieja National Park So Liberia it was and the Volcanic park of Rincon de la Vieja was our destination the following day. What was left of this day was just spent doing chores, in this case ten days of laundry and sending my Tomography CD to the Doctor in Buenos Aires. Once again I was given another shock by DHL in that it cost me $95 to send a CD from Liberia, in Northern Costa Rica, to Buenos Aires, this Tomography has cost me near $700 and I still don´t know what it says about my arm.
Up bright and early once again for the forth day in a row and at 7.30am we were in a 4x4 car and off to that Rincon de la Vieja national park for our days hike. The drive to the park was a bit on the adventurous side as for 20km we drove
over some ridiculously pot holed bumpy muddy road, I was glad to get out of the car when we arrived. The key trail in this park is the 8km hike (16km round trip) to the volcano, which our hostel owner told us was normally a very challenging hike and also was closed anyway due to all the rain we had been having. Just to give you an idea of how bad the rain has been in Central America recently, there was a mud slide in Guatemala around September 8th that killed some 20 or so people in a bus and whilst people were trying to dig the bus out another mud slide occurred and killed another 30 people, unbelievable, this was in Northern Guatemala and we will probably get there in about 2-3 weeks from now.
Anyway back to the hike, the volcano trail being closed annoyed one of the two couples with us no end, to be truthful it was never going to happen in our case anyway, but I showed my disgust equally to appease the couple. Instead Tracy and I and the two other couples did a 5km (10km round trip) hike instead to the waterfall.
Rincon De la Vieja
In the forest, it was beautiful, but we were getting eaten alive and didn´t know it. Our hostel owner had described the hike as pretty flat. Well he too like the hostel owner in Quepos was having a laugh. The hike did have some flat bits but for the most part it was mud trails (and quite muddy at times) over many tree roots and quite big rocks, not to mention the few gushing streams we had to cross, plus it was pretty up and down and damn challenging I thought. If that was his idea of flat I am glad I couldn´t do the volcano hike which he described as challenging. The hike took a good four and a bit hours and for the most part it was under the canopy of trees and so very humid again, I was sweating something ridiculous. We didn´t really see any wildlife at all and about the most interesting thing we did see was a cactus growing like a tree and the very cool leaf cutter ants, oh and of course the waterfall. All in all for the views we saw and the waterfall at the end of it, which was impressive, I don´t think it was worth it.
At this point we had lunch and I
Cactus Tree
Weird, saw this in the Rincon de la Vieja park on way to the 1st waterfall did spot a couple of mosquito´s flying round whilst eating my sandwich, but my blasé attitude was that they won´t bite me and I didn´t need any repellent. Yeah that was some call, I got bitten around fifty times, honestly, and it itched something chronic for the next few days, serves me right I know.
Well anyway, thoroughly knackered from our 10km hike I was adamant that I wasn´t going to do the shorter 3km round trip trail as well. However we weren´t being picked up by our driver for another three hours, so it was either that or sit around getting bitten by the mosquitos, so the hike it was. Well this hike was worth it, we saw a coati, which is similar to a raccoon, we saw an equally impressive waterfall as the one I´d hiked 10km to see early, which annoyed me no end, we saw some thermal hot springs and we saw a miniature volcano, or least that´s what they called it. There were also some impressive rivers/streams to cross with bridges that were just a fallen down tree, a wee bit hairy that crossing I can tell you. Apparently there was also some bubbling
Lunch
This butterfly was not shy, notice the two mozzies on my face eating me! mud pools and a big lagoon but we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because we didn´t see them. The thing I remember most about the hike though was that half way round it started to rain and boy did it rain. This is the first time we had been caught out in these tropical rains but by the end of the trail we were soaked and this despite having ponchos and umbrellas.
Our driver picked us up at 4pm, I was completely soaked from the rain and shattered from the 13km of walking we had done and so by the time we got back to Liberia at just after 5pm Tracy and I agreed on an earlish dinner and an early night as we were both shattered and this was exactly what happened.
Peñas Blancas Following morning we were up reasonably early and once again on the move, this time on the 80km journey to the Nicaraguan border and the Costa Rican border town of Peñas Blancas. This turned out to be probably the worst border crossing we have seen, absolute chaos, trucks everywhere, people everywhere, border guards that were of no use what so
White Faced Coati
About the only animal we saw in Rincon de la Vieja, similar to a Raccoon. ever and queues that whilst not that long seemed to take an age to go down because the Nicaraguan border guards weren´t rushing for no one. Eventually we did get through but I wouldn´t wish the crossing on anyone. Anyway here endith Costa Rica and next time its Nicaragua.
Cheers
Patrick
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