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Published: March 5th 2007
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So we left nicuragua and ometepe island and headed for costa rica at 5:30 in the morning. We took a ferry to get back to the mainland, and i should call it a chicken ferry, we were sitting inside the boat and we were getting loaded up with animals and all the pineapples you would ever want to eat. The boat looked like it was going to sink at any minute and i truly thought that was going to happen midway through our ride because there was water filling the bottom of the boat! but no one seemed alarmed, its just a regular thing in these parts. When we arrived on the mainland we didnt even dock, the boat pullled up alongside another boat and through a plank down and we had to skimmy across it! i thought i was going to die, we had to carry our bags and the locals were holding a large stick with their bare hands as a railing for you when you walked the plank, it was a bizarre scenario. When i ran across i think i squeeled, no i know i squeeled. We left the dock and our ride was waiting for us, but
as we were walking towards our van we were getting accosted by taxi drivers telling us that we should take a ride with them and not use a van, even though they wanted to charge 4x more then what our tour leader was going to pay the guys in the van. So what happens we get in our van and we try to leave and about 20 taxis surround us and box us in, we are stuck! The jerks wouldnt move, we had to call the police and wait half an hour and the drivers were just swarming around our van yelling incoherant things to us telling us that we are rich and that we should pay more money. So a cab driver finally moves his car because he realizes hes losing money just sitting around, so we finally get out just as the police show up. We then head to the nicuragua - costa rica border crossing. The following few hours are pure hell. We leave nicuragua and have to walk in the free zone which is inbetween nicuragua and costa rica, its a dirt road full of buses going back and forth. We are walking in plus 40
heat with our bags on our bags eating dust, we finally cross into costa rica and we have to wait in the passport line, its another line full of people waiting for a few hours to get their passport stamped to allow them entry. We finally get into the office and get this..... i get my passport stamped and i didnt think to double check the stamp, the officer had chosen me out of everyone in my tour group so write 30 days on my stamp. That means i have to be out of costa rica in 30 days and laura can stay for the regular 90. Instead of getting angry im taking this as a sign that i should go to panama sooner. If i wanted to get a new stamp i would have to leave costa rica for 72 hours which is a pain in the ass from where i am right now. So after all the passport business we finally get on a bus and our tour guide warns us that there are random passport checks and boy oh boy was he right. We had our passports checked 8 times that day, meaning the bus would have
to pull over and officers would get on checking each individual passport, i began to realize that they didnt care about ours meaning the white people i found out that they are looking for nicuraguans. Apparantly costa ricans arent a fan of their neighbours and alot of the tourist crime in costa rica is commited by nico's. That day we actually heard about a tourist bus that was held at gunpoint in costa rica by a 20 year old nico, what ended up happening is that the tourists beat him to death.......
When you enter costa rica from nicuragua you can immediately see the difference. Costa ricas prime industry is tourism, there are road signs here, there are garbages, people dont have bars on their windows, they recycle, and everything is so green here. It was such a sharp contrast, our ending point today was Monteverde. We finally arrived that evening after a 15 hour travel day. The one suprise with monteverde is that its damn cold! we were so hot all day on the bus and all we did was go uphill for an hour to monteverde and the climate changed drasticaly to the point that we were putting
on our warmest jackets, toques and runners.
The next day was one of the best days of my trip, i took the zip lines in the monteverde cloud forest!!! i was sailing like tarzan through the treetops yelling eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee it was so much fun, in total we went through 16 zip lines and it took about 2 hours. The first few were a bit nerveracking because if your not holding onto the zip line properly you can spin around and hurt yourself which is exactly what laura did, she let go of the line as she was going mach 3 and the guides were yelling at her! so after she does the line they look at me and say dont do what she just did haha....... the guides were funny there, they would tell us how to slow down if we wanted to but everytime i would try to slow down they would yell at me to go faster so i started to not use my hands as breaks and i began slamming into the ends of the zips and mach speeds and they never once told me to slow down. Going down the longest zip i was yelling like tarzan and not paying attention to my speed, all around me was virgin cloud forest and i was sailing above the tree tops, i didnt even notice the end of the line coming next thing i know i slam into it (good thing they have a safety catch) and i almost hit the tree, the guide high fived me and i looked at everyone else on my tour and their jaws were on the ground haha, apparently i was going really fast???
After the ziplines me and some fellow tourmates took a coffee tour which was very interesting. Costa rica makes like zero coffee,which suprised me. I think they produce 1% of the worlds coffee production, the climate in costa rica is no longer ideal for growing coffee. A few years ago they lost 70% of our production because of a fungal disease. Seeing the whole process was really interesting and does everyone out there know that lighroast contains more caffiene then dark roast and that espresso contains the least amount of caffiene! i bet you didnt! thats your fun fact for the day!
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