Blogs from Monteverde, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean

I landed in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. I had kept a few days just to recover from my long flight, see the city a bit which I did (it has some great museums, but since am into that much, I didn't do any). I explored San Jose like a local (well as much as I could), ate at Sodas (these are small local joints, tasty and cheap food, you will find mostly locals eating there). The dish that is most well known in Costa Rica is Gallo Pinto (pronounced as Gajo Pinto), which is made from rice, black beans, served with an egg (scrambled/poached) and can have add on of ham or other stuff you want and sweet plantain (tastes like banana, it's not banana though). Overall San Jose was a good stopover ... read more

After another rubbish night’s sleep in the rubbish bed, we get up and go for breakfast. The toxic pineapple juice makes a return appearance. He also brings a jug. I hear ‘agua para ti’ (water for you) so attempt to dilute my juice. Apparently, he said ‘agua para té’ (water for tea) and it is boiling water, which causes the fluorescent yellow liquid to bubble alarmingly. This morning is a toss up between another cloud forest reserve and Selvatura for a 3 km treetop walkway consisting of 8 bridges, the longest being almost 200 metres long. I’m terrified of heights and very much prefer to have my feet firmly on the ground, so my choice would be the cloud forest. However, my running club is doing a series of challenges this month, and one requires other ... read more

Today we have a 3 hour drive to Monteverde. First, time for a buffet breakfast at Coco Viquez; pancakes with plantain and pineapple again – yay! With a month of our trip left, I’m already starting to panic about sourcing my plantain habit when we return to Bournemouth. We take one last walk along the beach before checkout. After the chaos of the weekend and hoards of day trippers, it’s quiet today. The only evidence of the weekend crowds are the bags of garbage left behind being picked over by vultures. We join the handful of American snowbirds taking a morning constitutional. The sea is like glass this morning (a kind of greenish-black glass). It’s hard to believe I nearly got taken out by a wave yesterday. Once I have laid out yesterday’s laundry on the ... read more

We had decided that it would be in our best interest to not go zip lining or hike to cross the Hanging Bridges, so after breakfast at the hotel we hopped on a shuttle that runs within the hotel to go up to the canopy. Up at the canopy we hoped to see some different birds as there are birds that only live in the high elevations. Upon arriving at the canopy, the young man working there noticed our cameras and set about refilling the hummingbird feeder. As soon as he replaced the feeder, a variety of hummingbirds appeared. Sometimes as many a five at a time. Christian then came out and started looking with us to find other birds in the trees. After a time, he suggested that he might know where we could find ... read more

Monteverde - the cloud forest. Well... we didn’t see any clouds. I guess that’s what you get coming in the ‘dry’ season. On the bright side, we had beautiful vistas looking down into the valleys below. The guidebooks lead you to believe there’s wildlife everywhere and you can walk the trails and see all kinds of things in the forest. That’s my bad... because obviously I would laugh if people thought they could come to Canada and walk in a national park and see bear, moose and caribou casually strolling along. We took the advice of our host Jonathan at the B&B - he hadn’t led us astray yet! He recommended we not go to the cloud forest national park reserve. He said it’s busy there because everyone wants to go to the cloud forest. He ... read more