San José, where did you go wrong?

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Costa Rica is not in South America, so the blog should really have been "the adventures of TJ and the Beej in Latin America" but you´ll forgive us this poetic licence...

So continue our adventures, after a week of Level 2 Spanish courses in Buenos Aires for me and a week at home for her mother´s 60th for Taruna. We arrived in San Jose on the last day of May and managed to arrive within half an hour of each other. One would think that we had planned it all along... I had an uneventful flight from Buenos Aires with a stop over in Lima (the airport was very new but there was a smell of fish permeating the air...) and arrived in 25 degrees of heat and tropical rain.

What is there to say about San José!? The guidebooks did tell us not to expect very much of the city, and they were spot on. The first thing we noticed is the number of Americans here. I guess that Costa Rica is to them what Spain is to the Brits! The second thing is that all the American brands are here e.g. the ubiquitous McDonalds, KFC (there is even a statue of the colonel in one mall...), Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, the list goes on. We landed in San Jose, USA, really... The third thing is that the city ain´t pretty at all, and it reminds me of the capital city of Mauritius 20 years ago. It´s very gritty and there is not a whole lot to do! It´s however a great base to explore the rest of the country. And finally, the greenback is still king here and is used as a second currency when you run out of the funny money they have here, Colones. (One dollar buys you nearly 600 Colones, we can be millionaires here!).

The annoying thing here is that a lot of the locals are out to fleece you, like any other major touristy place I guess. Generally people are very friendly and quite helpful.

There are good sides to San José as well. It does have an amazing museum of precolumbian gold where we saw gold jewelry, pottery, and stone work of the aboriginal inhabitants dating from a thousand or so years. Definitely worth a visit. There is also a jade museum here, which we haven´t seen, but which contains the largest jade collection this side of the world.

The food here is really good. After the blandness of Argentinian cuisine for non beefeaters, it was refreshing to have spices, chillies and seafood. The local fare itself is somehow bland and basic, but there is a lot of international restaurants. We went to an Asian fusion place the first night and to a Peruvian restaurant the second. Both were excellent choices.

Yesterday we went white water rafting on the Pacuare river and today the Irazú volcano. Both were fantastic trips! More details and photos to follow.

Tomorrow we move on to La Fortuna and the Arenal volcano, and will be in a more scenic part of the country.

Hasta luego amigos.

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