Blogs from Alajuela, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean - page 10

Sunday 1st We arrive at Lima airport around 10.30pm and it takes another hour to clear customs and immigration. Another lot of forms filled in only to be thrown away without even being looked at. I'm getting pretty fed up with the unnecessary forms. We try to find out how to get to our over night hotel the airline are providing but no one knows where we should go ! Eventually we are told to just cross the road and book into the Ramada Hotel. The airline have reserved us a room but without any instructions for us. By now it's 12.30 and we're dead tired and fall into bed. Up at 7.30 and after a quick breakfast it's back to the airport for the flight to San Jose in Costa Rica. We get a shock ... read more

Today I'm on my own again and sadly don't get a lie in. I have to be ready for my tour bus which is picking me up at my hotel at silly o'clock (5.55am!). I find that I'm the first to be picked up and we go on a tour of San Jose's central and outlying hotels picking up a full bus by the time we get to the last one - a huge and very posh looking hotel near the airport. Unfortunately it's raining which doesn't bode well for a good view of Poas volcano, but it's early yet so the weather might change. I get chatting to a few of my fellow passengers. There's one guy from the UK who is going on a 5 days per country trip around all of Central America ... read more

We are off on our first snowbird type holiday-one month in Costa Rica.Day one was the usual SSI get up early for the ferry gig, then to the airport and wait 4 hours… We got in to Phoenix about 630 PM and shuttled to the fabulous Econolodge-very handy place and excellent value. In the morning, I got three great bird shots with the new camera (Eurasion Collared Dove, Fan Tailled Grackle and a Northern Mockingbird) After the non-gourmet breakfast, it was back to the airport to catch the 1.10 PM US Air flight to San Jose. (5 more fun filled hours) The new air travel scam is to sell you a reasonably priced ticket, then hammer you with luggage fees. We paid about $800 each for the return tickets and then had to pay another $112 ... read more

Driving in Costa Rica was proving to be a frustrating experience. The distances were short – Costa Rica was about the size of North Georgia – but the travel times were long. We were learning that if Google Maps said it should take two and a half hours that we needed to double it and if a Costa Rican said it should take an hour and a half it would be more like four. The trouble was that the posted speed limits were slow and the roads were uniformly bad. There were some nice paved roads, but even they were clogged with traffic and slowed by frequent towns and even more frequent school zones. There were unmarked speed bumps, absurdly aggressive drivers, potholes the size of small cars – we were driving a small car – ... read more

We had another lovely river journey leaving Tortuguero for about an hour and a half up a narrow river to Pavona where we met our mini bus for the journey to La Fortuna (about 3 hours). We passed some beautiful scenery a combination of jungle, valleys of green fields either with cattle or banana, sugar cane or coffee. The sky was black and moody but we didn´t have too much rain, just enough cloud to cover the volcanoes. La Fortuna is a fairly small town (about 5000 people) close to Volcan Arenal which erupted violently in 1968 killing 88 people. Until this eruption local people living here didn´t know it was a volcano and thought it was a mountain, it was called mount Arenal at the time and had never been scientifically studied. The sides of ... read more