Blogs from Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean - page 451

Mike’s been spending a lot of time with Jorge, our mechanic, working on the truck to get her ready for our adventure. The other day, Jorge’s friend Carlos stopped over and invited everyone to have lunch at his father’s house up the mountain. When he said “up” the mountain, that’s seriously what he meant. Carlos’ father, José Luis, works for the government-run telephone service. The company owns a piece of land on the very top of a mountain called Cerro Chompipe, where it has a telephone tower. José Luis’ job is basically to maintain the tower and ensure the technicians are doing their jobs. The company therefore allows him and his wife, Mirela, to live in a house right next to the tower on the top of the mountain. What an amazing view! They overlook the ... read more

We shared quality time at home after returning from La Fortuna and Volcan Arenal. Craig and Callista made brownies together. The kids and I made luminaries out of cans. I thought it was a nice idea but it will go into the “don’t try this at home” category. What kid wouldn’t like to bang a nail into a chunk of ice? The Mot-mot even decided Craig was worth getting to know and made quite a few appearances. What a treat! It was nice to have time to just hang out at home before we headed out again. Craig even walked up the hill and made friends with some of the tico kids his age. He went to a bonfire with them Sunday evening. I was both surprised and proud of how he jumped right in with ... read more

Well, I'm staying in Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast for the weekend...well, this is my last night here...I'm staying at place called Turtle Beach Lodge, which is absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend it. Tortuguero is a tiny tiny town that can only be reached by boat or light plane, as it is surrounded by water: the caribbean sea on one side and lagoons and rivers on the other side. Turtle Beach Lodge is also only accessible by water. On one side of the property is the sea, and on the other side the lagoons. There's jungle tours here, kayaking, boat tours, garden tours, hiking tours on Tortuguero Mountain and night watch tours for turtles. That's the reason I really wanted to come here: the turtles. Tortuguero is the nesting grounds for over 3,000 green turtles, along ... read more

We’ve bought a truck! All the time spent weeding through trucks that weren’t exactly right for us, has finally paid off. Narrowing our search down helped as well as we had done additional research on the 4Runners, Landcruisers and Pathfinders. We found that the Landcruisers, while great to look at, had very bad gas mileage and had extremely poor emissions. Pathfinders faired better however their long term reliability wasn’t as good as the Toyotas. 4Runners however seemed to be exactly what we were looking for as they had decent gas mileage in the 4 cylinder, had excellent long term reliability ratings for certain years (1992, 1994, 1995, 1996+) and had the lowest emissions for an SUV 4X4. We were sold. We immediately started to look at only 4Runners and only those who had good years for ... read more

On Saturday night we met 2 young expat couples to go to a festival/carnival in the local town. On first glance it looked like any other carnival with some dangerous looking rides, overpriced “tchotchkes” and games that are impossible to win. After a few minutes we began to notice that a lot of the stands were selling masks that some of the kids and many of the drunks were wearing. We found out that these masked “marauders” actually run through the festival during the daily parades beating onlookers with pig-bladders that they inflate with either water or air. Today we drove through town 10 minutes before the parade, and had the opportunity to witness this amazing ritual… Unfortunately Rachel was already feeling sick, and I am afraid that out her over the edge. Not only does ... read more