Blogs from Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean - page 455

In the morning we headed out to do the Sky Trek zip-line, which is one of the popular activities here in Costa Rica. A zipline is a series of cables high in the jungle that you slide down in a harness attached to a pulley (also known as a flying fox). The cables go through and above the canopy of the cloud forest and you fly past the trees at high speed. This was a lot of fun. The longest cable was over 700m long - quite impressive. After that we did the Sky Walk, which is a hike through a series of suspension bridges that go about the cloud forest. This was about the time that it starting heavily raining in true tropical style. By now we had learned that you don´t go anywhere without ... read more

Nous sommes arrivee a San Jose Ce soir vers 22h00, un peu tard a mon gout. Une dame qui a une auberge (Hotel Elvis) a un coin de rue de l arret d autobus est venue nous offrir le gite pour 6$/personne (internet gratis). C est une maison passablement croche avec une douzaine de chambres, la dame est sympa. Demain on quite le Costa Rica pour le Panama, on va y rester jusqu au 2 aout pour aller rejoindre Myra a Quito. La traversee de la douane du Costa Rica a ete la traversee de douane la plus difficile a date. Nous avons attendus l autobus pour la frontiere durant 1h30 (il n y en a que 2 fois /jour). Arrivee a la frontiere nous avons attendu l autobus pour la capitale durant plus de 2 ... read more

Hola! Things are still going really well here. I haven´t been feeling great again this week, but not nearly as bad as last week. A couple of days ago I had my first agua pipa, which is the water that you drink from a young coconut thru a straw. It´s refreshing and sweet and apparently it´s a lot like getting a blood transfusion. Soldiers used to use it as an IV to regain their strength. It definitely made me feel a lot better. Oh, and one correction from my last entry: sloths don´t grow algae in their fur, it´s actually moss. Not that that´s any better...however I´m actually becoming a sloth enthusiast. The other day when I was in Spanish class, there was a sloth hanging from the power lines, trying to cross the street to ... read more

In the morning we swapped rooms from our dungeon on the botton floor with one window, up to another room upstairs - this one was a lot brighter with several windows and a balcony with a view of the volcano. After breakfast we headed out to Vedano caves, where we were given rubber boots, helmets and flashlights. We hiked down a path and explored the cave system there for a couple of hours. It was pretty cool and there were a lot of little gaps that we had to squeeze through. At one point I got to lead a group through a little tunnel with about 30cm of headroom above the water. There were bats, some pretty big tarantulas and other spiders. The guide also pointed out a fish that was supposedly living in the stream ... read more

After taking a few crappy local buses, we decided to try out one of the "turismo" minvans to get to our next destination: the town of La Fortuna, next to Volcano Arenal in the northern part of Costa Rica. It probably would have taken us about 9 hours to get there via local buses - on the turismo minivan, it only took 5. Worth the extra cost, although Trish was still feeling motion sick and needed to lie down when we got here. In the evening we took a quick tour up to the north side of the volcano to watch the lava flow down the side. It was pouring with rain and most of the volcano was hidden in cloud, so I was pretty skeptical whether or not we would see anything much at all. ... read more