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Published: April 3rd 2010
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After 30 hours of travelling, three immigration lines in three different countries, a last-minute change of hotel and waking up my room-mate-for-the-next-two-weeks, my head hit the pillow at 2am on Sunday morning in San Jose, Costa Rica. Given my well-known talent for sleeping and the fact I hadn´t had much for a while, it took a surprisingly long time to get to sleep.
Which didn´t help the mental clarity when I woke up 5 hours later to meet everyone else on my Intrepid tour and have a guided tour of the highlights of San Jose. Luckily San Jose´s highlights are pretty limited - it´s your standard big(ish) city and lets be honest, one doesn´t come to Costa Rica for the bright lights of the City.
So the following morning we headed out of San Jose and down to the Caribbean coast to Tortuguero National Park. The only way in and out of the area is by boat through waterways flanked by rainforest. The boat trip there was a our first taste of the wildlife in the rainforest, but it wasn´t until the next morning we really got into it...
Boarding the canoe at 5.30am, Bill - a former
Bill
Mad as a hatter from too much time spent in the jungle Jaguar hunter and our driver/guide/wild-life-spotter - reassured us that he´d been on the river for 45 years an hadn´t had a single accident. The idea behind taking the canoe rather than one of the bigger (and more comfortable) boats with outboard motors was so the animals wouldn´t get scared off by the sound of the motors, and we could get closer in to the sides of the canals and this really paid off when, by the end of the tour, our aching backsides had been compensated by photos of caymans, iguanas, spider monkeys leaping across the trees, capuchen monkeys and all manner of birds. But perhaps the most amazing moment was when we learned that Bill (who was mad as a hatter and had been rowing our sorry asses around for the last three hours) was 84!!! I had been estimating about 60ish. We suggested we were going to start following Bill´s diet (he´d been going on about how he doesn´t eat anything that comes in a packet), to which he replied "you have to start by eating the heart of a Jaguar". Touche Bill, Touche.
After the canoe tour we spent the afternoon sweltering in the 40 degree
I seee you
Cayman lurking in the shallows heat/100 percent humidity before taking my fourth shower of the day, setting my alarm clock for 6am in order to get ready for a 7am boat departure from Tortuguero and hitting the hay nice and early...
I woke up when the ceiling fan stopped and the rain started... at about 2am. And this wasn´t rain like we´re used to back home, this was monsoon style, tropics rain... straight down, unrelenting, massive drops. At 6am I discovered the ceiling fan had stopped because the power had gone out, so the shower was by torchlight (though in hindsight it might have been more effective to just stand outside).
After what I expected to be a 1 1/2 hour boat ride (as it had been on the way in) turned in 3 hours, we pulled up to where they were letting us off the boat. This was different to where we had got on two days before (something about "incidences" on the way back from the other stop), and with the rudimentary steps being no match for the rain, now consisted of a steep embankment of knee deep mud. After a farscical scramble up this embankmet (basically being towed by the
boat-guys) we walked to where the bus was supposed to be waiting for us (a banana plantation) to find it had gone without us. Less than amused.
It was about this time when I thanked a god I don´t believe in that I was with a tour and getting us out of this mess was the guide´s problem and not mine. After a few hours wait in the lunch-room of the plantation, he did get us out of there and on our way to Sarapiqui.
The following day in Sarapiqui we went on a "chocolate tour", which sounds yummy enough, but in reality was so much cooler than that! after hiking through the jungle for 1/2 an hour (prior to which i had to sign a waiver about wearing flip-flips in an area with snakes around - boy did i watch where i was stepping) we got to this lean-to where we were shown the various stages of how Cacao beans get to blocks of chocolate. We got to taste the traditional hot chocolate drinks the local Mesoamericans drank before being conquered by the Spanish way back when. and the ground Cacao beans, then (and this was my
Spider monkey
leaping across the river. Bill timed this to perfection! favourite part) pure melted chocolate!! Now i get excited enough standing by the stove eating melted Green & Blacks, so you can imagine my endorphin level here. But in addition to being extremely tasty, the tour was also really interesting - the guy explained the two methods of making chocolate, which explains the price difference (and length of the ingredient list) between the cheaper brands and more expensive brands of chocolate (in NZ - check out the ingredient lists of Cadbury and Whittakers dark chocolates, that´s the difference). He also explained how Cacao trees need the rainforest to grow, so unlike banana and pineapple plantations, for which you need to clear the land completely before planting, cacao plantations actually encourage conservation of the rainforest because the cacao trees are planted in amongst the existing jungle. One more reason to eat Chocolate!!
Which brings us to yesterday when we took a mini-van to La Fortuna - a town nestled in the shadow of an active volcano (which is covered in cloud most of the time, so photos are pretty difficult to get). In the afternoon we headed to a waterfall (another of my favourite things in the world) which was
so forceful swimming in it was like Piha on a bad-day - exhausting. Or maybe that was the 400 steps we had to climb up to get back to the road. Whatever it was I ache today!!
And that´s enough for this blog. I´ll try and upload photos soon. Until next time...
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