Monteverde, Puerto Viejo, Panama, San Jose and home

What a delight - the fresh air and cooler temperatures up in the mountains!! Even though we had quite a lot of rain, I didn't mind in the slightest.   Mikael (the Swedish guy), Augustina and I did a hike in montverde national park, which was beautiful. We didn't see too many animals but the eerie swing-like sound (a white-chested manakin or something like it) and the moss-esque epiphytes hanging off trees everywhere, together with a low-hanging mist often felt in the mornings in the mountains made it a great little hike. Apparently the part of the reserve open to tourists is only less than 1/20th of the entire monteverde protected region!
Just outside the reserve there was a hummingbird garden with feeders and I managed to get some excellent shots of the little hummers - keep an eye out when I put my photos up!

Other than the beautiful nature hikes that you can do there, it's a little bit like the Queenstown (NZ) o costa rica with adventure & thrill activities galore. And the money to pay for them will last about as long as the adrenaline rush - they aren't cheap! However, we did give in to the ziplining as it's a must-do in monteverde. Ziplining is where you're strapped to a cable and you "fly" high off he ground across varying lengths of cable. There are 3 companies that do it in monteverde: one is in and over primitive rainforest, so a great view (selvaturas). Aventuras tries to attract customers by having the biggest Tarzan swing (strapped to a rope like Tarzan and you jump only to end up swinging around fora while) and on the zipline you can also do the superman hang (strapped to your back and crossing arms and spread out as if actually flying) which selvaturas doesn't have, though their ziplines are over farms. Extremos is secondary rainforest too and theyre waiting on a permit to build a bungee to 152m. 

We chose the primary rainforest one, as Agustina was scared anyway to do it. I'm glad we did, because on the last 2 ziplines, which are long and for stability you go in pairs, the views were stunning!! Didn't see any monkeys in the canopy, sadly. 

The next day we did a hike to a 100m waterfall, again beautiful, and rested the rest of the day. The next morning Mikael left us, and our plans being cancelled due to rain, we hung out like lazy sloths all day. When you go to monteverde stay at pension santa elena, the people we so so so helpful!!
I said my goodbyes to Agustina (we'd been traveling together for a month!!) as she was heading west and I went east. 

I took a bus to San Jose and then a bus to Puerto Viejo, at the bottom of the Caribbean coastline. Costa rica has some excellent beaches for surfing but if you're not into that then you're limited to those in the north on the pacific side. 
As I was waiting for the bus to leave in San Jose it hit me - Costa Rica doesnt have to pushy vendors selling every single nicknack on the planet that invade the bus aisles at every stop. It certainly is more peaceful but the liveliness of the sellers also has its charm. 

Puerto Viejo is, as all things are in costa rica it seems, much more touristy than I expected. Quality souvenir stalls lining the one street parallel to the beach and nice, albeit pricey, restaurants. I do think Costa Rica has my favourite comida tipica (local dish) - called casados, which is a plate with a pile of rice, a pile of red beans (frijoles, what else!), some salad, some fried plantain and a type of meat. My favourite are the meats in a tomato sauce, de-lish!

In puerto viejo I stayed at a hostel called rocking J's, which is almost worth coming to puerto viejo for - you can hang up your own hammock/tent, pay for one of their hammocks with an accompanying lockers, pay for a tent (which has a mattress in it) with a locker or go upscale to the dorms and private rooms. It is quite the party hostel, so music until late, but it's setting right in front one of the black sand beaches works in its favour too. 

Rain threatened in the morning but the afternoon saw a breakthrough of sun, which was just wanted I wanted as I was heading back to rainy Belgium soon. I was contemplating a trip up the coast to Tortuguero, which is a protected mangrove forest where tonnes of various turtle species come to lay their eggs every year on the same coastal side but up north, but I decided against it, opting for a short trip to Bocas del Toro in Panama instead. 

Bocas del toro is a group of islands on the Caribbean side, easily reached from Costa Rica, with great surf, beautiful corals and white-sand beaches. Most people stay in bocas town, on isla colon, but I decided to stay on bastimentos island, which has nicer beaches and the famous bastimentos colour morph of the strawberry poison dart frog, with black spots on its red body. Many people mistakenly believe that they're only to be seen on red frog beach (actually found on the whole island) though red frog beach does have sloths. I didnt go to red frog beach, but stayed on wizard beach - more quite and undeveloped, and had 1 day of sun and 1 day of cloudy weather.  Paradise!

I headed back to San Jose a with a full day to spare as I didn't want to risk the bus breaking down and me missing my flight. In San Jose I stayed in hostel Pangea, which reminded me a bit of hostels in Australia - a big institution, clean and made me feel cleaner than I'd felt in a long time!! 

I spent a morning walking around San Jose, which is actually really nice and I'm sure would get a lot more visitors if it ever managed to clean up its act about night crime. The beautiful buildings, civilised (and western) main shopping street (pedestrianised) and big park are lovely. 

And that's when I gave in and said goodbye. I headed to a hostel in Alajuela, much closer to the airport than San Jose, stayed the night and hopped on a free airport shuttle for my 8am flight. 

It's been a great 10 weeks, full of fun, nature and adventure, an I'd highly recommend it to anyone! 

Granada, San Juan del Sur to Costa Rica -> Liberia and Monteverde

Granada was wonderful! Our hostel recommendation, however, wasn't the greatest I'd had, but it was marginally cheaper than the rest, plus being too lazy, I ended up staying there for 4 nights. It was pretty far from the main square and it was full of hippies who roam from town to town trying to sell home-made jewelry, who don't shower regularly and who sit around all day drinking. Mmm...

Agustina and I explored the city with our cameras, for as long as we could hold out in the heat - we went to the cathedral, 2 churches and a convent. It was nice and peaceful because this was the 19th of July, the celebration of the start of the revolution in Nicaragua (independence day is a month later). I was originally planning on being in Managua for it and joining in on the celebrations, but on further consideration, and after seeing Managua, we'd decided to give it a miss. And I'm glad we did - we heard some of the cheering and craziness in Granada, and saw the hoards of people on TV listening to some guy's speech that went on and on.

But, lucky for us, it meant a little more quiet on the streets of Granada. I'd also got into the Stiegg Larsson trilogy and after finding the second book I took every opportunity I had to sit down and read. In the evening we had a last dinner with Talei, our friend from lago de yojoa in Honduras and Somoto in Nicaragua. Agustina decided to travel with her to Isla de Ometepe - Granada is right next to a huge lake, and this island is in the middle consisting I'd 2 volcanoes, whereas I was not so interested in hiking for 8 hours just to say I've climbed a volcano. Being on my own for the next 2 days, I decided to do excursions to Mombacho (another volcano close to Granada) and the next day to relax with my book at laguna de apoyo, which is a crater lake north of Granada. Travelling during the rainy season means the temperature is much more pleasant, but it also means mountains and peaks are covered in clouds 80% of the time. And Mombacho was no different. I got up to the start of the hikes by the shuttle, or Eco-taxi, which is well worth the $12 as it's quite steep and would otherwise take you 2-3 hours just to get to the start. I decided to do the short 1.5 hour hike around one of the craters. It was fairly windy and the clouds were hanging low so I enjoyed the temperature more than the views. But walking through a rainforest that is growing on a volcano is cool in itself, plus there was a nice troop of howler monkeys passing overhead. I got to the last viewpoint and waiting for a while managed to get a glimpse of the isletas, little scattered islands near the lake formed by the volcano years and years ago, before the clouds covered it up again.
I did a little retake of the beginning of the track, and this time I was able to see the trees growing inside the crater, which was pretty cool.

That evening I was asked to join a pub quiz team with 2 other people and we won! I'm getting good at those :)

On my last day in Granada it was looking dreary in the morning but it cleared up as I trekked out to laguna de apoyo, which is just north of Granada. I took a local bus there, a taxi to the entrance and then was nicely offered a ride on the back of a pick up down to the lake (saves me another 5km downhill). It's quite beautiful, and I spent the day lazily finishing the 2nd stieg Larsson book at a place called la abuela.

It is now Friday the 22nd, and I made my way to San Juan del Sur in 2 chicken buses, one of which was probably the shabbiest I've been on yet. San Juan is a place where surfers go, and it had a really laid-back but Western vibe. Quite the party town. I had agreed to meet up with Agustina and Talei there, in addition to which I bumped into a new Zealand couple from before, a group of Americans from the corn islands, the Swede from the Corn islands and the couple I did the pub quiz with in Granada! How nice.

On Saturday I went to visit one o the beaches with some of the aforementioned people, though they're not very pretty, mainly good for surfing. That evening I did a sea turtle tour, as it's the perfect time to see olive Ridley turtles coming onto the beach to lay their eggs. It was really interesting to see, though sadly I felt our group was too big. A 1am return led to joining a massive pool party that had been organised for the night...

On Sunday Agustina and I said our goodbyes to Nicaragua and headed onwards to Costa Rica. It was another typical border crossing, doing the walk across (I've never used intercontinental buses on this trip to cross any borders) though this one was more bustling than any of the others before it. In terms of people and in terms of the amount of trucks lined up single file - it just kept going on and on. We got to Liberia relatively harmlessly.

Costa Rica is much more developed than Nicaragua, especially in terms of tourism, and the people seem to be more cocky there. We wanted to go to Liberia because it's the capital of the northern municipality called Guanacaste, and for the past few days they'd been celebrating their independence from Nicaragua some time before.

Liberia is also known as the White city because many of the houses have white-washed walls. It's also a big rodeo and horse-riding town, so on the day we arrived celebrations were in full swing with a horse parade - hundreds of people making their horses do strange steps, with the cowboy hats, chequered shirts and boots to match. Horsepoo smell filled the air. Beer cans strewn around in the gutters. Salsa dancing by live bands. Interesting!

Funnily (and luckily) enough the last day of the celebrations, the one we were aiming for, wasn't nearly as eventful as the day we arrived so I'm vey glad we were able to the the day before's celebrations.

From Liberia we took a morning bus to Puntarenas from where we took a bus to Monteverde, the most visited place in all of Costa Rica. It's basically a big cloudforest reserve (cloudforest being a rainforest above an elevation of about 1500m) and the change of temperature to a cooler climate where you're not sweating 24/7. 3 days here will be followed by 5 more days on the Caribbean coast before heading home. So soon!!!