Why write a blog to show vacation pictures? - The pictures are in a larger format (800 pixels) than you get when you view them online, such as on the Picasa web site - You can look at the pictures just by scrolling up and down, no clicking and waiting for the next page. - It's possible to embed movies, audio files, images from other sources, and links to external web sites - Writing out a narrative and adding pictures is easier than writing captions for every picture.
This is all presented in chronological order, but if you are in a rush and want to jump ahead, the best pictures are from Manuel Antonio, Rio Celeste, and Uvita.
Here is a map of Costa Rica, with our route traced in light red. The numbers are as follows: 1. La Fortuna 2. El Castillo 3. Rio Celeste 4. Santa Elena 5. Manuel Antonio 6. Uvita
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All these pictures are stored on Picasa. Here are links if you want to see more.
About the videos: I originally had uploaded our videos to YouTube, but the image quality was so poor that I looked for a better option and found Vimeo. These videos look really good even if you select the fullscreen option.
Vimeo seems to a be pretty good service. It takes longer to upload videos, but the picture quality is outstanding. The only downside I've seen is there can be some choppiness, since you are downloading a lot more data than YouTube.
We arrived in Costa Rica around 12pm. We picked up a rental 4 x 4, a Daihatsu Bego, and got a GPS with it. The GPS proved itself invaluable from the first minute, as we drove into Alajuela looking for a bank in order to get some colones. Street signs are pretty much nonexistent, so the GPS guided us through the city and on to the road heading up the hill toward the Poas volcano. We had not made a plan for the evening, as we were not sure what kind of weather we would encounter and how good the roads would be. As it turned out, the weather was dry, and the roads were nice. The only thing that we had to adjust to for driving were the one lane bridges, which require drivers in one direction to yield to oncoming traffic.
The road over the Poas volcano was spectacularly beautiful. The highlands were cattle pastures, and they reminded me a bit of Switzerland, or the backroad mountain highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. We stopped to photograph the valley and a waterfall.
Since the weather was great, we decided that we would head to La Fortuna, which is the main city for visiting the Arenal volcano. Just around sunset, we got to La Fortuna, and found a hotel. This photo of La Fortuna's main street was from the next day.
We ate at La Choza de Laurel, which seemed to have been a good choice, at least there were more locals in it than tourists. It appeared that this was not tourist season, as there were lots of restaurants and most of them were pretty empty. We walked around La Fortuna afterwards, and it does not take long to walk around it. We heard the sound of music, and followed it to a community center, where the local people were having a great time dancing and partying. It looked like a lot of fun, and if we had been better dancers and better at speaking Spanish, we would have joined them.
We awoke with the sun, which came up around 5:30am. Since we had gone to bed early, this was no big deal anyway, and we continued this sleep schedule throughout the trip. Since it is almost certain to rain in the afternoon, it was best to make the most of the dry morning weather.
We had breakfast at the same restaurant where we had eaten the night before, as it was included with our hotel bill. We discovered the basics of Costa Rican breakfast. Coffee is made with a wooden tower holding a cloth coffee filter placed above a coffee pot, a pot of boiling water is then poured into the filter and you get a nice rich drip brew. (I found out later this is called a chorreador.)
Breakfast was eggs with gallo pinto, which is a mix of black beans, rice, cilantro, and few peppers, usually molded into a little mountain on the plate. That morning we also had our choice of fried cheese or regular cheese - the cheese was a lot like the mennonite cheese from Mexico, very tasty. (Update: I later learned the reason it resembles Mennonite cheese is because it is Mennonite cheese.) We had seen people selling this cheese along the side of the road the previous day, so it was nice to have the chance to find out what it was like.
We left la Fortuna and started on our way to El Castillo, on the opposite side of the Arenal volcano. It was only about 20 kilometers away, but after we left the highway, we had about 6 miles of rough, rutted dirt road, so it took us quite a while before we made it to El Castillo. The weather was beautiful that morning, and the volcano looked stunning the whole way there.
We arrived at the village of El Castillo around 10:30 am, and went to our hotel Las Cabinitas. The cabin was ready for us, so we checked in and then walked to the Butterfly Conservatory that was near the hotel.
We had a wonderful time there. We had varying degrees of success photographing the butterflies. The most beautiful butterfly of all is the blue morpho, and they had hundreds of them. However, they never left their wings open when they were stopped, and they flew too fast to be photographed with their wings clearly exposed.
The conservatory also had a frog exhibit, and we got a chance to wake up a sleeping red-eyed tree frog.
After our visit, we headed west of El Castillo to visit El Rancho Margot, a self-sustaining ("off the grid") ranch / tourist lodge. We had a nice meal there, and then hung out on their patio bar chatting with several of the people who worked there. One was from France, and he specialized in taking people on jungle hikes through some of the most primitive parts of the Costa Rican jungle. Hard core super-experienced jungle hiking freak, it was fun finding out about all that.
When we left, we checked out the road that continued farther west, where there was a river crossing, and found a couple of guys from New York who had just driven from a coastal town on the Guanacaste peninsula, and were trying to figure out if they could make it through the water crossing of the road. We did not have a clue, but I decided to photograph them as they went across in order to record for posterity the success or failure of the crossing.
It started raining that evening, and we spent most of the time in our hotel's restaurant, since our cabin did not have enough light for reading. We then sat outside our cabin, shielded from the rain by the overhang of the roof, drinking rum and looking at the occasional red flashes and streaming lights of falling ejecta from the volcano. The view of Arenal was obscured by the mists and we were a little disappointed not to see the nighttime eruptions of the volcano that we were expecting. Fortunately the next evening was different.
The rain from the night before had cleared out by the morning. We got an early start and headed for Rio Celeste, located in the Volcano Tenorio National Park to the northwest of Arenal. Our Costa Rica roadmap showed us a shortcut that we could take just west of La Fortuna, heading north and connecting up with the highway to Gautuso. We plugged in the GPS, and off we went. We found the road, but the farther we went down it, the rougher it got, and it looked like it was going to disappear.
We saw a man on a horse and he confirmed for us that the road did not go through. Apparently the river crossing on the road had washed out long before, but the map was never updated. This was a useful lesson that our huge roadmap of Costa Rica was going to be pretty much useless. In retrospect, I should have spent some time trying to learn all of the features of our GPS, but we weren't worried. We were on vacation, we had a 4x4 and all the time in the world. It was a nice little country road, with a couple villages, and nice little houses, each one with lots of dogs and kids.
We did a u-turn, and headed back to the main highway, and stayed on the main roads all the way to Gautuso where we stopped for breakfast. The restaurant in Gautuso was an open air place, very new, very clean, and the food was great. Ordering breakfast was a little interesting, since when I asked for "huevos y tocino", the patron of the restaurant insisted instead that we order "gallo pinto", and at the time I had no idea what it was. And to help confuse us, he would say "gallo pinto" and then point at the fried chicken they had there. Maybe he was intentionally pulling our leg, as I think of chicken when I hear "gallo".
His wife, who was the cook, suggested "gallo pinto con huevos y carne salsa", and the breakfast was fabulous. The carne salsa was what we call "carne guisada" here in Texas, a really nice spicy helping of stewed beef, which melded nicely with the superbly seasoned pile of gallo pinto, which I now realized was the the black beans and rice combination that we had been getting with every meal. The people at the restaurant were super-nice, and they sliced up a big platter of fruit to top off the meal. The entire breakfast for the two of us was about 4500 colones, or 9 dollars.
I asked the owner if he had a business card, so I could get the name of the restaurant, but he had none. Probably a silly question. It seemed that the restaurant had neither a name or an address, which is not unusual in Costa Rica. The address would be "the restaurant on the highway when you enter Gautuso".
And we were on our way again. We reached the road the led to the National Park, and started enjoying one of the great natural wonders of Costa Rica - the backroads. The roads are nothing but rocks and ruts, and you bounce around from left to right trying to find the smoothest part. We thought we had seen bad roads on the rutted stretches of gravel road that our hotel by Arenal was on, these were 10 times worse. Every now and then you would come along someone driving their Toyota sedan, or a huge delivery truck. Somehow everyone makes it through on the roads, if you take your time. And if you have a rental car, all the better! After what seemed an eternity, but was more like 45 minutes, we found ourselves at the entrance to the park.
We followed the hiking trail which took us to see the wonders of Rio Celeste, a river which is tinted blue due to chemicals from the volcano.
We first arrived at the waterfall, once of the most beautiful pools you can imagine. We shared the space with one other couple and their guide. It was nice not to have crowds there. It was spectacularly beautiful.
We climbed back up to the top of the trail and continued upstream to find the blue pools, and then the spot where the blue stream meets a clear stream.
At the end of the trail we reached the hot springs, and we stripped down and jumped in. We had the spot all to ourselves for the full time we were there, and it was absolutely what you would imagine a tropical paradise to be.
The only thing missing were the monkeys. And these we came across as we were hiking back. Fabienne stopped to take a picture of a heliconia, and when she did, she realized there was someone or something looking at her.
Up in the tops of the trees, white-faced monkeys were checking her out. Unfortunately, she didn't realize that she had a camera in her hand, and instead called for me to take a picture, and I did not have the easiest time even seeing them. But we somehow managed to get one good shot.
When we left the park, we decided to take a different road to return on than the one we had come on. We had wonderful scenery, and long vistas looking out over the areas where rain was falling. Most of the land was cattle pasture, but in some stretches we came across pineapples. We were growing to love the Costa Rica backroads, the more we got used to the idea of bouncing continuously as we rolled down them. It put the "sport" in "sport utility vehicle."
We followed the highway south from Gautuso which led to Nuevo Arenal, and followed the lake shore back towards El Castillo.
As we came around the bend, we saw Arenal covered with a shroud of fog just on its top half, looking like some sort of big ice cream cone. The road was twisting and narrow, and we had drive and drive before we could finally stop and shoot a picture. And when we finally stopped, what a surprise. The fog had dispersed quite a bit, so we no longer saw the ice cream cone effect. Instead, there was a full rainbow stretching across the sky above Arenal.
That night we ate in the restaurant of the slightly upscale hotel in El Castillo. It was not cheap, but the view of Arenal was great, and that evening the volcano was pretty active. After dinner, I found a high sensitivity setting on my new camera that allowed for night time photography. I put the camera on a tripod and started clicking away. The eruptions look even more impressive on the camera than they do in reality, due to the enhanced lighting, which also makes the black sky look gray.
At times, the side of the mountain would be light up red, the volcano would rumble, and I started wondering if I would soon be meeting my maker.
