Costa Rica - Part 1

In order to try and "pay it forward", I'm going to blog about our experiences traveling to Costa Rica this Feb 2008 for 2 weeks. I'm planning on having several posts to describe in more detail some things, but let's start off small.

Nicest People Ever

A co-worker of mine has told me that the people are super nice. For the most part where ever we travel we find the people nice-ish at the very least. The ticos were calm, patient and friendly.

"Dry Season" is a lie

We were in the Osa (which I'll do a whole post for) during "dry season". I think that it should be called "less wet season" instead. It poured every day for minimum one hour, luckily mostly at night. I think that the humidity was 90%+. In order to give you an idea what that's like, we had "dry fit" clothing that would get wetter if you hung it up and it didn't rain on it. Crazy. That was a small, small thing compared to the beauty of the Osa, so don't let that discourage you from going there. More details later.

Monteverde

We did some really touristy stuff in Monteverde like ziplining with selvatura. That was awesome and such a great experience. We also did the "tarzan swing" which I can only describe as 1/4 of a second of sheer terror followed by 30 seconds of joy. Laura who's not comfortable with heights did both. I'm very proud of her.

We also did a coffee tour which was really interesting to see and taste the steps that go into the process of growing and making coffee. I don't feel bad about paying more of fair traded coffee anymore...

When you're in Santa Elena and the area, you are either going uphill or downhill. There's not really anything in between. I think that the town was somewhere around 1500 m above sea level, some farms were 1100 m and the coffee processing "plant" was like 800 m. And that's maybe a couple of km away. We did a hike to the tallest point around (1800 m) and I think that the slope was 30-45 degrees for 95% of the hike. I've done a bunch of hiking at that was hard.

Okay, that's a good start for now. Other sections will be "The Osa" and "Transportation".