COSTA RICA 2004
TO THE PICTURES
TO MY HOMEPAGE
All comments are welcome!
Scott Sheridan
{ssherid1@kent.edu}
Welcome to my Costa Rica trip webpage. My friend Mike and I, each with our own frequent flier miles racked up, decided to visit this Central American country most famous for its prominence in the ecotourism industry, as well as its lack of an army. Deciding what to do in this eco-paradise was rather difficult, as there aren't too many individual "must-see" locations; rather, one could spend months traveling around interesting places. In the end, we decided upon the route you can see in the map here, an efficient route taking us to volcanoes, cloud forest, lowland forest, beaches, and a city or two.
Our trip began in San José. Mild-mannered by Central American standards, the capital resides dead center in the country, has the only significant international airport, and is central to all transportation links. The perfect base, it honestly doesn't offer too much on its own, which doesn't matter much since Costa Rica is much better known for its natural environment than its cultural one. It does offer one quite unique feature: a city of several hundred thousand, built upon a grid system, with virtually no street signs. Even some security people we passed couldn't tell us what street they were working on. We gradually learned to get ourselves in the vicinity of something and then just do circles.
We got our car the morning after our arrival, and left San José behind as quickly as we could (which, given the lack of street signs, wasn't as quickly as we would have liked). Much of the next several days were spent in or near the cordillera. We first visited both Poás and Arenal, two of Costa Rica's most significant volcanoes. Poás was up first, and is the more tranquil of the two, with a beautiful crater lake you can see in a couple of my photos. Up around 2700 m, it was quite cool and enshrouded in clouds, the latter a common theme to the trip. Aside from a small cloud forest hike, there's not much to do up in the park, though the view alone is certainly worth the trip. Following our descent from the crater, we hooked around Poás to the town of Fortuna for the night. Fortuna brought our first experience with flooding rains, as the small roadway in front of our hotel was a veritable river for several hours, and numerous roads were covered with slides (also in the pictures).
The following morning, the rain had stopped for a brief while, and from our hotel window we could at last see we were staying right under Arenal. Arenal is much more active; an eruption in 1968 killed scores of people and small pyroclastic flows occur on occasion, with the last one only two months before our visit. We could hear it groan a few times, and on clear nights occasionally it's said to light up. We wouldn't know. Too active to hike up to the top, we decided to visit the park to hike around as much as we could, only to be turned away at the gate, because - and this is true - the people at the gate wouldn't open the park because they were still counting money. So we went to the nearby Arenal Observatory Lodge, a private reserve, where we got to take an awesome three-hour hike up part of the volcano, to where we could see some somewhat- recent lava deposits. It was my first real hike into rainforest, and it was an incredible experience. Aside from the intense vegetation everywhere, we got to hear howler monkeys for much of the second half of the hike. It poured on the way back, and the river we crossed at the start of the hike was quite a bit angrier on the rebound.
Following our volcano adventures, we headed back up into the high mountains, via some rather tenuous roads, to the Monteverde area, and the town of Santa Elena. Monteverde is a biological reserve containing fairly large swaths of cloud forest, and despite the ruggedness of the roads, is quite a popular place to visit. We stayed two nights; the full day in between we spent hiking around the cloud forest. Different from the lowland forest, the cloud forest has an amazing biodiversity, and things grow everywhere they can - look at some of the pictures if you don't believe me. We visited the Reserve, a private area dedicated to research in the forest, where we took a guided tour. Not usually a fan of guided tours, this one was quite worth it, as we got to spot the toucan and the quetzal, both of which I would never have seen were I not shown where to look. Green birds against a green backdrop, you'd almost think they didn't want to be seen. One tree we witnessed had eighty other species just growing on it. The reserve also included the continental divide, which I suppose isn't quite so dramatic when the continent has become as skinny as it has by Costa Rica's latitude. Following a rest and changing to another set of dry clothes - quite a futile endeavor in a cloud forest - we later hiked along the SkyWalk, a series of bridges suspended as much as 60 m above the rain forest. Here we got an entirely different perspective, and the life creeping onto every rope tethered to the land was a reminder that if it can have something grow on it, it will.
The remainder of the time in Santa Elena was downtime; there's not much to explore in this three-block triangular town, though we did get to watch the Costa Rican soccer championship at a bar. Following our stay here, it was down to the Pacific Coast, though not quite so quickly, as the roads were rocky, muddy, cow-laden, curvy (with no guardrails), and steep. We averaged less than 10 mph to start; the scenery would've been more breathtaking were it not for the constant wondering what was around the corner. Eventually, however, we made it down near sea-level, and to the town of Quepos.
Quepos, and the nearby small Manuel Antonio National Park, are the closest things Costa Rica has to a resort area, though it's still a long way off from that as thankfully much of the land is either protected or far too steep to build upon. The beaches are beautiful; the real attraction here is the national park, with quite a concentration of wildlife, and tropical rainforest that grips the land right up to the crashing waves of the Pacific. With three nights here, we had no shortage of time. The first full day took us into Manuel Antonio. Just to enter is quite an ordeal, as you have to hike across a considerable tidal flat and then pay someone to row you across a small, swift channel. Though the park is small – there’s only several kilometers of trails – it’s fascinating to explore, and we stayed the whole day, seeing squirrel monkeys tons of land crabs, chameleons, and hidden beaches and waterfalls. We also saw a smaller type of deer that seemed to captivate the Costa Ricans far more than it did us. We would happily have gone back for a second day, though Mondays the park is closed. To further complicate matters, with the rains clouding the water, snorkeling or scuba didn’t represent an option, either. So, one the sunniest day of the trip, the only time where from sunrise to sunset no rain fell, we had no choice but to spend the day on the beach! I suppose there are worse things in life.
Our next day was the last with the rental car, meaning it was time to return to San José. We passed an endless sprawl of African palm plantations, and ultimately had to cross the mountains once more. This time, the road was paved, though as a major highway, there was far more traffic moving at far greater speeds, despite the hairpin bends and weather that changed in the blink of an eye. We managed to make it back to the rental place five minutes before close, a relief as it meant no further negotiating San José’s roads in the car. Our final day we spent further exploring the capital, visiting a couple museums, doing a bit of shopping, mainly for the incredibly cheap coffee one could find in the grocery stores.
As a vegetarian, I’ll say this: the Costa Ricans did a good job of catering to me. As someone who likes flavor in his food, I was somewhat less impressed. The Costa Ricans are not known for their cuisine. The “plato vegetariano” inevitably consisted of white rice, black beans, hyper-steamed vegetables, and no spices whatsoever. The occasional fried plantain was excellent however, and Mike had good seafood along the coast. The best meals were in restaurants of other nationalities, which thankfully are plentiful, including Italian, Mexican, Chinese (which I didn’t try), Peruvian, and Nicaraguan.
Places we stayed at which I’d recommend are Arco Iris in Santa Elena and Mono Azul in Quepos. Payless Car Rental was good to us with the SUV we rented, though the cost was quite expensive, as it was with all agencies.
If you want to jump directly to a particular page, here is the list of photos