Ultimate Vacation Spots

posted by Travel Cat on May 2

Sorry there have been no updates so far, but I am having the most amazing time ever.

Within a few hours of arriving we saw a giant iguana and plenty of birds.  Within hours of walking through our first rain-forest we saw blue morpho’s, capuchin monkeys, agouti, coati,  toucans and a sloth, and like a billion other insects, butterflies and birds we couldn’t identify!

Journeying there was no fun as the Costa Ricans seem to think that a road is ‘anything that you can move a car along’, this includes gravel tracks, sugarcane fields, what appear to be 5 lane riverbeds amongst other things.  The road up to Monteverde was a cross between a riverbed and an avalanche site.  It wasn’t ‘an hours drive’ like the brochure said, it was a lurching, rock-strewn struggle in first gear, 45 degrees up the side of a mountain on an unpaved ‘road’.  Don’t go here if you get travel sick as the side of the road here is a 500ft drop off the side of the mountain!  And I’m not kidding.

Arriving there in one piece and standing still at the side of the road felt so great - just nice to stop being thrown from left to right……

Our hotel was Pension Santa Elena and was just what we needed right then - a backpackers hostel in the centre of town with friendly staff, clean rooms, a hot shower and a comfy bed.  Perfect.

We slept for some time after the 36 hours it had taken to finally get here from San Jose after landing last night - and the hotel we stayed in there was awful.  The receptionist was a young girl who spoke no English at all and the rooms were very seedy indeed! 

We also got her all confused as we needed to check out early in the morning (at 7am to be precise), but we had gotten the time wrong on arrival as the UK had only just changed their clock forward an hour and Costa Rica was 6 hours behind according to the book.  So when we got up at what we thought was 6.15 and checked out a bit early (6.45) we couldn’t understand why she was not a happy bunny, we really were confused - after all we had written down we wanted to leave by 7am.

It was only after arriving at the pick-up point for the bus to Monteverde, that we caught site of their clock and it said 6am - we had woken her up at 5.45!  That explained everything! Ooops….

Anyway, today we are off trekking through the rain-forest again…….