June 23, 2014
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| Arenal Backpacker's Resort |
I got up (I really have to concentrate on not omitting
pronouns, now, when I speak English, after so many months of speaking Spanish.)
even earlier than usual, because my shuttle was coming at 8:00 and I wanted to
be sure I was breakfasted and ready in time.
That turned out to be fortunate because, when I returned from my shower,
the mechanism had jammed and I could not get my key into the padlock on my
tent. It took two men from the
maintenance department and some big bolt cutters to get it off for me. That was stressful, but it all worked out
fine and I was packed and ready long before the shuttle arrived.
Not wanting to spend the night in San Jose, I had booked a ride on an Interbus Shuttle. It was a wonderful service. They drove me door to door for $49, which I would have spent, anyway, if I had taken the bus, because I would have needed to pay for a hotel and taxis in San Jose. The van was clean and comfortable. When the driver learned I spoke Spanish, he invited me to sit up front with him, so I had lots of room and he offered a
running commentary as we crossed the country, which was very interesting. It took us about five
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| Interbus Shuttle |
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| Bad Visibility Near San Ramon |
From San Ramon, we headed towards Punta Arenas on the Pan
American Highway. We passed through
Esparza and finally sighted the Pacific near Caldera. Caldera is a bay at the mouth of the Gulf of
Nicoya. We could see mountains across
the Gulf and the scenery was pretty spectacular. We continued on another hour to Jaco
Beach. At one point we crossed a large
river with at least a dozen big crocodiles sunning themselves on the
banks. We followed the Pacific coast
through Parrita and finally arrived in Quepos about 1:30 in the afternoon. Quepos is a nice little town in the jungle,
slightly inland from the water. While
there are many tour operators located there, it still didn’t feel like a
tourist town. Most of the hotels and
restaurants were along the 7 km road between Quepos and Manuel Antonio National
Park.
I stayed at the Pura Vida Hostel. “Pura Vida,” (pure life) is the slogan of
Costa Rica. It connotes a sort of
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| Pura Vida Hostel Outside of Quepos |
Finally, about 4:30, I decided I had to go to town before it got dark, even if it was raining. I donned shorts and flip flops so that everything not covered by my raincoat could be easily dried and headed off to town. I explored a bit and discovered the supermarket, but wanted to go to the bank first. I got to the bank just after 5:00 when they closed. I was using the ATM when the power went out and the machine rebooted. My card was lost inside the machine. I only had about $20 worth of colones, which wasn’t enough to pay my hotel bill or the balance of the rafting trip I had booked. I started to get concerned. I grabbed a cheap dinner at a chicken restaurant and then went to the grocery store and bought a few things for breakfast and a couple of beers. Then I sloshed my way back to the hostel and spent the evening distracting a young woman from the pain of her burned calf. She had crashed a motor scooter in Monteverde and burned herself on the exhaust and was steaming the scab off the burn with hot salt water at the suggestion of her friend’s nurse practitioner mother.
June 24, 2014
As much as I would have liked to get to the National Park
before the crowds, my first order of business was recovering my ATM card. The bank didn’t open until 9:00, so I was
able to sleep in a bit. I arrived at the
bank just before they opened and there was already a long line of people
waiting. The bank was very efficient. A touch screen monitor at the entrance gave
us the opportunity to state our business and then printed out a ticket with a
number on it. Monitors over the teller
windows directed each person to a particular window when his or her turn
came. Despite the line, I waited less
than 10 minutes. Fortunately, I had no
trouble collecting my ATM card. I just
had to show my passport and sign for the card and I was on my way. I walked back up the hill to the hostel,
collected my day pack, and waited for the bus to Manuel Antonio.
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| Public Beach at Manuel Antonio |
The bus picked me up across the street from the hostel. The fare to the National Park was 285 colones
(about 50 cents.) The buses between Quepos and Manuel Antonio ran every 15 minutes and were clean, safe and reliable. They stopped wherever you flagged them down. We climbed up over the peninsula and then descended to the beach on the other side. Hotels and restaurants lined the road nearly
the whole way. The views were
gorgeous. The Manuel Antonio area looked exactly the way you expect a tropical paradise to appear. Lush jungle and palm trees reached all the
way to white sand beaches and clear blue water.
Rock outcroppings jutted from the water.
The Manuel Antonio National Park occupied a peninsula and offered
several coves with gorgeous beaches. As
a pale person prone to sunburn, I found tree shaded beaches to be delightful. The entry fee to the park was $10, although
the fee is scheduled to increase to $16 as of August 1, 2014. The ticket office was on the street, a block
or so before the entrance to the park.
T-shirt vendors lined the road and guides solicited business, although
they weren’t too interested in me, since I was traveling alone.
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| Three Toed Sloth |
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| Squirrel Monkey |
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| Capuchin Monkey |
Once inside the park, a dirt road led from the entrance out
to the beach where the trails split.
Manuel Antonio is a very small park and gets the largest number of
visitors of any park in Costa Rica. In the morning, when the road
was crowded with people and guides, it was easy to spot animals. One had only to look in the direction that
the guides were pointing their telescopes.
Within 50 yards of the entrance, I had already seen a sloth. Shortly thereafter, I saw a troop of squirrel
monkeys playing in the trees and on the power lines. Next, I saw a large iguana creeping through a
tree. He moved almost as easily from
tree to tree as the monkeys did. Further
down the road, I encountered a troop of capuchin monkeys. Several of the paths were closed for maintenance. Indeed, there seemed to be quite a bit of
construction going on. At the beach end
of the road, there were several nice restrooms with changing rooms and showers.
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| View from Cathedral Point |
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| Beach at La Trampa |
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| Thieving Raccoon |
I followed a path along the beach and saw
numerous raccoons, boldly trolling for food.
I continued past the beach and explored the Cathedral Point trail, which
led out and around the tip of the peninsula and offered spectacular views and
some tiny beaches. The trail passed
through groves of palms and then into a forest of very tall trees, before
returning to the main beaches. I stopped
at the beach to admire the water and take a nap. While I was sleeping, a raccoon attempted to
drag my day pack out from under my head.
He was very cute, but was so persistent, that I started to worry we were
going to have a confrontation. I had
been warned not to leave my bag unattended, but didn’t realize that it was
non-human thieves I needed to fear.
After an hour or so of chasing raccoons, I decided it was time to
leave. As I walked up the path, I saw a
capuchin monkey climb up onto a trash can, open the lid like he did it all the
time, and proceed to remove the trash.
Several more monkeys appeared and they carried the garbage up into the
trees where they divided the spoils.
Several raccoons milled about below them, snatching anything they
dropped.
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| Monkey Opening Trash Can |
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| Dragging His Spoils into the Trees |
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| Iguana |
June 25, 2014
I had a lazy morning, since I had booked my rafting
adventure for the afternoon when I hoped it would be warmer. I lounged around
the hostel until about 11:30 when the rafting company picked me up. They took me up the road to their office
where we ate a nice lunch of chicken and rice with beans, salad and vegetables
while they collected the rest of the group.
There were two rafts full of people.
One held a family of five and their guide. Our raft only had three clients and a
guide. Our guide’s name was Flippy. This did not inspire confidence.
We drove for about half an hour up the Rio Naranjo. The van let us out a short walk from the put
in and Flippy led us on an interesting nature walk while the other employees
readied the rafts. We nibbled cinnamon bark and ate star fruit fresh from the tree.
There were limes and oranges and several types of bananas growing along
the road, including some purple ones.
Everything was ready to go by the time we got to the rafts. We donned life jackets and helmets and picked
up our paddles.
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| The Rio Naranjo Where We Pulled Out |
The stretch of the Rio Naranjo we rafted was mostly class II
and III with a few class IV rapids thrown in.
The guides seemed intent on getting us as wet as possible. They aimed for the holes where we got stuck
while water poured over us. Our raft was
completely full of water and I thought we’d never get out of there. Fortunately, the water was a reasonably
pleasant temperature. After a while, it
started to rain and it rained pretty hard.
We heard lots of thunder and saw some lightning. I did see one sloth, but after a while, my
glasses were so wet I could hardly see anything. The actual rafting part of the adventure
lasted about two hours. The last stretch
was much calmer and we could relax a bit.
I was actually cold by the time we got to the van. Fortunately, it was a much shorter drive back
and I was the first one to be returned to my hotel. I went straight for a hot shower.
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| Quepos Bus Terminal |
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| Pez Vela Marina |
My room had been shut up all day and was nice and warm. It didn’t take long for me to recover from my
chill. I had been thinking of staying an
extra day to enjoy the beach, but the weather looked wet, so I decided to head
out into the rain to locate the bus station and check out the marinas for my
sailor friends who were coming behind me so I could leave the next morning.
I donned my shorts, flip flops, and raincoat and grabbed my umbrella
before heading out into the rain. I
walked down the hill into town and quickly located the bus terminal. Quepos is quite compact, so everything is convenient. Quepos actually lies two feet below sea
level. Back when United Fruit used to
have huge banana plantations in the area, they constructed a sea wall and built
the town on what was once a mangrove swamp.
They also built a big pier for loading bananas onto ships. Today, that pier has been converted into a
marina. There is still a lot of
construction going on there, but the harbor is tucked behind a substantial
breakwater. There were a few sailboats
in there, but most of the boats were sport fishers. There were also many boats docked in the
estuary of the Rio Naranjo, but it looked like the channel might be hard to
find and probably would be best navigated at high tide. The official marina was called Marina Pez
Vela. It looked like it was meant to be
high end with some nice restaurants and good security. It was within easy walking distance of Quepos
and the bus terminal. It would be easy
and cheap to catch a bus to Manuel Antonio from there.
I had been searching for a replacement for the day pack I
bought in Mexico almost from the first day of my trip, since I had had to
repair that pack before I ever even used it and had mended it several times
since. It was also poor in the water
resistance department and everything I kept in it had to be wrapped in plastic
bags if I wanted it to stay dry. After I went to the bus terminal
to determine the times for buses to Dominical, I spied some decent day packs
outside a store near the bus station. It
was not a store that catered to tourists, but the packs were imported and it
cost me nearly $40 to buy a new one. I
didn’t realize it at the time, but when I got it home I was pleased to discover
that it had a padded compartment for my computer. It was nice that it wasn’t obviously a
computer backpack. I spent all the money
I had brought to buy dinner on the backpack, so had to trek back up the hill to
get more cash.
I ate roast chicken and French fries (I have never eaten so
many French fries as I have in Central America.) for dinner at a fast food
place and then picked up a small bottle of cheap hooch and some fruit juice at
the local liquor store. I spent much of
the evening sipping cocktails and chatting with Mauricio, a young man from
Mexico who was working at the hostel to earn enough money to take his
motorcycle on a sailboat to Columbia.
Having just checked out the sailing trips from Panama to Cartagena, I
knew that taking a motorcycle along was possible, but cost double what it cost
for a person alone. Unfortunately, it is
impossible (or at least seriously inadvisable) to go overland from Panama to
South America. One has to either fly or
go by boat.
June 26, 2014
I spent the morning packing and planning a trip to Corcovado
National Park. Then I caught the bus in
front of the hostel that took me to the bus station. The official schedule says there are three
buses a day going to Dominical, but it turns out that there are really many
more. All the buses to Uvita stop at the
edge of Dominical. One has only to walk
down the hill to the beach, which I was easily able to do, even with my rolling
duffel bag. The ride to Dominical took
less than an hour. |
| Piramys Beachfront Hostel |
Dominical was the opposite of Manuel Antonio. The main street of the town was a dirt
road. While there were a few nice small
hotels, the majority of the place was decidedly surfer funky. Restaurants advertised organic juices and
there were yoga classes available. Most
of the signs were made from broken surf boards.
I stayed at the Piramys Beachfront Hostel. The sign out front said private rooms cost
$26, but I got one for $12, which must have been the low season price. The room was a concrete cave, but it had
large, high screened windows, a private bathroom with hot shower and a
comfortable mattress with a mosquito net.
I didn’t see any mosquitos, but it was comforting to know it was there. Sitting under it made me feel like a kid in a
fort. The room was cool and well
ventilated and the walls were painted with colorful murals. It was funky, but comfortable.
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| My Mosquito Net |
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| Surfer in Dominical |
Dominical revolves around surfing and the waves were
spectacular. The beach wasn’t
particularly attractive. There as a lot
of driftwood and plant debris and much of the beach was rocky. The action was all in the water. I got to Dominical just before noon. I checked into my hostel and then went to the
tourist information place to determine how to get to Sierpe before 11:00 in the
morning to catch my boat to Corcovado.
The collective shuttle from Quepos had been full and a private one would have
cost $70. A taxi from Dominical was an
even more outrageous $115, but there was a public bus at 4:45 am that would get
me there in time. It would be painful, but
the price was right. I was kind of
hungry, but decided to wait until 2:00 when the soccer game came on to eat
lunch. Rain was predicted for later in
the afternoon, so I took advantage of the sun to sit and watch the surfers and
walk along the beach to the river and then back through the town. Much of Dominical was hidden in the
trees. It felt a bit like a campground,
rather than a town.
At 2:00, I went to the restaurant attached to one of the
nicer hotels that was advertising a casado and a smoothie for 3000
colones. A “casado” (married man’s meal)
is a piece of meat (I had steak.) with rice, beans, and salad. I even got spaghetti with mine. It was a huge platter of food and I left most
of the rice and spaghetti. The steak was
tender and flavorful. It was the best
piece of beef I had had in months. All
beef in Costa Rica is grass fed. They
even export organic beef to the United States.
I ate my lunch and watched Belgium beat Korea. It was the most violent soccer game I had
ever seen. They seemed to be tackling
each other constantly. Both teams were
extremely aggressive, which seemed odd to me since neither of them had a chance
to progress in the World Cup. Maybe Korea
just wanted to win one game before they went home. The Koreans never did get a goal, but they
made some spectacular flying kicks. They
were entertaining to watch.
After the game, I went back to my room to rest a bit. It soon started to pour down rain and it
continued to rain all evening and into the night. I never did go back out for dinner. I just stayed in and watched Netflix.
June 27, 2014
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| View from The Southeast End of the Beach at Dominical |
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| Rocky Beach at Dominical |
Friday was my day to emulate the sloths I had been seeing hanging out in the trees. I got up latish and went out for a latte and a smoothie at a cafe near the highway. In Dominical, the closer you got to the highway, the more civilized things were. After breakfast, I went for a walk down the beach. Rain was predicted, but the sun was out and the beach looked more attractive in the sunlight. The southeast end of the beach was sandier and more attractive than the part closer to town. There were parrots squawking in the trees. The surf looked seriously sick. I considered moving to Uvita, but knew the bus schedule from Dominical, so decided not to risk it, as I had to be in Sierpe by 11:00 am the next day to catch my boat to Corcovado. At this time of year, the 3:00 pm boat was not running and it would cost me $20 to hire a private boat if I missed the 11:00 one. There was no one to pay at the hostel, anyway. I looked on and off all day, but couldn't find anyone working there. It was very quiet. I spent the afternoon working on my blog. Around 5:30, I went out to the San Clemente Bar and Grill for a grilled chicken salad. Dinner with a beer ran me about $11.00. Beers cost just over $2, but food prices were pretty comparable with the United States.
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| Dominical Definitely Had the Breaks |
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