Costa Rica 2005

We headed down to Costa Rica for 1.5 weeks starting from the end of Feb to the start of March. What a great trip, if you are interested in going do it for sure. It would be better if you did it sooner rather then later though. You can see lots and lots of Resort developments and there are more and more tourists coming each year. One thing I was surprised with was the lack of guys trying to sell you stuff. Along the streets they had little booths set up and stuff, but would see more booths set up at Kelowna City Park on a warm summer day. I was expecting tones of guys trying to sell you stuff like in Mexico . There where a few but not as many as Mexico and the ones that where out weren't as pushy as the Mexicans are. If you wanted to make a killing just head down to one of the beaches and walk around with a cooler full of beer. You could take home a tone of cash. OK if you want a great affordable backpacking trip to a beautiful country head on down.

Our trip started out in the Capital City of San Jose. The town itself was ok I guess. We didn't head down for city life though so we didn't spend much time in San Jose . From San Jose we hopped a bus and headed North West to Monteverde. Monteverde was a quite, small Jungle town that was a way up in the Mountains. The Jungle up there was amazing. We even did a canopy zip line tour. The tour was a blast. It had 16 zip lines and a Tarzan swing. After the Zip line tour we went for a bit of a walk to a water fall. I don't know what it is about a water fall. I mean we come from the land of water falls in beautiful BC but hey it's a water fall so we had to check it out. As it turns out the guy who told us how to get there didn't have a very good sense of distance. He said it was about 2 km when it was really about 20km away. So we never made it there but saw it from afar and it looked cool. The next day we headed off to Tamarindo. Tamarindo is a beach town that is starting to take off tourist wise. When we got there we found a nice Hotel on the beach for 24 bucks a night. Right out front was some nice swell with lots of people enjoying it. Just as we walked in from some swimming and sun I head a voice. I was like hey I know that voice. I turn around and there was my buddy Jeff. I was like hey Jeff and he just started to laugh. Then around the corner was my buddy Chris. What crazy luck down in Costa Rica I run into two buds I played soccer with. So that night we went out and had some beers. The flowing day I hit the surf. It was good I rented a board for the day and it cost 20 bucks. That's way better then the 50 bucks a day in Toffino. The water was so warm so I stayed out for the better part of the day. At one point I got caught in the rip tide and I couldn't get back in. So the lifeguard came out and helped me get in. As the day went on I was getting a bit better. I could get up consistently but would fall rather quick. By the end of the day I was knackered and my ribs hurt so I packed her in. The next day we headed down the peninsula to Montezuma. Montezuma is a nice little town right on the edge of a national wild life reserve. We went to check out the reserve. It was a 2.5 km walk through the jungle, and then you end up at a nice beach. During the walk we heard tones of howling monkeys. For a little bugger they sure have a good set of lungs on them. The first time I heard them I thought there was a pack of big dogs in the jungle. We also saw lots of lizards, iguanas, monkeys, and raccoon type things. I even saw a snake. There are some pics of all the things below. The next day I wanted to get back on the ocean, so we booked a boat tour. The tour was cool they take you out to a little island and you snorkel have lunch and drink beer. The snorkeling was pretty good, I wish I would have had an underwater camera though. We saw everything from an eel to an octopus. Then for lunch they cooked up some blue marline. From Montezuma we headed back to San Jose to fly out the following day. The crazy thing about the ride home was that I was listing to the Spanish radio. The broadcast came on and it sounded like breaking news. All I could pick up was Monteverte, Bank, robbery 10 hostages and 3 dead. Now I don't know any Spanish so I listened again. So it still sounded like a bank heist with 10 hostages and 3 dead. So I woke up Susie who can speak Spanish. She said that they where talking fast, but after we watched the news I was right. It was kind of crazy one week after we went into the bank it got stuck up. So that was the trip down South if you are interested you should definitely go it is well worth it

Here is a map of Costa Rica. On the left is the whole thing. Then on the right is a smaller section of the north west..