Apart from the roads of course!

Before we left, the destination that excited us (and most friends) the most was Costa Rica. So does it live up to expectation? YES, YES and a big fat YES!

Costa Rica’s all about nature. They want to be carbon neutral by 2022 and I’m sure they’ll probably do it. The abundance of wildlife and wild spaces is immense. Yes, there are lots of entrance fees to national parks, zipline adventure tours or sloth sighting offers, but they’ve got to make the low carbon life pay somehow and tourism is the go-to moneymaker. Everything can be paid for in Colones and US$ and most places take credit cards so they make it really easy to part with your money. Food’s good and easy for veggies to get a decent feed and being Costa Rica, the coffee’s good!

We skipped San Jose and made our first stopover the town of Alajuela, a smaller, bustling town with a great market. We’ve loved the nature reserve and national park hikes around La Fortuna, Arenal, with the waterfall proving a real highlight for us all. Whilst you see plenty of birds, animals and reptiles on hikes, the best part of these hikes is the actual being in the rain/cloud forests. Yes you can hire a guide but we quickly realised that they simply take you on a short walk to spot a couple of ‘must see’ species through a telescope. They then take a picture of it through your phone for you to tick it off the bucket list. But for us, the idea of just seeing stuff through a lens lacked appeal. We wanted to get a stride on and explore ourselves! Anyway, on every hike, you always come across guided groups or private guides who have spotted something so you still see the same stuff anyway and can then carry on going at your own pace leaving the poor guided peeps to trudge along with their group. Our extra long hike around the base of Arenal Volcano to the 1968 lava flow was a great challenge and provided brilliant views. More interesting than the sight of 50 year old lava rocks though was the knowledge that it was all once molten and flowed so far down the mountainside destroying 2 towns/ villages in the process. Most people seem to do the short hike directly to the lava rocks then moan on tripadviser that is was dull and uneventful. The long route takes you through the forest first and gives you a proper hike. In any event, the volcano was topped later that day when we sought out the local hot springs river that feeds all the fancy hot spring resorts. Having done hot spring resorts in other countries it was a real treat to find it at source and sit in this fast flowing hot river as the thunderstorm gathered overhead. Another highlight despite Colette’s new flipflop disappearing off downstream! We traipsed back to the car in the thunderstorm, hot, drenched and laughing out loud at the craziness of it all.

So forget the tours, the best stuff in Costa Rica is the stuff that is all around you. We slept in a treehouse in the forest and the place comes alive at night. Again the host here offered a paid for night time tour around the grounds but go for a walk yourself and you encountered all the frogs and bugs that lived there! Our current host in Manuel Antonio has dissed the national park here as ‘wildlife is everywhere!’, which of course we know, even a hike to the beach leads you through the jungle again. We did do a monkey mangrove boat tour as it offered a different perspective but there are only so many zip lines you can ride. This place has white faced monkeys walking along tightropes, vines and palms all around the grounds. The iguanas and geckos are always around the pool, the toucans in the trees and the birds of prey and exotic little fancies all show themselves in the early morning just on the side streets leading to the beach. Huge birds circle the air, a sight to behold until one of them takes a dump on your windscreen and it looks like somebody’s emptied a baby’s nappy on you (smells like it too!). We headed to a little local waterfall for a swim yesterday but took a wrong turn so the adventure turned into one of stream scrambling as we followed the river. An afternoon in the hostel pool kept all happy with Henna and Arlo honing their diving skills and teaching a mexican family the finer points of gracefully entering the water. We also have plenty of time to catch up on journals, blogs and maths work now before we head back to Alajuela ready to return to Mexico.

According to the hostel’s owner, it’s a constant 28/29 degrees in Costa Rica year round, even when it rains. And boy does it rain here! Everyday without fail! (at this time of year anyway). We’ve come at a fabulous time of year, early rainy season, so you get great sun in the first half of the day (it’s light at 5am) and then come 4, 5pm it batters it down, thunders, lightens – BIG FAT HEAVY rain and a great show of a storm. Then it’s gone, just like that. Next morning it’s bone dry ready to start again. We’ve played football in it, marvelling at the non- muddy pitch as the ball got stuck in puddles that would soon disappear. The whole ecosystem here is just like one big sponge. Check out the BBC and the big news back home is a thunderstorm and flooding. Can’t work out if that’s because we’re a clayey island or that we’ve concreted, flagged and block paved the life out of our own spaces (and built on flood plains, don’t forget that little nugget of planning wisdom). I’m sure in full blown rainy season, rivers run where there once was none here but they seem to work with it rather than against it, and let nature do it’s thing, which it kicks arse at here, it really does.

For me the highlight by far has been sleeping in the forest air amongst the sounds of the night. It IS really loud but it totally envelopes you as you drift off to sleep. You can’t take a picture of this as a memory maker of course but these nights will stay with me forever – AND those thunderstorms of course! You can’t beat thunder that you literally feel rumble right through you! So with all this wonderfulness it’s easy to overlook the fact that every minor road is a rough stoney track – at least it’ll drain well!