After a morning of relaxing and an afternoon of surfing, I am back in the cabin to continue where I left off yesterday. Having walked up the giant hill (more on that later), the odds of my leaving again this evening are slim to none. What to do in a private cabin on a hill… perhaps I’ll continue with part one.
After booking the flight, my next step was to figure out exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. For a country this small, there is a preponderance of activities and different climates. I would even go as far to say there is a plethora. There are two coasts with totally different vibes and in between are mountains, lakes, rivers, jungle, and everything in between.
I went through the usual outlets in my research, which is Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor, and all the sights that come up when I google “Travel to Costa Rica.” This search gave me a more narrow idea of where I wanted to go and led me to a company called “Anywhere Costa Rica”, which we’ll call ACR for short. This company will arrange everything for a traveler before hand and takes a lot of the leg work and planning out of the equation. I thought this would be a good idea for my first week to get me where I need to go and keep me out of trouble, seeing how this was my first trip to CR and I don’t speak a lick of Costa Rican.
My flight was to San Jose and my first thought was to get out of the capital as soon as possible. In past travels I’ve started out in big cities like Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila. Arriving straight into a big city to lead off a trip is a great way to waste money or lose something valuable if one is not careful—the kind of trouble I was looking to avoid. My motis operandi for the first week was to take some adventure tours, do some eco tours and eventually get to Montezuma. ACR made a custom plan for me which I was able to change or tweak easily, and the agents were very helpful and accommodating. A shuttle was arranged to take me directly from the airport to the town of La Fortuna, at the base of Arenal, an active volcano.
Active volcano, you say? Always right up my ally. I booked a rappelling and white water rafting tour, and a horseback tour to a waterfall. I would spend three nights here and would leave for Monteverde Friday morning. For Monteverde I opted for the zip-lining over the Cloud Forest Canopy/ suspension bridge tour. That sounded alright. The next day I would have a guided tour of the forest, there would be a free day after that, and then Tuesday morning I would head out to Montezuma.
Montezuma would be the final destination for ACR, and I would be on my own after that. I conjured memories of my Philippines trip, where I spent a week traveling around and then spent the last ten days of my vacation chilling in a small beach town. The idea of hanging out in a tiny, laid back, Bohem little town for 11 days sounded very appealing to me. I also figured that if I didn’t like it, I’d make my way up the coast. I think most of you know how that worked out by now.
Eventually, I will go into more detail on each place, and my experience with Anywhere Costa Rica. If this is as far as you read, please take away from this a very solid recommendation for the company. More on that will follow. For our next part, I want to talk about my preparation for the trip, what I brought, and how it worked out.
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