The following is from a series of emails sent out during our three week trip to Costa Rica in January 2004:
Nasa gets to Mars again!!!!! Horray!!!!!!
Meanwhile, the Christou Costa-Rican rovers have been busy crossing the crazy central american lands on their own exploratory mission. Considering I have already written a fair bit in my own book, I will pick and choose from this, and try and give a more detailed account of what goes on more frequently in the coming week. Locations wont mean much to you, so go over to mapquest.com or something and try and look these places up.
Dec 29 we got to San Jose (the capital) in the evening, after waking up at 4am to start this adventure. Add to this that we were both still pathetically sick from before Christmas, and this was a sad sad start to the trip.
San Jose actually smells like an exhaust pipe, so we took off on Dec 30 for the Pacific Coast, a beach town called Jaco. Descending from the higher grounds gives you a definitely noticable change in humidity. It is very scenic there, and the food is great. With one exception — Here is a ‘Christou style’ excerpt from my journal:
*** …walking around after supper I still hadn’t found pineapple, which is supposed to be plenty, delicious, and white. A pizza kiosk looked to be closing for the night soon so I asked to buy some slices of pineapple. Apparently he had some pre sliced fruit wrapped up. 200 colones (pronounced co-LONE-ehzzz, about 60cents CDN), thanks, and start walking down the road. Oh buy, unwrapping, I cant wait to eat this! BLAAAAAAAAAA! IT TASTES LIKE BEER! I think it sat there all day and was very rotten. I want pineapple :( ***
Since then I have learned to get it sliced up fresh in front of you. I have also found some pineapple since then, and it was indeed delicious!!!
okay where was I… we were there a few days, and then went to Manual Antonio (further south along the Pacific coast) for a few days. It is another beach community. There is a national park here, at which we saw some monkeys, sloths, iguanas, and a boa constrictor. Also we took a tour into a rainforest, which had numerous zip lines (some 120 feet into the sky on the massively tall trees), and repell lines straight down. This was very cool!
Today we took off for the mainlands/mountains, it couldnt have been better timing. A huge downpour started yesterday and continued into the morning, which wouldnt have allowed for anything outdoors anyways. One transfer, 6.5 hours, and hundreds of windy roads later, we are in the mountain regions of Monteverde (Santa Elena). It rains a lot here and its actually chilly. There is not as much humidity since we are not near the coast, but the big upcoming attraction will be a continuously active volcano! More in that after we get there.
Okay we are bring kicked out of the internet cafe as it is closing, so I have to wrap it up here!
talk to you all later
Chris