I am the Burgerfan!

Chris Christou's Weblog. Everyone has a story — What's yours?

January 10th, 2004: 7:34 pm

The following is from a series of emails sent out during our three week trip to Costa Rica in January 2004:


Hi all, and here we go again!

So that crazy type of rain I talked about in the past email — it turns out that is actually the inside of a cloud! It sounds like more fun than it actually is apparently.

Last email we were in Santa-Elena. We were ready to make our way out of the mountains, but the next stop was either a seven hour public bus ride around the mountain, or a $21 USD per person tour ACROSS the mountain in a “jeep-boat-jeep” package. This is the zaniest terrain I have ever seen that was called a ‘road’, and was 90 minutes of riding in a blender. All my internals should literrally be mixed together now! Tem minutes short of losing it, we stopped (thank goodness) at a place where we take a 30 minute boat ride across a lake, which goes to a point on the road near our next stop, the town of La Fortuna.

This was a nice little town. Its feature attaction is the Arenal Volcano. This volcano is known for being very active, apparently erupting every few hours. We heard it and it sounds like thunder… very neat. The key tour is to go to an observation point where you can see the lava running off the top of the volcano, with a fiery red hot glow. Unfortunately it was very cloudy and raining on and off, and so even after staying a day longer to try and catch a glimpse, no view. Postcards it is for this album.

Today we left from there, and took a series of three buses over six hours to the city of Fortuna. Population 50,000 we expected this ranch-town to be as dirty and unenjoyable as San Jose, but it isnt! It is actually a nice place with lots in the centre-street area (ie: downtown) to walk around and see. Since we were in a bigger populous, I wanted to find a music store to get some latin music. This escapade took over an hour to find such a store, asking people who didnt know English, and getting directions in spanish and pointing, and no two direction sets were the same. But we finally got the right directions from someone who knew how to explain in English! yay!

Technology highlight: The plumbing is not set up too well here. I think that while tourism is a major industry in the country here, it caused lots of hotels and stuff to get set up pretty quickly. As a result, I am guessing that certain infrastructures that were in place and built on top of cannot handle the use we’d expect. As a result, most toilets we have encountered you cannot flush toilet paper down. You actually have to place it in a trach can beside the toilet. Nothing like that outhouse scent in your indoor, modern-day loo!

Take care, and hope to hear from you all again soon. We can’t wait to get back and visit! But after a little more relaxing…

Chris