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This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

Now we’re staying at the base of the Arenal volcano, Costa Rica’s biggest and most famous.  We’re just up the road from La Fortuna, so named, I think, because it was spared during a previous eruption.  The volcano is completely socked in by clouds and fog today, as it usually is; if it clears up, they tell us we can see the red glow at the summit from our hotel room.

CVH went off on another wildlife tour today, up towards, the Nicaraguan border.  She and her friends got to see a lot of animals.

Perhaps you can get a sense of how excited these amateur naturalists are from this video of them watching a small lizard:

Or check out this shot of them watching another animal; you can hear the guide pointing out there are three animals to see:

Did you see all three? No? Did you see one? Me neither. Now you know how I felt on these outings.

Here she is waving from the Nicaraguan frontier sans visa.

While she was watching for animals and making illegal border crossings, I walked into the town of La Fortuna. It’s about two blocks wide and five blocks long, mostly souvenir shops and tour offices, but had a wonderful bakery. The souvenir shops did have a variety and quantity of goods that was much greater than what we had seen in the other towns, and the prices here were about double what we had seen elsewhere. in general, any time you see a price in dollars, you can expect that you’re paying the “gringo premium”.

I got off the main drag and wandered down to the local bus depot. It started to rain (we’re still on the wet side of the mountains), so I ducked into a small soda, or lunch spot. In the U.S., the diner next to the bus station is usually a pretty nasty place; but this soda, like pretty much every place else in Costa Rica, was meticulously mopped and clean. Ticos seem almost obsessed with mopping and cleaning. I did get a wonderful lunch – huge pork chop, rice and beans (of course), plantains, fried yucca, salad. The portion was “American sized” – i.e., I couldn’t complete it – although this place was clearly not oriented toward the tourist crowd. I guessed the locals ate their big meal of the day at lunch.

After I ate, and the rain stopped, I walked around town some more. I saw a lady sweeping the parking pad between the pumps at the gas station, right after it rained, no less; these people really like to sweep and mop. Then I passed a bakery. The bakers had some sort of setup where they blew the aromas out onto the street; they knew what they were doing.

In the afternoon, we all went to a hot springs resort. The waters are fed hot from the volcano. The resort was on the touristy side, but boy the hot water felt good!

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.
Today we head back west on our journey to the Pacific coast.  Before we leave the Caribbean coast, however, CVH befriends a cat and gets her picture taken with the jungle guide.

Somewhere José got hold of a poison frog, called a Blue Jean frog because the lower half of its body is a bright blue color, making it look like it is wearing blue jeans.  He brought it onto the bus for us to take pictures.

When we stopped for lunch, we were once again treated to an interpretive dance.  This time it was a paean to the fauna of Costa Rica.  The young woman who played the jaguar was really good.  You could tell that she had studied cat movements.  Julie Newmar had nothing on this lady.

After lunch, it was more pineapples.  We visited just about the last thing I expected to see in rural Costa Rica – the Alamo-themed Collin Street Bakery building.  Yes, we’re a long way from Corsicana, but this is where their pineapples are grown.  They even have a Texas flag flying out front (of course!).

Here we see a man trimming a fresh pineapple with a very sharp knife.  I only wish I could have stayed around to watch him sharpening it. The knife, that is, not the pineapple, which he passed around for us to eat.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

Well, here it is the 21st.  At the beginning of the tour, José, our guide, polled us about what we wanted to see on the tour.  I said that if I saw a volcano and a tree frog, I would be happy.  Since now I’ve seen those things, I suppose that if the world does end today, I will at least have met the minimum success criteria for our trip.

This morning CVH went out on a rainy wildlife viewing trip in an open boat (I, on the other hand, sought shelter from the elements).  She did get to see this flower, which only blooms for one day.

Later in the day, after it stopped raining for a while, we went to the beach.  CVH went one direction and got to see a baby sea turtle emerge from the sand and make its long dangerous journey to the sea.  There was a small crowd of wildlife enthusiasts with her and they all cheered on the tiny creature.  For many of them, it was the highlight of their entire tour.  I walked the other direction and didn’t see a damn thing.  This was to become the theme of my wildlife viewing attempts.

Although extremely humid, it was surprisingly cool and comfortable there in the jungle, and not as many mosquitoes as we feared.

I got to see more gaudy tree frogs this evening.  They are so cute.

They don’t have fir trees in the coastal jungle, of course, but the lodge staff really tried to do their best with the materials that they had at hand.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

Now we headed off to the rain forest, on the Caribbean coast.  We would be staying in a wildlife sanctuary, and there are only two ways to get there.  One way, if you’re rich, is to fly in a small plane.  We took the other way.

Our bus drove to the end of the paved road, and then about another half hour on dirt to where the road really came to an end.  Here we all got on a boat.

It’s about an hour on the boat to get to Tortuguero.  You really feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere during the trip.

Our lodge location is indicated by the yellow circle on the picture above. Accommodations here in the national preserve are simple. There isn’t much electricity, so your cabin has few light bulbs; there’s no phone, TV, air conditioning, or much hot water.

It rains a lot in the rain forest. Yes, I know you would expect this, but you don’t expect just how much it really rains in the rain forest. It pours for hours at a rate of one to two inches an hour. It makes quite a roar on the roof of your cabin. Yet you can still hear the howling of the monkeys over this din. I figured that they are either extremely loud or extremely close; probably both.

I was thrilled to finally get to see gaudy tree frogs. They are difficult to photograph, as they generally only come out at night, and you shouldn’t use flash because they are very sensitive to light. I took these shots handheld, lit by a small flashlight.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

Today we head east toward the Caribbean coast and the rain forest jungle.  We passed this river, full of water carrying noxious volcano runoff.  Doesn’t seem to be affecting the thick vegetation on the left bank too much, though.

We stop at a roadside farmer’s market.  CVH is very curious.

Then we visit a butterfly garden.  Lots of butterflies.  Very pretty.  Very fast and very difficult to catch on camera.

This one posed well because it’s dead.

Here’s a video with a blue morpho on CVH’s arm.  If you look really quick, you can see its blue color when it takes off.

Another quick shot of the blue morpho.

At a rest stop, CVH tries to figure out where we are going.  She is not pointing to where we are going now, but rather to where we will be next week.

Back on the bus, we passed a Chiquita banana plantation. There were a lot of bananas. An awful lot. Those that were almost ready to be harvested were enclosed in a blue plastic bag to protect them from harm. Apparently one banana on each bunch has to be left outside the bag for the fruit to ripen properly. This banana, thusly sacrificed, is called the “hero banana”.

Here we see the blue bags of bananas being pulled along the “banana train” from the fields to the processing plant.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

On the way down from Vulcán Poás, we passed one of many “Cave Canem” signs that we would see on our trip (I never did see a Doberman there, though).

When we stopped for lunch, our tour company arranged for a group of young people to stage a dance of the indigenous peoples from pre-Columbian times.  Here you see the shaman wearing a replica of one of the gold disks that I saw in the Museo del Oro yesterday.  He’s been inhaling the smoke from the sacred leaf burner that the priestess is holding.  Shortly the priestess will remove her frock and be joined a other young female dancers and the whole thing gets a little erotic.

Our appetites thus stimulated, we eat lunch, and then head on to a coffee plantation. There were several historical artifacts there, including this example of the national symbol of Costa Rica, the oxcart. The coffee company put on a humourous skit about the history of coffee cultivation, and finished with a demonstration of how to brew the perfect cup of coffee. I won the door prize of a bag of coffee. We exited through the gift shop, where I was able to select the coffee variety that I wanted. There were several different beans and roasts available, but I can’t handle caffeine anymore, so I asked for a sample of their decaf. It was the best decaf I had ever tasted in my life. I brought home two bags and tossed them in our freezer.

When we got back, I forgot to take one of the bags into work with me. So I just brewed a cup of the coffee that I had. It was a good coffee, twelve dollars a pound, purchased and ground at a local deli. But after two weeks of sipping Costa Rican coffee, it tasted like mud. I am totally spoiled.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

Today we joined our group tour for the first day of an extensive journey around Costa Rica.  We were going to see samples of every part of the country, from the Central Valley to the Rain Forest to the Pacific, and several places in between.

This morning started with a trip up to Poás Volcano. It’s a beautiful drive up to the park. It was almost the start of coffee season, and we saw lots and lots and lots of coffee plants with their little red berries. We also passed many houses; they were all heavily gated. You could do well in the wrought-iron-and-razor-wire business here.

We were very lucky when we got to the top; it is often, if not usually, socked in by clouds, but today’s view was truly spectacular. The lake behind CVH in the photo is about 300 meters deep and has a pH of less than 1.

The sulfurous stench of the fumes wafting up from the center of the earth was impressive. I’m breathing heavily in this video because the air is little thin for a flatlander like me. Notice how the acid environment stunts the trees and bushes in the foreground.

We climbed on up to the secondary Poás crater, the cold but beautiful Lake Botos at about 2500 meters altitude. No stunted vegetation here; it is surrounded by a cloud forest as thick and dense as anything in a Tolkien book. Despite it being a bright and sunny day, as soon as you stepped away from the lake and into the woods, it gets dark and you are surrounded by thick, gnarly trees all long and twisted around. You would think that you were in southern Louisiana or something instead of on top of a mountain.

Aerial view of Lake Botos; you climb up from the parking lot at the bottom of this photo.

The “Poor Man’s Umbrella”, a surprisingly sea-level-looking plant that we only saw at altitude.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica. If you like, you can start with the first post.

The sun came jumping up this morning, as it does every morning down here. At just under ten degrees north of the equator, it stays high and goes screaming across the sky all day until plunging behind the volcanoes to the west.

San José sits between two long mountain ranges in what is called the Central Valley. The majority of Costa Ricans (known as Ticos) live in the Central Valley, I’m guessing because the weather is so pleasant (many houses need neither A/C or furnaces; you just open the window). That equatorial sun is fierce though, and I was surprised that I was one of the very few people wearing a hat.

Before we took off for the day, CVH had me take this picture of the hotel Christmas tree. It is typical of the commercially displayed trees that we saw.

Outside the cultural museums, Charlaine saw a pigeon sitting down.  She swore she never saw a pigeon sitting down before, and had me take a picture of that, too:

We went into the museums and first saw an exhibit on Costa Rican currency (numismatics). Like most other countries, their paper currency is more attractive than that of the U.S., and all the time that we were there, I got a kick out of looking at my paper money. (Their coins, however, are boooring.) Typical is this close-up of a 1000 colones bill, showing the national tree, a hoofed animal, a flower, a scorpion, and other flora and fauna.

Next was a exhibit on the archeology of the big cats of Costa Rica: how the Puma, Jaguar, Tigrillo, Ocelot, Caucel, and Jaguarundi have been depicted throughout the ages. There were several pre-Columbian artifacts, including this cute ocarina.

I even got CVH to unleash her inner Jaguar (momentarily).

Next was the Museum of Gold. This absolutely amazing collection of pre-Columbian gold and precious metal artifacts captivated me. There were owls and crawfish and people and many other creatures depicted. My pictures below can’t do them justice, but here’s a taste:

After all that museum-going, we were hungry, so we ducked into Cafecito y Algo Más, a small restaurant on Calle Siete downtown. We had the basic businessman’s lunch: fish or chicken, rice and beans (of course), vegetables, salad, pumpkin soup, coffee, and dessert.

Nearby is Seventh Street Books, a book store that caters primarily to the English language crowd. For a small store, they had an impressive selection; still, if I lived here, I think an e-reader would be a necessity.

We walked back across downtown San José to the old Post Office in an attempt to visit the philatelic museum, but the museum was closed for the holidays.

This is one of a series of posts on our 2012 trip to Costa Rica.  If you like, you can start with the first post.

At breakfast this morning, I committed my first faux pas. When the waitress came around asking if we wanted coffee, I asked for decaf. I got a jar of Sanka. The coffee is excellent in Costa Rica, and you can get decaf in the stores, just don’t ask for it in restaurants.

We took a taxi ride to the center of Alajuela, the largest of San José’s “suburbs”, although really a small city in its own right.  It looked like this was a big market day for Alajuela, with buses from all over the region disgorging natives from the hinterlands to do their weekly shopping.  We went into one of the big grocery stores next to the bus station so CVH could check out the food situation.  Lots of rice and beans.  This grocery store looked to me like an American grocery store of fifty years ago; a lot of basics, and not two dozen varieties of every single item.  But then, it became clear that we were not in the most properous area of Costa Rica, either.

We visited the not-over-air-conditioned Supermercado Palí; I was surprised at the number of processed items which were made in Costa Rica.  I figured they’d have to import all that stuff.  So very many of the items in the store come in “green” or environmentally-friendly packaging, biodegradable pouches and the like, to minimize waste.  This is just another reflection of the “greeness” of Costa Rica.  It does make one wonder why we don’t do the same here in the states.

Going to the bank here is interesting  It’s a time-consuming process.  Not because the clerks are particularly slow, but for some reason it appears that everybody has to go to the bank.  Lines are very long at every bank; you wait outside the bank until there’s enough room for you in the not-overly-air-conditioned lobby on the inside and then you wait there.  I never did figure out what all those people were doing.  Whatever it was, it was obviously important.

Today we also discovered that travelers should check the expiration dates on their ATM and credit cards before leaving the country, just in case the cards have expired and the bank didn’t send you new ones.  We found ourselves a long way from home in a country not fond of credit cards with little cash and no good way to get it.  It turns out that you can rectify this situation (and we did), but it will cost you time and money.

For lunch today we went to the considerably more upscale suburb of Escazú and had pizza with a marinated octopus appetizer.  When we sat down, I checked to be sure the “VISA” sticker was on the front door, and whipped out my card as soon as the check arrived.  The place seemed to do a good business in delivered pizzas; young folks on small motorcycles (whom you see everywhere in San José) strap the pizzas to the back and zip through the ubiquitous traffic jams by riding between the lanes. There were a number of different families enjoying pizza there with us, including a children’s birthday party. Pretty fancy pizza for a kid.

After pizza, we walked over to the POPS, a local ice cream chain. They have very good ice cream, although during our time in Costa Rica I discovered that plain vanilla is not very popular. They like fancy flavors there.

About this time we also noticed how clean places were San José. Tiled floors are the standard, and it seemed like someone was always mopping them. Clean, clean, clean.

After lunch we walked around the nearby neighborhood.  Lots of nice looking townhomes and haciendas, and lots and lots of burglar bars and razor wire.  Reminded me of the French Quarter, except quiet and with lush landscaping on outside.  (I think the bigger places have courtyards too.)

Then we hopped a bus downtown.  There appear to be a number of bus companies operating in San José, and they charge different prices.  I did notice that the cheaper buses were more crowded, but they were all inexpensive, especially compared to the cost of operating a car in Costa Rica.  The center of downtown is a large retail area and here the week before Christmas, it was a hustle and bustle.

News item: The Earth has had two near-misses with large asteroids already this month.

Add to this the idea that the Mayans predicted the world will end on 21 December 2012 when a “planet” strikes the Earth, and, well, why not be there for a front-row (or at least balcony) seat?

So we landed in Costa Rica today for a two week vacation.

Our sweet neighbor dropped us off at the airport this morning at 5:30 a.m. (We have really nice neighbors; in addition to this favor, they are also taking care of our cats, while hosting another friend’s puppy for the holidays).  We had a layover in Charlotte, and ate breakfast there at Beaudevin, a real restaurant in the middle of the airport.  I can highly recommend Beaudevin if you’re in CLT and need a meal.  It’s in the main atrium area.

I had some fun with CVH after breakfast: she asked which concourse our Costa Rica flight was leaving from.

“D,” I said.

“D?” asked CVH.

“Sí.” I replied.

“C?”

“No, D.”

“D?”

“Sí.”

She hates that sort of thing.

After breakfast, it was off to Costa Rica.  On the way there, we flew over Cuba.  I was able to see the island from the airplane.  Not a particularly exciting sight, I suppose, but it is intriguing to someone of my generation how such an unprepossessing spit of sand has caused so much controversy in the last sixty years.

We got through immigration and customs at the not-over-air-conditioned San José airport without problem and taxied to our hotel, the Barceló Palacio.

We had a very pleasant taxi driver on the way in from the airport.  We chatted about the plants and trees that we saw along the way.  It was such an unusual pleasure to get a airport taxi driver that could speak the language and knew where he was going.  (I’ll never forget the time I returned home to Houston and had to give the driver directions on how to get out of the airport.)  However, despite all the many signs in the airport that indicated that the official orange airport taxis all take VISA, our driver would only take cash.  We found this aversion to credit cards to be common throughout the country; they haven’t yet accepted the theory that the fees are made up for by increased volume.

The view from our room was just paradisaical:

After dinner, when we returned to our hotel room, I told CVH that I’d try to get a nice telenovela on the TV so that she could practice her Spanish.  She said no, she didn’t really care for telenovelas, but if we could get Law & Order in Spanish, that would be a help (I think she has seen every Law & Order episode twice).  Well, I couldn’t quite get that, but we did get Law & Order in English with Spanish subtitles, which she got a big kick out of.  There was also a big fireworks display going on over at the giant soccer stadium.  Apparently people everywhere like fireworks, even in a country so pacifist that it doesn’t have an army.