costa rica

i figured i would write a blog post about our costa rica trip in case anyone is planning on going and wanted to know about our experience. i may actually keep the blog running a little bit, more as a vacation photography travel blog now that we are boring and only get 3 weeks off a year, and who knows, maybe we will pick it up full time again in the future...

nosara

there are a number of surfing destinations in northern costa rica; the most popular being tamarindo, nosara, and santa teresa. tamarindo is supposed to be a tourist nightmare full of party hostels, and santa teresa is both far away from the airport (8h bus ride) and has a fairly steep and powerful break that is hard to surf. nosara is the goldilocks; not too far, not too trashy, and has some of the best surfing on the west coast of the americas.

we flew into liberia and got on a long, bumpy, hot, 4h bus ride all the way to nosara, turned out to be about 15 hours of travel by the time we got into our hotel. it was dark out and we were very tired by the time we got in.

playa guiones

playa guinones is famous for the most consistently good surfing on the pacific. it has one of the best beach breaks going, basically excellent conditions all year round. off shore winds all morning, 27 degree water, a perfect break that works at all different tides, ample space to spread out. we are here basically to surf for an entire week.

"perfect conditions" however does mean big waves, pretty much all the time. about chest to overhead high. which is much bigger than anything amy has ever surfed on. i have been on some big waves in bali, but it has been a while. the first day we went out we both got absolutely pummelled trying to remember how to do this.

"perfect conditions"

crazy offshore winds blowing everyday, but busy lineups

since we didn't have a vehicle, we spent a lot of the week walking around to the different beaches around nosara, this is playa pelada

early in the week we hired a surf instructor, who brought amy out to the outside for the first time to catch her first real big green (unbroken) waves. this was a game changer, especially for her. after catching her first overhead wave and paddling back she was ecstatic, yelling "that was so cool!" i think she gets it now. we learned a little more about how to read the sets coming in, find where the peaks are, timing, positioning, it was all super helpful. unfortunately i don't have any good evidence of this, but by the end of the week we were catching lots of big, green waves, and turning back and forth down the line with ease. very sick. learning is much easier when you have perfect conditions everyday.

since we were mostly in the water together i mostly didn't bring my camera to the beach. except for one evening when i brought it to try to get some photos of amy, but without any moral support out there i think she had a bad time so i mostly only have photos of her wiping out lol

hibiscus

surfing, however, is extremely tiring and so you are only able to do this for about 2 hours a day, which does leave a lot of time to fill everyday, which is difficult when you don't have a car.

hotel pool

costa rican food is honestly pretty boring. healthy. bland. as my theory goes - places with high levels of suffering and poverty usually use food as a coping mechanism and make some of the best tasting foods out there. this is the exact opposite. when you live in paradise where the weather is always perfect and have a relatively stable sociopolitical situation, who cares about what's for dinner? a typical meal is beans, rice, fruit, vegetable, salad, served by many roadside "sodas" (diners).

on our first night in nosara, we were woken up in the middle of the night to an otherworldly low growl, like a pig squeal but 8 octaves lower. like death metal singing, extremely loud, right outside our hotel room. terrifying thing to wake up to disoriented in the night. turns out it is a howler monkey, who are everywhere around here. i had assumed that they howled, not made deathcore breakdown vocals. tiny monkey, very big sound.

here is an example:

one day a big iguana chased amy and she got very scared

a lot of what we do in costa rica it seems is try not to spend money. costa rica almost exclusively uses the usd and the exchange rate is terrible, plus costa rica is an expensive place to live at baseline, and in nosara everything is priced at tourist gouging prices. meals of beans and rice are around $22cad each, and even groceries are insane; we once paid $22cad for 2 tomatoes and 2 avocados at a small town mercado. car rentals were around $150cad/day, scooter rentals the same, so we opted not to rent a car for the week we were in nosara, which left us limited in our options of things to do and see. we got a hotel with a shared kitchen so we could cook at least some food there (we even brought oatmeal, ramen, and powdered peanut butter from home in our bags to save money) and it was still insanely expensive to eat here for a week.

we spent a lot of time just walking around the beaches and forests of nosara

we rented a scooter for one day and went to do a hike into a small waterfall and go see this cool beach with a white sand between two coves. we also went to playa ostional, which has a massive turtle hatch every year if you time it right, but all we saw were egg shells.

san juanillo beach

hermit crab

malanoche waterfall: a 4km round trip hike to a local swimming hole

overall, nosara is fine. it is pretty chill, safe, easy to walk around, but very expensive, very gringo, very designed to extract as much money as possible from rich american tourists. it's not a party hostel tourist trap, more of like a yoga/wellness/$25 smoothie bowl kind of ripoff, which is slightly more tolerable. it's kind of a dusty town as they are tearing up all the terrible dirt costa rican roads and putting in interlock for the whole town, and there is construction everywhere. many walled compounds for rich expats and for wellness/surf retreat centres that cost $9000 per week. the whole tourist money extraction machine thing definitely harshes the vibe of just chilling on vacation.

banana trees - i always thought bananas grew on a tree, but it's really more of like a bird of paradise. the plant also only produces one stock of bananas, so the whole plant is cut back after the fruit is harvested, only to regrow again from scratch.

more boring healthy food

nonetheless, we had a pretty good time in nosara. not amazing, but definitely not a bad time. like a 7.5/10. the surf conditions were great, which is the main reason we came. the weather was also great. lots of time to lie on the beach. we saw a couple cool things we saw when we rented the scooter to get out of town. probably worth it to come and surf here once, don't know if i would come back for our next surf trip.

so long nosara

monteverde

after a week of surfing, being thoroughly exhausted, beat up, sinuses rinsed with sea water (amy developing a sinus infection), we headed up to the mountains, to see one of the famous things about costa rica: the cloud forests. rainforests at such a high elevation they thrive off cloud moisture. monteverde (green mountain) is one of these areas.

from monteverde you can see all the way to the gulf of nicoya. it sits at about 1400m, so clouds roll through regularly, especially in the mornings.

it must be mentioned that the driving in costa rica is insane. most locals drive giant, new, expensive, north american sized suvs (think 4runners, land cruisers) with high suspension and a snorkel, because just getting around often means river crossings and roads that would be considered difficult atv trails back home. even the major highways are full of potholes, washouts, and the odd river crossing. whatever google maps says for eta, double it.

we did a tour of a coffee and chocolate plantation, which was pretty cool. the slimy white seeds in the yellow pods are chocolate, it gets dried and ground and mixed with milk and sugar. costa rica is famous for coffee but actually makes very little of the world's coffee, in part because it is small but also in part because they literally can't afford to pay costa ricans (ticos for short) enough to do the labour involved. the cost of living here is so high that for farm work they have to bring in temporary workers from cheaper neighbouring countries like guatamala.

i was very surprised by the standard of living in costa rica, i was thinking it would be a lot like mexico, but it turns out that because costa rica has had a relatively stable political situation for a long time, it is the go-to central american country for foreign investment, so they have a large number of free trade deals with america, china, etc., which means a lot of people here are highly educated, well paid, and work for big international corporations. that and political stability has made this the "safest" destination for foreign tourism dollars in central america.

view from our bedroom

we stayed about 20 minutes outside of the town of monteverde at this "eco lodge", whatever that means, mainly because of the view. in town would have been another boring hotel room, here we can see the mountains and the sunset. however, the road into the eco lodge is one of the steepest non-switchbacked roads i have ever driven on. i am amazed the suv we rented doesn't go ass over teakettle every time we descend the slope to our hotel.

look familiar?

we did a few wildlife tours while we were here as the jungle is absolutely teeming with life, but most of it is so well camouflaged there is no way you would see anything without a guide pointing things out. the first we did was a night tour to see all of the insects, lizards, frogs, etc. i really wanted to see some of the poison dart frogs but we only saw fairly boring normal tree frogs. we did see tarantulas, stick insects, and lots of sleeping birds.

night tour fauna

i took this photo from a pizza restaurant

finally unhealthy food

we went up to the monteverde cloud forest reserve to do a hike and another nature tour. the cloud forest is very cool; what seems like fog drifting through (but it is actually that you are just standing in a cloud), super dense foliage, moss, vines, plants growing on trees that are growing on other trees.

it was about $45cad each for admission to go and hike in the woods, this is a common theme in costa rica, but probably worth it to see these big trees

there are bats in the cracks

these are the same hummingbirds we have at home, they actually migrate all the way to canada for some reason

this is the best photo i have of a 'resplendant quetzal', which in birding circles is apparently some sort of big deal

these animals called coatis are everywhere, kind of like costa rican daytime raccoons, except they also have raccoons here. basically most animals that exist in canada also exist here, but they also have a tonne of weird rainforest animals on top of that

all our houseplants also just grow here naturally, it explains why they aren't as happy indoors - they want it to be costa rica - aka 30 degrees, sunny, and 100% humidity

there was this pretty cool rope tree nest thing high up in the trees in the woods near our hotel

la fortuna

further inland and around the arenal volacano and lake arenal is a small town called la fortuna. we drove down more winding, sketchy, potholed mountain roads for about 5 hours from monteverde to get here for the last leg of our trip.

the volcano makes this area famous for hot springs, unfortunately mostly all of them have been made private and are like $200 admission per day, fortunately there is a local favourite spring that is essentially a hot spring river that is free to access (once you pay the guy that says you have to pay him $15 for parking even though it is just the side of the public road). pretty cool. very busy.

natural hot springs, this river is about 40-50 degrees celcius (80-100f)

even just around our hotel there were parrots and all sorts of weird ass birds in all the trees.

wow weird birds

we did another hike at the mistico hanging bridges, the main feature being 16 suspension bridges along the trail that hang high above the jungle so you can get into the treetop canopy. this was cool but very disneyland-y, very manicured trail, lots and lots of people, $50cad each for admission to go hiking in the woods.

crown shyness

pit viper

if i hear someone say "pura vida" one more time i am going to lose my mind. "pura vida" is the tico way of saying "pure life", expressing how great it is to be a chill guy in a hammock living in paradise, but also to say "hello", "goodbye", to dismiss minor problems, to say things are good, or just to generally express the kind of optimism that could only come from living in the most idyllic climate on earth. when we got to our hotel in la fortuna, the host must have said it 30 times just during our check in alone. when we got to the room, the wifi was password protected and there wasn't any sign or anything, but i was pretty sure i could guess it; puravida.

one of the main reasons we wanted to go to costa rica was because amy really wanted to see a sloth. we had been on high alert through all our time so far walking through the rainforest, and even on our nature tours we didn't see one. we did however eventually find one chilling above a parking lot, and another hanging out above our hotel.

la fortuna waterfall is pretty cool, this was a fairly short but fairly steep hike (1km, 25m), admission is $40cad each. there is a swimming hole at the bottom if the waterfall is not raging, however today is definitely not a swimming day. lots of people.

more sloth

el salto rope swing, a local swimming hole

with our final day in la fortuna, we wanted to experience the hot springs so we decided to splurge and shell out the $230cad each to go to the private hot springs at this hotel resort which was very white lotus. they had about 30 different hot springs of different temperatures and degrees of minerality etc. which was pretty cool, very relaxing.

toucan with arenal volcano in the background

we did one more hike, the arenal 1968 hike (5km, 250m), exploring the lava fields around the arenal volcano, which is currently dormant but was actively erupting from 1968 to 2010. the town of la fortuna is actually called that because it was fortunate enough to survive the initial 1968 eruption that destroyed many other towns. pretty cool to see all of the black talus lava fields and get a good up close view of the volcano. i wanted to climb it, but apparently that is illegal as it does still have minor eruptions that send boulders flying. it also $40cad each to go hiking in the woods here.

these leaf cutter ants are everywhere, very cool

view of arenal from the lava fields, very cool

san jose

we drove back to san jose with enough time to explore a little bit in the afternoon before our morning flight. traffic here is crazy, no public transportation so everyone drives. the city rides well up into the mountains surrounding the basin so the roads are twisting, switchbacking, crazy. a long, tiring, bumpy drive back from la fortuna at this point i am having a hard time finding vegetarian food and getting pretty tired, ready to be back at home. we explored the market which was very lively, there was some sort of festival on. cute old town square. most people say san jose isn't really worth exploring as it is a pretty boring town; mostly government workers, tech employees, nothing overly exciting compared to the nature stuff in costa rica; in our short time here, i would agree.

overall, our time in costa rica was pretty good. a 7/10. am i glad i came? yeah, probably. would i come back? probably not.

it's hard to complain about paradise, but here i go: i think if you had infinite money and didn't have to stress about hemorrhaging cash everywhere you go, it would bump costa rica up to an 8.5/10. but even still, at least on our trip, we found that everything was very touristy. even nature. a hike in the woods is an $80 affair, as every possible natural experience has been monetized and advertised. it is hard to get off

the beaten track and away from other tourists, and even hiking can feel bovine.

we did do our best to try to get off the tourist trap treadmill, but found it pretty difficult. maybe that is just a consequence of not living in a van and having endless time to stop in small untravelled areas at our leisure, never planning more than a day in advance, and never worrying about where we are going to sleep at night. when we planned this trip we had to have it all planned before we left ottawa - hotels, hikes, flights, car rentals, etc. which left us with the only the internet to guide us, and it tends to amplify the most popular opinions aka the busiest most touristy options. we also tried to stick with our old faithful for getting off the beaten track; nature, hiking, the woods, but even that is one of the main reasons people come here, so that is busy and expensive.

a lot of this has to do with the fact that costa rica basically doesn't have public lands; in the 90s, after deforestation hit its high water mark, leaving only 20% of the country left with trees on it, the government enforced strict laws preventing logging and rebuild the jungle as part of a move towards progressive, environmentally friendly policy. what it didn't do is make this new rainforest land public, it remains in the hands of the owners from the farming and logging days, and so these landowners need some other way to make a buck; ecotourism.

overall i think we spent over $10,000cad for the two of us to come to costa rica for 2 weeks despite doing literally everything we could to save money, but still, every time you turn around here, somebody wants a big stack of usd for something as menial as walking in the woods or beans and rice. that amount of money would have lasted us 2 months living in the van, even in america or canada where living is already pretty expensive.

but: we saw a lot of cool things (sloths, cloud forests, a million different birds, howler monkeys), amy surfed the biggest waves she has ever surfed, we had excellent surf conditions and both improved a lot because of that, and we spent two weeks in the 30 degree sunshine instead of -40 degree january in ottawa, so it is hard to actually complain. overall: pretty good.

thanks for reading!

pura vida!