COSTA RICA
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| A calm sunset at Santa Teresa beach. |
Our last few days in Korea were absolute chaos. Regardless of how much we had planned or packed, the end result –as it often happens- was me buying huge boxes and just cramming as much junk that I needed shipped home into them and grabbing a taxicab down to the local post office to ship them off. I feel like I had become a bit of a celebrity at that post office, the women often scorning my package sizes as well as rifling through them and any documents that I had more out of curiosity than actual need to see what I was shipping.
For our last few days, after all had been sorted, Heidi and I took the train up to Seoul to spend our remaining time with Les and Sujin and their two dogs. We had a really nice photo walk on our last night there and met up with some other friends to say goodbye.
Our flight the next day was really exciting for the both of us but sad at the same time. I had not actually thought that leaving Korea would be that difficult of an event for me, but after having said goodbye to Les and Sujin I sort of lost it in the hallway. They truly are some of the best friends that I have ever had, and I didn’t realize how hard it was to say goodbye to them at the end. So much time I had taken for granted in Korea.
The time traveling was pretty uneventful. We landed in both LA and Houston (where we camped out)
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| Vending machine picnic |
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| We called ahead for reservations... |
We were not really ready for the…well, North American attitude, or the waistline to frankly put it. We didn’t even really remember restaurant etiquette, so when we arrived at a restaurant in the LA airport and sat down for lunch we must have looked like a bunch of idiots. We both were really feeling out of our depth at that stage and wanted to just sort of escape from people.
We finally made it to Costa Rica the following day and met our friend Kevin at the airport (he had taken a different flight and made it there much quicker than we had – the bugger!). We got into a taxi and Heidi took the reigns with her command of Spanish, and we zoomed into the Coca Cola bus station in San Jose.
The first thing that we became quickly horrified at however was the price of things. Heidi had lived in Costa Rica about 5 years ago and everything had been about 50% to sometimes 400% less expensive than it was now – we found it to be cheaper to get a meal in Korea than it was to do so in Costa Rica! But on the other hand…the food was immensely delicious!
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| Ceviche! Central American sushi |
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| Burrito time. My favorite comfort food while traveling. |
After spending a few days in Manuel Antonio we made our way up the coast to a highly controversial city called Jaco (Haco). Highly controversial in that, some people love it, some people hate it. Heidi’s brother Devon had found it to be more of the latter and we soon found out why. We arrived and began the epic journey that was trying to find our hostel.
We looked around and around and finally we came across this building that we had discovered was our hostel. There was only one problem with it…it was being torn down! (The best part was that Heidi had actually reserved us rooms using their online reservation system which had not been deactivated yet! What a ripoff!)
We made our way to another hostel which was, essentially a total hole in the wall. It did not have a very safe feeling to it, and the sun was starting to get a little low in the sky, so we left our bags there with the American owner who had told us, “Now you know, you can’t go leaving your bags here and then come back in a few hours and change hostels.” We were sort of surprised by this statement and later on we found out why he had said it. Upon going to a local information center, the lady told us that the hostel we had booked into, was in the worst part of town, and it was regularly broken into by locals that got a bit messed up at night time and bad things had happened there.
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| No reservations, no windows, no locks on the doors, no bedsheets. No problem! |
This sufficiently freaked us out enough that we zoomed back there, grabbed our bags and got a new (and amazing) hostel run by an Israeli (which Heidi loved).
The hostel was great. But the town was not. Jaco turned out to be this decent surfing town, which was loaded full of drugs and bad happenings, so we had been told. All I know is that it was full of trust-fund hippies and 60 year old Canadian and American burnouts who were more interested in telling you the way the world worked than anything. So, after having a meal and a sleep there, we hopped on a boat and zoomed over to Monetzuma, a really beautiful and incredibly hard to access part of Costa Rica.
By this point in our trip, I had begun to get pretty disgusted by what I was seeing. Costa Rica has been totally transformed by the tourist influx of North Americans, and here’s why I think that it’s bad:
Everywhere (for the most part) that we went, we saw businesses, restuarants, tour companies, and real estate that was owned by foreigners (non-Costa Ricans). We would be having great conversations with restaurant workers at a local “Soda” and the grumpy white owner would come in and the smiles would all vanish from the workers’ faces. The worst part about all the foreign investment, is the fact that, we learned most of the money made there is NOT re-invested in the country, it’s exported back to North American bank accounts. So the cost of living is going UP UP UP, and the locals are getting paid the same – a pittance. No wonder some people turn to crime. No wonder some people are just pissed at foreigners.
Anyways, when we got to Montezuma, it was a little bit of the same that we had seen so far. Only on a smaller scale. It turns out that this town is, once again a trust-fund hippy haven, but it has become almost a self sustaining community, with local artists selling all their wares to tourists and creating a really cool vibe. But once again, this wasn’t the style of traveling that we had been craving. It was just traveling to see more tourist spots.
We were getting to see some absolutely gorgeous sights however. Amazing sunrises and sunsets over the ocean and the incessant eerie growls of the howler monkeys added and amazing atmosphere to the place.
Our second day there, we took to the trails, with legends of a massive waterfall that you can jump off of, we set to exploring. After a random meeting with a local on the trail, he took us up the treacherous path to the beginning of the waterfalls. It turns out that there was actually THREE waterfalls, the first being the largest at 35 meters, the secondd was 14 and the third was only a few. But the cool thing was that they cascaded into each other, creating an incredible scene.
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| Heidi taking a leap of faith! |
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| Look at that technique! |
The best part was that, after quite a treacherous climb up, we got to jump off the 14 meter waterfall! For those of you who aren’t accustomed to the metric system, or have trouble imagining 14 meters, think 45 feet, or a 6 storey house. Professional rock climbers don’t even take falls that big! (Well, if they do, they probably aren’t going to be climbing for much longer). Our initial skepticism at the dangers of the place were soon allayed by a 9 year old boy running and jumping off the edge and actually surviving! That was good enough for us. I stepped up, and plunged, and….OW!
Not knowing the most effective technique for such high jumps, I had bucked slightly, giving the water clear access to my bottom region and was introduced to the inticacies of the high powered water enema! Holy moly what an experience that I would not be keen to experience again! And yet…I did it two more times! Masochist much?
Both Heidi and Kevin took the plunge and unfortunately they both fared a little worse off than I. Kevin, soon after taking to the sky, began to rotate backwards in an astonishing and horrifying display and landed more on his back than anything. We were all pretty worried, but he came up and had some pretty amazing bruised for the remainder of the trip! Heidi smacked her bum REALLY hard on the water and had a bruised tailbone for the rest of Costa Rica! Not too fun on off-road buses!
After Montezuma, we worked up to Santa Teresa beach, another small dirt road community where foreigners basically go to surf and escape from the everyday pace of life. A town where an ATV was more efficient to get around than a car, the pace of life here was refreshing. At the beach, Heidi and I once again tried our hands at surfing and had mild success again. Heidi had an unfortunate run in with some rocks closer to shore and sprained her ankle, and we decided to call it a day. We got some amazing sunsets on the beach which provided for some GREAT photo opportunites!
We then had a very long long day from Santa Teresa to get to Monteverde, in the highlands, and we could not get over the temperature difference! We traveled less than 500kms I would reckon and went from as little clothes as possible to long pants and sweaters! Monteverde provided a completely different vivbe for Costa Rica, where we now had Cloud Forests and amazing zip-lining opportunities!
We spent one morning taking a zip-lining tour which promised the opportunity to see lots of wild animals in their native treetop environment, but we soon found out that it was a bit hard to see animals while screaming past them at zip-lining speeds. All told though, it was an awesome experience, and it proved an awesome time for me to bust out my handy little HD Headcam for the 1km long superman zipline!
After that, we traveled to La Fortuna, a region known for its active volcanoes and hot springs. Unfortunately for us, the volcano had become INACTIVE in the past 6 months for the first time in 60 years! Shucks! Kevin and I went on a “Volcano walk” and visited the “Volcano hot springs” which turned out to be a resort with no actual water or heat provided from the volcano. It was really cool to see the volcano though, and I obviously was very excited at the opportunity to snag a few shots. I also ran into some other photographers there who seemed to have invested quite a bit of money into their gear. Apparently one of these fellowes’ lenses had cost him over 10,000USD. They seemed a bit ticked that the volcano had stopped producing lava as well!
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| Arenal volcano, active for over 60 years - became inactive 6 months ago! |
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| Look at those canons, literally! I was expecting them to shoot something at the mountain. |
In La Fortuna, I had come down with my first ailment of the trip as well. I got out of bed one morning at 4am and had to run for the bathroom. A very sedate day followed for me with the bathroom not too far out of reach. Thankfully we had purchased a few courses of antibiotics and as this looked like food poisoning, reasoned that I should start one of them. By the end of the day I was feeling totally better.
When we were ready to move on, we went to our final stop in Costa Rica, Playas del Coco. This place, I was very excited to see because initially when I had planned on coming to Costa Rica, it had been for a Divemaster course that I was going to pursue with a dive center in Coco. I was really excited to go out diving with them and see what I would be missing out on!
We saw that the diving was REALLY expensive so we opted to go for the snorkeling option, as most of the reefs in the world don’t go deeper than 20ft, we reasoned that we could experience it much cheaper! So we did this option….and I cannot say how glad I am that I decided to travel instead of spending 10 weeks there to do my divemaster! The diving was fun, but we did not see that much that was that spectacular.
We were starting to be good and over Costa Rica at this point. Everything, as Heidi had described it, had changed…and not necessarily for the better. Don’t get me wrong though, we had a blast in Costa Rica, but now looking back at it after having gone to all the other countries, it was our most expensive and least culturally interesting country that we visited! And that’s why we wanted to travel – for the CULTURE! But it was a lot like a little America there.
We took a bus back to San Jose with Kevin and had our last meal at an empty little restaurant beside our hostel there for our last night. We stayed up playing cards, but then Heidi and I didn’t feel too great, so we hit the sack a bit early.
And then it hit us. Heidi and I got up at some really early point in the night and started being violently sick both up and down. Some people call this Darth Mauling (check out his lightsaber…you’ll understand). Personally, it got to the point that it was just ridiculous, any water that touched our lips would send us running.
Kevin left us that morning, feeling pretty rough –he was flying up home that day so he had a long time in the plane scheduled for him. We both were hoping that he didn’t get as sick as us. After he left us, Heidi said that she thought we should go to the hospital, so I called the travel insurance for us and went through the whole process of getting us a reference number. That whole process took about two pointless hours.
Finally we got to the hospital and after about 30 minutes of not being able to speak Spanish, and noone there speaking English, we found the emergency center and received triage and were sent walking down the road to the next facility where we were to be treated. By this stage, Heidi was leaning on my and I her, as we stumbled down the sidewalk. Anyone could have mugged us or whatever and we would have been able to do nothing. Pretty scary situation.
We got to the next building and waited in this large line to be seen and finally when we got to the front of it, the lady indicated to us that we needed to pay and sent us away. We found the chaplain, to whom we had to pay our bill in advance (Sorry we don’t do travel insurance reference numbers here! You must get reimboursed back at home!) Shit. We didn’t have enough money, we had a flight to Guatemala that afternoon, so we had gotten rid of our cash. We had enough for one person, and Heidi was feeling worse, so I took my credit card to the ATM 5 blocks away, and she got started on treatment.
After what felt like an hour, I returned and after paying, they put an IV in me and I fainted. After coming to, I saw that we were in a room with IV bags dripping into us. I have no idea what they were, but after a few hours we felt fine enough that we determined we could maybe make our flight. We grabbed our medicine, then a taxi back to our hostel. We grabbed our bags and took the taxi to the airport and actually made our flight. We arrived in the most dangerous city in Central America (not including Mexico city) a ragged mess and were mercifully picked up by our hostel taxi service. And we crashed in Guatemala.
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| Destroyed by rotten chicken. This is the face of food poisoning while waiting for our plane to Guatemala. Yuck. |
Thanks for reading this entry, and stay tuned for the next installment of my Central America trip – Guatemala!
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