From the city that never sleeps we flew via Miami to an entirely different kind of place.

At Miami airport, we had a couple of hours to kill, so we looked into taking a bus to check out the beach. The bus didn’t turn up when it should have, or even 10, or 20 minutes later, so we had to give up on that idea. Lucky it was too, because if we had returned when we were going to, we might have missed our plane. It took over 20 minutes to get through security –  they seemed to get very excited when we said were going to Costa Rica. I got the full treatment, from shoes off to a walk through the air puffer machine, to a full bag search and swab. No problems though, and we arrived in Costa Rica a few hours later. In contrast, the arrival security there was totally nonchalant… in fact, I’m pretty sure I saw a gun in the x-ray image of someone’s luggage, but the security guys weren’t even looking.

Dee had already been surfing in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks, and he was at the San Jose airport to greet us and take us to the hotel in the city. The first impression of San Jose was of a poor and run-down city, with a fair bit of crime, if the bars on all the windows were any indication. It was a bit disconcerting to see so many heads turn to watch our shiny black 4WD roll past. We met Richard and Tim at the hotel, then walked up the road to a bar full of mostly tourists. We were only in San Jose for that night. Next morning we headed north towards the Arenal volcano area.

Not far out of San Jose, Costa Rica started to show its colours as a great natural wilderness. There’s plenty of rainfall here, so there’s a lot of green. We weaved through mountains, stopping at one of many small family-run restaurants out the front of their houses for a cheap traditional meal with beans, plantains etc. There’s several commercial hot springs in the area, so we checked into a nearby hotel called Hotel el Silencio del Campo then walked along the road to one of these places for a soak and a meal. Unfortunately, none of the photos taken there were very good because of the steam. The Arenal volcano is active, and there’s actually lava visible from some vantage points. Unfortunately, when we drove up to the observation point, it was closed due to the top of the volcano being covered in cloud, and the forecast was for it to remain that way for the near future.

As we moved on the next morning, we stopped off nearby for a canopy tour, where we spent about an hour flying in harnesses along 10 cables, one of them nearly a kilometre long, suspended above and through the forest canopy. A horse ride followed, through an indigenous village display and back to the base station, where we saw some local butterflies and frogs in a greenhouse. A really nice surprise was to see the tip of the nearby volcano uncovered by cloud for long enough to snap a few photos.

Here’s a video Dee shot while riding the longest cable:

The rest of the day was spent driving slowly down a heavily potholed highway to the small beach-side town of Montezuma at the bottom of the western peninsula. Our 4WD handled it fairly well, but another car wasn’t so lucky. We rounded a corner of a dirt road to find a car in the middle with a wheel off. Our hire car agreement tells us not to stop for anyone because of the prevalence of car-jacking, but we figured there’s 5 of us and 2 of them, so we stopped to give a hand with the jack from our car. They replaced the wheel well enough for them to drive on, but we’ll never know if it was a failed ploy to kidnap our shiny black vehicle.

We arrived in Montezuma around 9pm with no accommodation organised, but Dee took us to the place he had stayed a year before and luckily they had a few rooms free and a night watchman to let us in. The pizza at a local Italian joint went down very well, and later we played dominos with some locals at a bar.

Mal Pais is a beach not far from Montezuma, where Dee and Richard wanted to go for a surf. We spent the morning there with lots of iguanas, pelicans, dogs and crabs. Montezuma is a great place to relax, with heaps of cafes, restaurants and bars, so we did a lot of that for the next few days, in between hiking along the beaches and to a waterfall which is the town’s water source. Suddenly we found out that no place could sell us a beer – there was an alcohol ban due to an upcoming election. However, for some reason, we could still get wine or sangria.

Richard and I had to return home in a few days, so the last stop was another beach-side town called Jaco, which we drove there via the Puntarenas ferry. In contrast to Montezuma, Jaco has been quite Americanised. The beach is dirty, but the waves were good and the walk up the southern headland have a great view of the bay.

After I left, Dee and Dom stayed on, and went to the east coast which has whiter sands and more wildlife, including theiving monkeys. I’d love to go back…