Adventure Pacifica Tour in Costa Rica

We got off the ship about 1300 hours and were going to take a taxi to the doubletree, but we were stopped by one of the ship's contracted van drivers and he offered to take us, so I tipped him $5 USD. The doubletree was very nice; a far cry from the accommodations on the ship. I got on the internet and tried to send all the backed up messages, but not many transmitted. I headed for the pool and had a beer and a dip. The water was as warm as bath water, and I could see the ship still at the pier. The ship was to leave at 0300 august 13, but later I got an email form Faye Pyles on the ship saying they had missed high tide and would try again the next day. I explored the resort and found it quite wonderful. I wish I had more time to stay as the food and ambiance is terrific. After breakfast I checked out about 0900, and we met our driver who took us to MANUEL ANTONIO NATIONAL PARK south of Puntarenas about 2 hours away. He did stop and let us walk across the bridge of the TARCOLOS RIVER (SP?) so we could see all the crocodiles. That was quite a site. There were several pretty big ones. I did stop in the city of Quepos to try out the bank's ATM. That proved easy and successful. We got to the Hotel Villa Bosque, a lovely Spanish style hacienda style place with an open dining area. I skipped lunch but had a cold beverage. Our park guide met us and took us into the park. Geiner Mena, nature interpreter, was very knowledgeable and informative. I would recommend him to anyone. We saw armadillo frogs, mangrove boas, Jesus Christ lizard (that run on top of the water), 3 toed sloth, frog eggs hatching on leaves, Iguanas - big Iguanas! several species of birds and lots of beautiful beaches. Costa Rica is truly a beautiful place, and the people are wonderful. Geiner said the pacific coast people are more friendly than the Caribbean side of the country. After our 3 or so hour trek we were met by our van driver with some fresh local fruit and a cold juice drink. Now I am back at the hotel updating this blog and getting ready for dinner. Tomorrow we go whitewater rafting - hopefully without the crocodiles!! The tour folks sent me a detailed itinerary and I am trying to figure out how to get it printed out. Out for now/emr 1713 hours.

What a great day yesterday. The Manual Antonio National park guide we had was great. He was very knowledgeable and most helpful. The park is quite large and well worth seeing and the coastal scenery is spectacular. This hotel is quite nice and above my expectations. Clean, nice, good staff, good food, REAL hot water! no real complaints, except no coffee maker in the room and no phone but I can adapt. The little restaurant is alfresco and has great food! Speaking of food, I am off to breakfast before our rafting trip. More later/emr at 0643. After I got back from rafting I got cleaned up and went do to photograph some birds at the bird feeder near the restaurant. I met one of the waiters who was off duty and the chef. Their recommendations for dinner : the whole red snapper (fresh) stuffed with shrimp, squid, clams in tomato sauce with a glass of chardonnay. I took their advice and it was fantastic. I would highly recommend the Villa Bosque hotel and restaurant for your next Costa Rica visit!! And last night was a full moon! There were some spotty clouds, but the moon over Costa Rica is beautiful. It was a beautiful night. The waiter and chef advised me on the differences between bananas and plantains; and told me about hicamas (or Jacamas, as they call them) and their uses. Did yall know that Costa Rica produces computer chips for Intel? It represents 60% of their GDP, I am told. Someone needs to verify that, as I seems very high to me.

We are on our way to Monteverde on highway 34 out of Quepos. It is a good road, but still has bumps and curves. It is bit harder to type in a moving car than I thought. We just past a big African palm oil plantation, and a shrimp farm. The shrimp farm owner maximized his use of resources by planting teak trees along the perimeter and along the road. The African palm will produce the fruits or berries used to extract the palm oil in 3 years. They harvest the fruit every week, I am told. After 25 years they inject diesel fuel into the roots to kill that tree and plant another in between 3 years prior. The trees live much longer but they get too big and do not produce as much fruit. They seem to have it all figured out. I continue to be impressed with the Costa Rican people. They are hard working, punctual, very friendly, just nice people. Please bear with my typing; this ain't as easy as it looks - Costa Rican roads! The are pretty good, not as good as Salvadorian highways, but better than Mexico. As I said that we just hit real bad bumpy stretch. A real kidney bruiser!! We seem to be doing some backtracking but I guess it cannot be helped with our schedule. Now we are into rice country and some sugar cane and cattle. Except for the palm trees, it looks a lot like the Red River delta near Garland City AR; flat, fertile soil. The farmers trees (not sure at this time what kind) along the fence rows, and cut the tops off when they get big enough. That way they have a living fence post. Now we are right back along the coast near Jaco Beach and some beautiful scenery. The drivers are pretty careful. They pass on these two lane roads with more care than I have seen in Mexico and the US!! One of the passengers just requested a bano break. That was a very nice and well stocked MAXIE Bodega - pretty impressive. On the bulletin board outside this Costa Rican wal-mart there were apts /condos for rent for $800 /unfurnished and $850/furnished. USD I assume per month, with a/c, pool, all the amenities. Leaving at 0800 , we should get there about noon. I have seen more serious bicycle riders than expected. In fact, on our way to Manuel Antonio national park we met a bicycle race with about 80 or so competitors. Now we have turned onto Costa Rican highway 27 going back towards Puntarenas, then on towards Monteverde (like I said) lots of back tracking, but the trip has been very good so far, so no complaints. Now we are passing a large mango orchard. Now we are back to the port of CALDERON and I can see in the distance the pier where that USNS comfort was docked. After the problem with missing the high tide, I was glad to see the comfort had sailed out of Puntarenas. Now we just passed the entrance to the Doubletree/Hilton outside Puntarenas, and passed a sardine canning factory on hwy 27 for little while until we turn North on HWY 1, the pan-american highway. We just passed a big rice processing plant and lots of rice fields. SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS WHILE RIDING: One of our docs at a medcap remarked that while he was filling out his patients Rx form, he looked up and she was text messaging on her cell phone. Not something you expect to see!! I am very proud of Project HOPE and the Navys mission, but I do wish we could do more. We have so much capacity with the Comfort, but use so little of it. We could and should do more teaching and capacity building. The driver just told me that this Hyundai van uses diesel and diesel cost about $5.60 USD per gallon (or 460 Costa Rican colones per liter). That is a bit more than we pay! Last I remember seeing was about $3.50 or so per gallon in the states. The farmers plant trees (the type IS CALLED INDIO PALARO) along fence rows that serve as living fence posts - good idea. I have seen that done with pine trees in the south of the usa but not to this extent. STILL SUNDAY, AUGUST 14 AT 1300 HOURS: we got to Monteverde..what a climb up the mountains. Monteverde is 1400 meters (about 4200 feet above Puntarenas and sea level. It was 40 miles of bad road getting up here, but what scenery. It took about 2 - 2.5 hours to go about 25 Km up the windy mountain, gravel road, but we are here. Up this high there are some pine and cypress species and they say there are puma and ocelots in the woods, but not to expect to see any. It is quite a bit cooler up here, and the hotel is beautiful. The main lobby is 3 years old and quite nice. The older parts are 30 years old. My room is LARGE with a spectacular view, big bathroom and TV and phone, refrigerator. No complaints so far. If the clouds disperse, there should be a very pretty moon tonight. We get breakfast only, so we will scout out a place for dinner. Walked down town and got lost and wound up on the gravel road we came into town, so I backtracked and it started drizzling rain. I did not find the coffee shop I was told was good, but found Mar and Terra restaurant. The vegetable soup and cappuccino hit the spot. I took a good long hot shower when I got back to the room and turned in to get rest for the zip lining tomorrow.

What a day. Breakfast at the hotel was great. Louise, our waiter, took good care of us. French toast, 2 eggs over easy, toast, fresh fruit and fresh mixed fruit juice and coffee! I ate it all and got on the bus to the rainforest. First was the zip lining thru the rain forest! What a hoot!! They strap you into a harness and hook you to a steel cable stretched from towers over the canopy of trees and push you off. Well, a little more explanation than that, but not much. Everything I saw looked very stable and safe. We harnessed up, including helmet and headed up the trail. The harness is a sit down type and they hook a bid D ring up to a pulley that sits over the cable and another safety D ring as a back up. Given some basic instructions, you are off. It was quite beautiful (and scary) zipping along above the forest. You could brake your speed with your gloved hand, or they had a failsafe braking mechanism just before you landed. I think there were 13 different zips or runs. The real problem and real work was all the walking to get to the next tower. The trail was covered with concrete type or cinder block type things with soil in the block openings. Sort of like the paving blocks you see in some driveways that allow grass to grow up in the openings. It was hard walking, plus you were carrying 30 or so extra pounds of zipping hardware. Good thing I have been taking all those health breaks, or I would not have been in good enough shape to do all that uphill walking!! After the 13 zips over the cloud forest, the last station was optional: it was called the TARZAN JUMP. You climb up this 20 foot tower, they hook you to a couple of ropes, then push you off to swing out a very long way. The scary part is you initially drop about 8 meters before the rope gets taut, so you are freefalling for the first 8 meters. Sort of puts a lump in your throat. Well, it was so much fun that I tried it a second time. One of the others in our party did want to partake so I took her spot for a second go at it and hopefully someone got some photos. It was fantastic. After lunch of another hearts of palm salad and cervesa /beer, we headed to a more sedate undertaking: watching the hummingbirds!! We only have the ruby throated humming bird in North America, and down here they have 21 I believe. I will have to get my book out to identify all the ones I took pictures of. They had a big nice garden with four feeding stations and literally hundreds of different kinds of hummingbirds buzzing around. If you stand very still, they will work around and ignore you. But they are so fast you have to be quick to capture them in a picture. I have many frames of empty feeders that I will need to delete from my camera. I even took some movie of them, after I got tired of trying to capture them in still-life. Then we took the hike over the hanging bridges. Again it seemed like it was all uphill on those pavers blocks, but the scenery was fantastic. We could hear water flowing below us, but could not see it because of the dense canopy of tree tops and foliage. I wish I knew more about the fauna and flora, but many are familiar house plants/trees, like the chafflara, philodendrons, orchids and many more. Most of the orchids had already bloomed so we missed them. But every big tree must have had a hundred or so parasitic plants growing on it. Lots of mosses and ferns on every tree. I am sure the pictures I took will not do the scenery justice. All in all it was a fantastic experience and would recommend it to everyone. Tomorrow we bus it to Arenal (volcano ) national park. Now we are trying to find supper and get to bed for our 0745 pick up and probably a 4 hour drive. Out for now at 1716/emr

Let me update you on Monday evening: I stopped by the bar on the way to supper at the hotel and met an interesting character along with a nice young lady bartender. After a great dinner that Louise, our waiter, recommended, I returned to the bar to continue my conversation. The fellow tells me he is 73 and a former sea captain on commercial vessels. He is from Corsica originally and lived all over the Caribbean and came here with a girlfriend 18 years ago. I asked if he worked at the hotel since he had the hotel logo on his shirt. He casually indicated to me that he owned the hotel. His seafaring stories were most interesting. We discussed world politics, governments, healthcare and had a grand time. I went to buy him a drink and he would not hear of it and bought me one. I finally had to leave him at 2200 to get some sleep for our 0745 hour, pick up. Our driver was on time and after a great breakfast we were off. I said goodbye to Louise, our waiter. The gravel road was no better leaving town. It was pretty bad, but the scenery grand. After almost 2 hours we took a welcomed bathroom stop. Another hour put us at Lake Arenal, where we transferred from our van to a boat to make the last 30 -45 minutes, then another van picked us up for our last few miles to the hotel. The ARENAL MANOA HOTEL IS JUST BEAUTIFUL! Large rooms, very large walk in shower and beautiful landscape. All is well and I have 1900 hour reservations for dinner. Now to look around the grounds a bit./emr out at 1552 hours, Tuesday.

We just got back from the Arenal volcano tour. We walked up a private nature trail to the base of the volcano. It is 1700 meters high. We could only walk up the volcano about 300 meters, as per the law. Pablo was our guide and he showed us all the flora and fauna of the cloud forest. He found a hummingbird nest ..fantastic! A little later he spotted another hummingbird nest with 2 eggs in it. Unbelievable! And I got pictures. He recommended to me the book: MEDICINAL PLANTS OF COSTA RICA. I will look for it on Amazon when I get home. He spotted lots of orchids and butterflies and insects. BUT NOTE TO LOIS: NO SNAKES WERE SEEN IN THE MAKING OF THIS STORY. I did see some lizards and a colony of leaf cutter ants. We spotted several birds, but they were too quick for me to get a picture. The Kopot or Ciembo trees were gigantic and magnificent. Several survived the 1968 volcano eruption. Pablo said that in 1968 no one knew Arenal Peak was a volcano. It rumbled and erupted in the summer of 1968 covering 2 villages on the west side. The town of Fortuna was spared. The volcano exploded from 3 columns on the west side and that side had lots of new green growth. Now I it is time for lunch and off the see the hot springs near the base of the volcano. Emr/ wed at 1207 hours.

Tortugero

Morning canal boat trip

Transfer back to San Jose

Return home to the states