About Me

My photo
I am a wife, mother, daughter, friend, reader, wanna-be chef, interior designer who always has a project in mind, music lover, dish & silverware collecter, and runner. Plus a lot of other things, but I don't want to brag :)

5.21.2008

Pura Vida - Part 1 May 2-6

Welcome to Costa Rica! We flew out of Salt Lake on Friday at midnight and didn't actually get to the airport in Costa Rica until 1 pm on Saturday. Airport really is such a relative term, more like wooden posts holding up a shabby roof with no exterior walls. Danny and Lindi, the couple that we went with, didn't get in until about 2:30 pm on Saturday so we waited, on the floor, for them. We were so worried about making sure that we met up with eachother that we decided Adam and I would wait at the baggage claim for them. Not necessary. You get off the plane. You walk in to the "airport" and they put your bags on the floor. We couldn't have missed eachother if we tried.



Once we all got our bags and got our rental car we were on our way. I felt so adventerous since we didn't have a guide, just a couple maps and Adam and Danny's spanish. We stopped at a shack on the side of the road about an hour from the rental place to eat some lunch. It was called El Cebolla, or the Onion. Should have known! First of all, there aren't many places that we went that even had menus....they just served whatever they made. We finally figured out that it was rice, beans, chicken and salad. Sounds good, right? Oh my....we should be glad that I didn't get a picture of the chicken, I couldn't even tell you what part of the chicken it was. Besides that and the nasty fried plantains that they served at nearly every meal, it wasn't too bad. Infact, I didn't get sick one time on our whole trip.


I digress.....so we get back on the road and head up this CRAZY dirt road. It was so beautiful...the countryside, the color of everything, the basics of life. We drove by tiny towns with tiny shacks put together from scraps of other peoples homes. It was a humbling experiance to be there and to see that alot of people live with dirt floors, no electricity, no gas stations, etc. In fact, I think we went 3 hours without seeing a store or gas station. At about 7 pm we finally get to our cute little eco-friendly hotel in Monte Verde. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep as soon as I laid on the bed.
The next morning we ate a yummy breakfast of rice and beans, toast and lots of fresh fruit. That is one thing about Costa Rica that inspired me - they eat so much fresh fruit and vegetables, it was awesome. We were in the heart of the Cloud Forest and so we decided to go hike around for a few hours.....it was amazing. It's like something you can't even describe to be in the middle of so much life.

That picture above marks the Continental Divide, which means that water on one side runs to the Pacific and water on the other runs towards the Atlantic or Carribbean. I think that's what it means...








Yep, that was pretty much one of the scariest bridges I've ever crossed...in my life. It said it could hold a maximum capacity of ten people. What kind of people though, little midget people or normal people or little kiddies? I sure didn't stay on that long, especially when Adam was moving it all around. After we finished playing in the jungle we got on our way back to the hotel. On our way we saw a sign for a waterfall and thought it'd be fun to check it out. When we got to the little "toll booth" it said it was $8....but there was no one there. There was a note that said if the owner wasn't there than to leave the money on the table. If there had been someone there I would have felt bad trying to sneak in but there wasn't. What was so awesome is that this waterfall was right off the main road, just like a few hundred feet. We saw a few monkeys on our way back out and actually got a really good picture of it!








We felt like we were on the set of "Lotst" with all the trees looking like that!



When we had checked into the hotel on Saturday night Adam had heard that one of the best things to do around Monte Verde was a canopy tour so they booked it for Monday morning. After a quick run into town for some snacks we were on our way to "Extreme Canopy Tours" and pretty excited about it. It was even better though that I could have imagined it. Besides the fact that we got to wear those cool helmets and harnesses while hiking up intensely steep trails, we were seriously flying through the jungles and across huge valleys. I was expecting it to be small ziplines, but these were like four and five hundred feet long way up above the ground. I felt slightly bad because there was a couple in our group who were from California and just like us didn't really have an idea of what it really was. They were probably in their mid 50's and I think one of them was afraid of heights. The walks up to the zip lines were brutal for us and you could tell it was hard for them, plus the lady had a pretty bad heart condition. She kept on braking and then didn't have enough momentum to make it to the other side so the tour guides kept having to come pull her in. I guess they were sick of that so for the last 1/2 of them they just had her ride on the back of one of the guides. Anyways, it was fun. I loved it and wished that it could have lasted longer.



I'm not sure how far 750 meters is, but in the picture below Adam is stading at the beginning of the line and taking a picture of the other side and that little spec of white flying through the Costa Rican air is me!



Later that night we just hung out in the non-thriving town of Monte Verde and ate a little local cuisine, which wasn't too bad. In the morning we got up and decided that there must be trails all over this place, why should we pay to walk on them. So we found our own "trail", although I don't think you can call it that. We pretty much just bushwacked it through the jungle until we found some cool trees and waterfalls, which we did. Not only did we find those, but we also found some cool trees that give nasty rashes and have super huge thorns that like to stay in your skin. Yep, Adam and I pretty much got our trash kicked on that hike. It was fun, Danny is quite the trail blazer!



It's totally true that everything in the jungle is bigger, look at that ginormous caterpillar that Adam found! I couldn't even believe it!



Adam thought that this sign posted in our bathroom at the hotel was funny. It says "Tropical septic systems cannot handle paper or plastic.....Please do not flush toilet paper or similar. Thank you." I don't think he liked the idea of throwing away used toilet paper.



On our last night in Monte Verde we went on a night walk through some forest. It was crazy....we saw huge tarantulas, a sloth, lots of creepy crawlies and some birds. We had fun, even if I was slightly paranoid about huge things crawling on me :)


Oh yeah, I forgot to mention what Pura Vida means: Pure Life. It's like the Costa Rican motto and people say it always. Like if you pay someone at the cash register, instead of Thank You, it's Pura Vida. You accidentally run into someone, you just say Pura Vida. It really was so fun to be there!

0 comments: