Beaches, forests, and 10 hours on the bus
A couple of days ago, Andrea, Brittnay, and her friends rolled into the beach/surfer town of Manuel Antonio, entering into the world of blue sea beaches, dreds, and wildlife. We showed up without reservations and due to the low season, scored beautiful, getting a room for six people con air conditionando, baños privados, aqua caliente, y un pool for just a hair over $10 per person per night. As such, despite hot and (worse) humid weather, we spent the our days in Manuel in relative luxury for a price that should have landed us in the local pension.
After a couple of days of being beach bums and checking out the local parque nacíonal, Andrea and I parted ways with Brittnay and started what turned out to be my biggest bus adventure yet. It's important to take a moment here to describe what I mean by busses--think twenty-year old bus frames with cramped seats, an air conditioning system that only works when the bus is moving (e.g. windows), and people crammed in the asile hovering over you, trying to catch a wisp of a breeze or a glance out the window. It goes without saying that when the bus is stopped everything intantly turns into a sweaty and sticky sauna. The bus itself is held together by an amazing block of Mercedes-Benz Marcopolo iron that's probably been held together at least a million miles past its rated lifespan by Central American mechanics that are infinitely more skilled and handy than their first world counterparts.
Anyway, getting anywhere in Costa Rica takes a full day and leads you through neighborhoods and dirt roads that I'd be skeptical of finding even on local maps. On our journey from Manuel Antonio to Monteverde, we started with a short bus 40 minute bus to Quepos and made a six hour ride north to the port town of Puntarenas (which was suppose to be 3 hours), and thought we were going to be stranded for the night having missed our connection. Someone up above smiled down on us though and Andrea and I banded together with four other travelers in the same boat, one of whom had done this very trek before. So we ended up on a short (30 minute) bus to a busy intersection of the Inteamericana highway (essentially the middle of nowhere), and waited an anxious hour as we looked for a bus with "Monteverde" on it. The bus eventually showed up on Latin America time and wisked us away northward for the next 2.5 hours, eventually ending up on a dirt road winding up 34km into the stratosphere. In the guidebooks, this dirt road is described as being passable by 4x4s and the bus. Imagine my amazement when not a bus of the humvee derrivation but a bus of the aforementioned quality successfully arrived in Monteverde without stalling or bottoming out even once, especially as the driver was writing text messages on his RAZR and macking on the beautiful latina girl sitting shotgun. The latter part made me a tiny bit nervous as the driver was spending a good portion of his time driving with his eyes off the road and on the girl.
Nonetheless, we made it to the infamous cloud rainforest safely. It's absolutely beautiful, especially when bathed in the light of the full moon during our ride last night. Thus far, I've spent today doing the flying fox across 3km of zip lines strung up outside the national park and walking across suspended bridges soaking in the view as I myself got soaked down to the bone marrow by a torrential rain (after all, it is a rainforest). Tomorrow, Andrea and I are headed into the actual Monteverde park. Beautiful pictures are aplenty (current count is about 800), but I won't be able to triage and post these until I return next weekend.
Until my next...pura vida!
Reposted from Adventures of a Vagabond
After a couple of days of being beach bums and checking out the local parque nacíonal, Andrea and I parted ways with Brittnay and started what turned out to be my biggest bus adventure yet. It's important to take a moment here to describe what I mean by busses--think twenty-year old bus frames with cramped seats, an air conditioning system that only works when the bus is moving (e.g. windows), and people crammed in the asile hovering over you, trying to catch a wisp of a breeze or a glance out the window. It goes without saying that when the bus is stopped everything intantly turns into a sweaty and sticky sauna. The bus itself is held together by an amazing block of Mercedes-Benz Marcopolo iron that's probably been held together at least a million miles past its rated lifespan by Central American mechanics that are infinitely more skilled and handy than their first world counterparts.
Anyway, getting anywhere in Costa Rica takes a full day and leads you through neighborhoods and dirt roads that I'd be skeptical of finding even on local maps. On our journey from Manuel Antonio to Monteverde, we started with a short bus 40 minute bus to Quepos and made a six hour ride north to the port town of Puntarenas (which was suppose to be 3 hours), and thought we were going to be stranded for the night having missed our connection. Someone up above smiled down on us though and Andrea and I banded together with four other travelers in the same boat, one of whom had done this very trek before. So we ended up on a short (30 minute) bus to a busy intersection of the Inteamericana highway (essentially the middle of nowhere), and waited an anxious hour as we looked for a bus with "Monteverde" on it. The bus eventually showed up on Latin America time and wisked us away northward for the next 2.5 hours, eventually ending up on a dirt road winding up 34km into the stratosphere. In the guidebooks, this dirt road is described as being passable by 4x4s and the bus. Imagine my amazement when not a bus of the humvee derrivation but a bus of the aforementioned quality successfully arrived in Monteverde without stalling or bottoming out even once, especially as the driver was writing text messages on his RAZR and macking on the beautiful latina girl sitting shotgun. The latter part made me a tiny bit nervous as the driver was spending a good portion of his time driving with his eyes off the road and on the girl.
Nonetheless, we made it to the infamous cloud rainforest safely. It's absolutely beautiful, especially when bathed in the light of the full moon during our ride last night. Thus far, I've spent today doing the flying fox across 3km of zip lines strung up outside the national park and walking across suspended bridges soaking in the view as I myself got soaked down to the bone marrow by a torrential rain (after all, it is a rainforest). Tomorrow, Andrea and I are headed into the actual Monteverde park. Beautiful pictures are aplenty (current count is about 800), but I won't be able to triage and post these until I return next weekend.
Until my next...pura vida!
Reposted from Adventures of a Vagabond