COSTA RICA- Day 8

I woke up at 4:30 and went for a walk and jog on the beech.  Life is simple here.  Put on a pair of swim trunks and tee shirt and go.  The temperature is perhaps 80 with a light breeze off the land.  I walked back into the hotels reception area for a smoke to allow time for Bett to wake up.  I was greeted by a gun totting guard who welcomed me.  He had the taciturn appearance of a man who had worked the late shift without being awake the whole time.  I know the look.  He shuffled off and reappeared shortly with a cup of coffee which he offered to me.  I was very grateful and gave him the few words I know.  Mucho gracias.  He introduced himself as Andres and we tried to talk but he had almost as much trouble with English as I did with Spanish.

The reception area is wide open and looks out on the pool area and the ocean.  The hotel was built in 1940 but is kept immaculate.  The architecture is pleasing and relaxing to take in.  The walls are very thick masonry and the tiled hallways are very wide and airy. To "Como esta?", I say "muy bien" excellently as a mop totting receptionist swabs past me.  The Wi-Fi does not work in my room so I’m sitting in the bar area.  There is a grassy area between the beech and the hotel.  This area is shaded with mostly tall old palm trees and there are beech recliner chairs all over this area.  There is a stone wall about 16” tall at the end of this area and then the beech.  The grass grows right up and over this little divider wall and it is easy to just walk over the wall instead of walking down to a gate 50 yards away.

Doctor Joe should be jealous of us being here.  This is a surfer paradise and we notice the clientele here is little younger and rowdier than in La Fortuna.  The beech is the finest and cleanest sand with a very gradual slope into the ocean.  I walked way out yesterday to body surf and was rewarded with these long beautiful waves that carry you a long way.  The surfers are mostly very very dark and I suppose will all succumb to skin cancer 40 years from now.  At the end of the beech there are mountains that end in the ocean.  This is a delightful setting and an ideal place for a resort.  We were told that the current Hotel was built on the site of a former hotel that was here prior to the town.  The town grew out of the income from serving the tourists.  We have not seen the town yet.  Not doubt Humphrey Bogart would have made some movie here in his career.  The setting is so perfect.

The art motif for the hotel is completely native.  There are statues of monkeys, fat woman, and Indian warriors everywhere.  The name of the hotel (Diria) is the name of the warrior who confronted and fought the Spaniards when they arrived.  He is honored for his efforts which I suppose is little consolation when you consider that his efforts were futile against the gun totting Spaniards.  I really like the art though which is a relief from looking at the Hindu God motif of the Royal Corin.  That stuff is unnerving to me and I thought it odd that this décor was chosen in a prominently Catholic country. 

It must be 6AM now and the hotel is coming alive.  The sun is up and the breeze has picked up.  There are butterflies and birds floating among the trees and walking around the pool.  I’m ready to eat and face the day.  Wish you were here to share this.

COSTA RICA- DAY 6

We woke about 6AM to the sound of birds and loud motor scooters going by the hotel.  We are at the end of a long valley that dead ends at the volcano and from the fourth floor balcony I can see the valley to my left and to my right the steep slopes of the volcano begin right across the street.  There were at least six turkey vultures souring around in lazy circles and the sky was spotted the length of the valley with cumulus clouds.  It was a beautiful day and we were free until our walking tour of Arenal at 3PM so we had a leisurely breakfast, I took a nap and then we caught a cab into town, about five minutes away for a little shopping.  I never was much good with exchange rates and I find as I get older it gets more difficult to figure out foreign money.  We bought what we wanted and didn’t worry about the money too much.  I got 3000 mil colones change from the taxi driver for the $20 I gave him.  I don’t know what a mil colones is but was just glad to get the ride.

We left for the walk at 2:45 Costa Rican time which is to say we left late and stopped on the way to pick up a Miami football team called Mo Steel.  This turned out to be a well behaved bunch of high school students who were enjoyable to be around.  They had just won a world tournament and were being treated to a trip to Costa Rica.  Our guide was a local young evangelical Christian who has been married for five years and is trying to have a baby with no luck.  He was very informative about geology and the history of this volcano and talked about the wildlife around Arenal as we walked to the lava fields.  The volcano had a minor explosion in 1968 that buried a town and killed a lot of people.  Nobody lives on that side of the crater now and the plant life consists of a bamboo like palm shrub and ferns.  The guide says this is so because the soil is so shallow that trees up root very easily.  The original soil is buried under lava.  He said the Indians here tried to warn people about the volcano for years but people were so ignorant they did not even know the mountain was a volcano.  It evidently lay dormant for about four thousand years but since then it regularly pucks out lava which is a good thing to keep it calm.  It has not been active for a few months so that all we can see for activity is steam drifting out from the top where a recent lava flow has not yet cooled down.  We could not go up high on the volcano as the sides are rough very steep gravel and walking is not considered safe.  There are 121 volcanoes in Costa Rica depending on whom you talk to and 370 including those under the ocean.  We enjoyed talking to Pablo about Jesus Christ and he informed us that they are instructed as guides to not talk about sports, politics, or religion.  He managed to not talk about sports.  We learned that the country disbanded their army in 1948 because there was tension over election results where one of the parties was communist and the ruling party was a afraid that if they got into power they would use the army for evil purposes.  This is weird to me but they to this day do not have an army.  Recently Nicaragua invaded some of the Costa Rican territory up north and the international community talked them back out of the country.  This sure seems like a nice deal for Costa Rica.  Their social security system and national health care system interestingly is expected to go broke about the same time as ours.

We got home at 6PM and I took another nap while Bett got ready for diner.  The hotel is all inclusive and we have enjoyed fabulous diners and waiters that are so attentive and sophisticated that they annoy me.  They changed out our silverware twice during diner to conform to what we were eating with knives and spoons and such being adjusted to give us the right utensil.  It is all lost on me but I tolerate it.  The waiter did run and fetch a carton of Marlboro reds for me for $16.30 which pleased me greatly.  I wonder how many I could bring into the US.

Tomorrow is a day with no itinerary and then we leave for Tomarinda on the Pacific the next morning.  We will have no sightseeing there and hope to lie on the beech for the whole time.  We may rent a car and go to Liberia.  This is we lived for the first few years of my life so I’m a little curious to see it.

COSTARICA- DAY 5

We woke late at 7; 30 to the sound of rain.  It seemed loud to me with the drops bouncing off a thousand leaves on the way down through the canopy.  I went down to the dining room about a hundred yards away and got 2 cups of coffee.  Then we went down for breakfast with Laura and returned to the cottage for devotions and to pack.  As we brought our luggage down the walkway Bett spotted a white faced Monkey above the dining hall and then we watched five other monkeys join the show Bet was convinced was put on just for her.  Before long these interesting little creatures had drawn a crowd of camera totting tourists.  We got a little movie of their antics and recorded their little noises that sounded like little yappy dogs.  Then I noticed a humming bird checking out the flowers and photographed it up so close that Haraldo commented he had never seen one allow anyone get so close before.  This little guy is evidently and insect eater as we watched him zip off his perch and snag a little gnat three feet away.

We said our goodbyes to our gracious hosts and boarded our private boat with Ping and Laura for the 90 minute trip back to civilization.  The river was calm and Ping put the petal to the metal and made the trip in an hour.  We stopped only once to see a crocodile sunning himself on the bank.  We picked up our private bus after saying our goodbyes to Ping (Morizimo) and headed down to Exploradora outdoor adventure meeting place where we had lunch and watched about 20 large river rafts land and pack up a steep slope from the river below. I was sorry we did not have time to take the rafting adventure but we had to stick with our itinerary and shortly left for the three our trek to La Fortuna.  We wound our way up through the mountains with a bus full of strangers who had been on the rafting adventure and were heading our way to the Arenal Volcano.  We arrived at 6:30 PM to what we realized was a five star luxury hotel tucked at the base of Arenal.

Our baggage was whisked off the bus and we were ushered into a magnificent lobby by two well dressed and attentive bell boys.  We were handed two mango drinks in Manhattan glasses with a slice off lime on the edge and checked in.  We headed up to our room on the fourth floor and could not figure out how to open the door.  The bell boy soon arrived with our luggage and just passed the card in front of the door handle and the door unlocked.  Our room is fabulous and we began to explore the features immediately like a couple of kids in a candy shop.  The first order of business was to figure out the shower.  I figured out how to work the electronic control panel and got the radio turned on and then the full body length shower heads at which point I began to flood the bathroom.  Eventually I figured out how to turn on the variety of showering devices and we checked our rest of the room features.

We went down for the inclusive diner and chose a restaurant on the first floor with an outside table.  The diner would be impossible to describe but it was gourmet to say the least and we laughed our way through the variety of silverware and servings of food and the very proper way our young handsome waiter dealt with our relative lack of couth in dealing with all the choices.  It was a great meal and after touring the pool and the eight springs fed hot tubs below our room we then headed up to bed very happy with Costa Rica and the itinerary so far.

COSTA RICA- Day 3

We are scheduled for a tour of the jungle today.  I woke at 5:15 and read Psalm 39.  David is unhappy in this psalm and wanting God to forgive his sin and stop looking at him so that, “I might smile again before I depart and am no more.”  I shared this with Elizabeth during devotions and did not find she was particularly encouraged.

After devotions we went down to the river to meet up with Louda and Ping (Mourisimo).  We boarded our boat and were off down the river 5 minutes to some small canals dug back into the jungle a mile or so.  We moved up these various canals slowly and stopped often to check out every manner of animal, bird and reptile.  Sloths, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, Macaws, crocodiles, parakeets, and a whole host of wonderful animals and plants that I do not recall the names of.  We motored back for breakfast and a nap and then we went for a walk in the Tortorquero national park, which was also about five minutes down the river.  This preserve bordered the ocean on two sides with the waves in places visible through about fifty yards of jungle shrubs separating us from the beech.  We learned about the life cycles of various ant colonies we passed.  The varieties of trees and ground cover growing under the canopy are endless.  I was fascinated with the vines and other plants that grow up the trees and up in the trees.  All of the forest is a support system for plants that don’t have trunks to find the light.  Most do not get their nutrition form the tree and don’t harm it at all.  Some do and slowly kill the tree and their own futures.  We arrived back for lunch and then were off down the river to the spa for an hour message.  Our itinerary has been so packed we scarcely have any down time but we persevere onward like the troopers we are.  Even in pleasure God draws us close to him and we worship.

After another nap we had diner and retired for the evening to relax to the sound of our I-Tunes.

COSTA RICA - DAY 2

We had a buffet breakfast at 6 AM at the Aurola Hotel in San Jose and then were picked up by Carlos for the trek to Cano Blanco about 120 kilometers away on the Caribbean coast.  It was a long beautiful ride winding down through the mountains from the central valley where San Jose is located.  The grades up and down were very steep and the bus we were in was stick shift and Carlos was always shifting gears and I could hear the Jake brake whining as we would slow down for the curves.  The scenery was spectacular with steep drop offs looking out at the mountains that surround the central valley.

We ended up on a dirt road after about 40 miles and our guide said “get ready for a free message."  The road was covered in smooth and sometimes large river stones and it really was a message.  We hammered our way along sucking dust often anytime a big bus would go by kicking up clouds of dust.  There were sure a lot of buses, some of them very large and luxurious.  I don’t know how they could hold up on such roads. We stopped for a little garden tour along the way were we were introduced to many varieties of flowers and trees that I instantly forgot the names of.  We got up close and personal with some little orange poisonous frogs. We found out they are poisonous because of the food they eat.  They were very cute. Eventually we stopped at a Del Monte banana plantation and took the tour.  It was a fascinating process to see the bananas coming in from the fields and working their way through the process and being crated for shipment. We really did not know what would happen next at any stage of this adventure.  All we knew was that we were going to “lodge” that could only be reached by boat.

Next we stopped at an “adventure” drop off point were about 10 of the passengers were going and had a buffet breakfast there with about 40 other people who were there for some kind of hiking and rafting adventure. We were happy- having our second buffet breakfast for the day.  Then we were off again with our guide Lauda (Laura) and the bus driver Carlos.  We continued up this gravel road taking in the sites for a long time perhaps an hour dodging buses that seemed to push us off the road.  We passed many banana plantations and large cattle ranches with the lush grassy fields.  There were a lot of Indian cows and bulls with the big hump on their backs.  Eventually we arrived at a little store and restaurant next to a river. We found out that this winding river was actually a canal built back in the forties to move lumber out into the ocean and up to various markets.  We were told this was were we would be picked up by a boat for a ninety minute ride up north to the lodge were we would stay for three nights and four days.  We hung out for half an hour waiting for the boat and watching other board boats with perhaps twenty people per boat.

Our boat finally arrived and everyone helped us drag our luggage on board. The amount off luggage seemed ridiculous but we had brought what we needed for a month away from home.  We were off and strangely we began to realize that we were the only people on this tour and we had our own guide and boat captain for the duration off what was becoming a really fun adventure.  I don’t know how our money could provide for this kind of care but it was beginning to feel really good and we felt very special in deed.  We saw many people and boats on the river but none with their own boat.  Our captain liked to open up the throttle and go and we would navigate the wakes of other boats as we would overtake them with our boat lifting out of the water as we sped along.  We joked about how our captain Ping really liked to drag race other boats and seemed to take great joy in passing them.  Sometimes we would stop to look at a great blue heron or some other wild life.  We arrived at the lodge on time and were surprised to find that the accommodations were absolutely charming.  The whole compound consisted of an airy central dining hall were we would be eating for the next couple of days and a series of little cottages connected to each other and the  dock and dining hall with concrete board walks that wound through the jungle about four feet above the ground.  Our little cottage consisted of a large bed room, a large bathroom with a sink toilet and shower, and a small front and back porch.  It was just beautiful tucked into the jungle with out even disturbing the trees and vines surrounding us.

We had lunch and then after a short nap we headed out for a tour of the beech which it turns out is a reserve for the huge turtles that come here from all over the world to lay their eggs.  We got an interesting lesson about these amazing animals and saw where they dug up the beech to lay their eggs in holes three feet deep.  We found one of the discarded eggs as we walked along.  We then arrived at a little village for some shopping.  This consisted of a series of little housed (huts really) along the river up stream from our compound.  This was a real tourist trap and the prices seemed so high that we did not buy very much.  Ping picked up after half an hour and we went back to the lodge for diner.  The dining hall had about 30 teenagers who were here for a class trip and perhaps 10 older folk.  A lady from San Francisco sat with Lauda and us for diner and we had a pleasant conversation for the diner hour.

We ended up going to bed around 9PM after checking out the swimming pool area and having brief devotions.  We were warned that we would wake up a 5Am to the sound of “howling monkeys.”  After a glass of wine we retired.