Costa Rica - the ultimate summary

 Costa Ricans, or Ticos as they like to call themselves, are a very nice, friendly race of people, inhabiting a country that might have been imagined by a nine year old child. That is a bit harsh, perhaps a ten year old. Unless you take a guided tour in which case such things will not be apparent to you, doing anything in Costa Rica is needlessly complicated.

The child will have imagined conical volcanos, jungles full of wild beasts, forests full of lollipop shaped trees and sandy beaches lapped by warm seas. All this is real, but the child has forgotten the means to link them all together.

The roads except in towns have no names. The buildings along these roads have no numbers. Navigation is therefore performed with reference to local landmarks e.g. ' The hotel is 20m west of the Igatsu crossroads' or ' The lodge is opposite the zoological park.' Now if you know the area well, or can speak Spanish to a local inhabitant, this is less of a problem, but if you are a non-Spanish speaking foreigner then such a system is useless.

Tourism in Costa Rica

The tourist industry is culpable of institutional hyperbole. Yes, there is a great diversity of birds, but unless you are a keen twitcher you won't see many of them because most are small creatures which dart about at high speed and have learnt to keep great distance between themselves and anyone with a camera or pair of binoculars. Ground and arboreal creatures are larger but sensibly prefer to remain hidden in dense foliage.

The tourist industry has responded by retraining eager locals as guides. They can be identified by the tripod bearing a spotterscope that they will be carrying, and the gaggle of slightly sunburnt tourists trailing in their wake, to whom they will be explaining the benefits of ecotourism.

Similarly, many ground dwelling creatures have evolved to avoid tourists by becoming nocturnal. The tourist industry has responded to this Darwinian tactic by creating night walks. Here the guides are instead armed with powerful spotlights and laser pointers to illuminate the slower moving of their prey, whilst they explain the benefits of ecotourism.

This leaves monkeys and raccoons as the most frequently sighted land animals, attracted as they are to human garbage and tourist's backpacks. These do not need to explain the benefits of ecotourism as they are already profiting from them.

Independent travel in Costa Rica.

There is an important industry carting tourists around in minibuses and coaches. This creates an incentive to deter independent travel by making it as difficult as possible. Hence roads are not made up or maintained, beaches only kilometers apart require detours ten times the length into the hinterland to drive between one and the other, and signposting is sporadic.

Take a travel kettle and cups and many tea bags with you. The electrical supply is 110V and uses American style sockets. This means patience if the kettle is 240V. A kettle because most hotel rooms don't provide one. Teabags because they are expensive here, despite a bewildering array of alternatives which make something almost completely dissimilar to tea( to borrow Douglas Adams' famous phrase). The tea bags should be kept in a hermetically sealed container ( Tupperware or similar) to avoid visitations by ants.

Expect anything in the road, especially after dark. This includes but is not limited to: people, speed bumps, horses, sleeping dogs, inexplicably parked cars, single lane bridges, children, river fords, cattle, branches of trees, bicycles and motor cycles without any lights at all, cars with no rear lights, potholes, canyon like storm drains and if you are really lucky, asphalt.

Hotels and lodgings rarely have signage from the main road, and if they do it will have been designed by a creative artist who has demonstrated his creativity by transforming the name into an elegant but barely legible work of art.

The only way to reliably navigate is to use a SatNav and program it with the GPS coordinates of your destination. That said, we came across one hotel which published the wrong coordinates because they showed a more favourable location, whilst another used the coordinates of the crater of a nearby volcano, so do check the coordinates match the expected location using satellite imagery. Unfortunately the method is not completely infallible because some hostelries claim they still do not know what GPS coordinates are.
(Our trusty SatNav and accompanying mobile phone are now up for sale here on EBay.
 (http://www.eBay.co.UK/itm/301553243242 )

On the plus side there are no beggars, the social security is strong and universal, as are the education and health systems. The police are helpful and patrol most roads used by tourists.

On the minus side you cannot leave anything anywhere without the possibility of theft. Travelling with baggage in the car is a nightmare, only park outside banks, police stations, or in supermarkets with security guarded compounds. Roads can be atrocious or summarily closed without explanation.

Anything to do with the government leaves you with the impression that they are primarily interested in your wallet rather than your presence.

Watch out for 2p British coins in your change. They are about the same size, colour and weight as 100 colon coins but have about a sixth of the value.

Paying in cash, either Colones or US Dollars, sometimes makes things cheaper for the purchaser as government tax may conveniently be forgotten about. Sometimes it just makes it more profitable for the vendor. You may come across places having signs saying that the card machine is temporarily out of order, the signs themselves often having an air of permanence.

Food is usually about the same or a little more expensive than the UK, but the quality is often poorer. Eating out is not only expensive but usually varies from uninspired to inedible. Petrol is about half the price. Car hire for 4x4s is ridiculously expensive if you want full insurance protection, and you do.

All in all for independent travellers, Costa Rica is an interesting place to spend some time, but extremely poor value for money and sometimes exasperating for the spirit.

Returning home

Possibly the ugliest building in San José.

After a morning shopping, we had lunch at the bright and airy food court on the fourth floor of the Universal on Avenida Central.

Grays Tours were prompt in picking us up by mjinibus at 2pm. It was supposed to be a shared service to the airport, but we had the minibus to ourselves.

We paid the $29 each exit tax at the airport without much queuing, but were unable to purchase any duty free rum, which was a shame. The assistants explained that if we did, as soon as we went through security at Madrid it would be confiscated as a suspicious liquid.

The Iberia flight left on time and we saw a mountain peak poking through the clouds, but alas not a volcano.

The flight was in a much more modern plane than the one in which we had arrived which let us view several recent films. Flying through the night the view over the Atlantic was magical, with small fluffy clouds being illuminated by moonlight with the starry black sky above.

Flying over East Dulwich, London

A smooth landing in Madrid and just enough time to get to the connecting BA flight to London. This was late both in departing and arrival so we were an hour behind schedule in alighting. However our bags were amongst the first off and we only had to wait 5 minutes for the RailAir coach to Reading. The coach only took 20 minutes and we then caught a cab back home.

We were pleased to find nothing major had gone wrong in our absence. A mouse had got in and chewed through a small water pipe, but as the water was switched off this had only resulted in a couple of small puddles on the floor.

Montezuma to San José

Breakfast with no less than three Crested Magpie Jays who were variously interested in scrambled eggs and sugar packets.

The road was good if slow but we got to the ferry at Paquera at quarter to ten. That meant we secured our place and bought our tickets before the bus came in and the queue became long.

The Tambor II left on time at 11am and the gulf was calm. We passed the sister ferry halfway across.

From Puntarenas we drove towards San José, hoping to find a restaurant for lunch, but in 120km there was nothing except toll booths and a few fruit sellers.

We dropped off the car with Dollar and they drove us back to El Presidente hotel in the middle of the city. A late lunch, a bit of shopping and then to P3, our favourite pub situated on the third floor of a block on an intersection of Avenida Central. Now back in our favourite San José hotel for the last night

Last day in Montezuma

Breakfast with only one Crested Magpie Jay who was today perhaps predictably uninterested in packets of anything, and just wanted scrambled egg.

Later in the morning we walked to a nearby waterfall, only a kilometer or so away, where local youths took it in turn to leap from high on the rocks into the plunge pool.

After lunching on most of the remaining contents of our fridge, a beautifully ripe mango and a pot of yoghurt, we strolled down the beach again looking for rock pools left by the falling tide.

We found several, but too small to swim in although home to many small fish. Then a tiger heron showed up and we spent a long time watching him.

HWe left the beach as 27 pelicans flew in formation away from the setting sun. Now we get ready for the journey home, as was this small agouti we met in the hotel gardens.

Montezuma - Playa Grande

Better today. Breakfast was shared with two Crested Magpie Jays. Beautiful birds, they each sat on a chairback either side of me. One of them chirruped to attract my attention whilst the other stole a packet of sugar from beside my cup of coffee! This routine was repeated a couple of times. An individual serving of strawberry jam disappeared in a similar manner. What the birds wanted the packets for is a mystery. Perhaps it is the current trend in nest decoration, who knows?

After breakfast we walked a couple of kilometers eastwards along a beautiful shady path that wound under palm trees, over headlands and dipped into sandy coves before opening out into the wide sandy beach that is Playa Grande.

This is a very entertaining hotel. It is set in a sort of jungle garden with gravel paths under palm trees, heliconias and gingers. Not only are we visited by geckos and eyed up by suspicious iguanas, but it is rare to walk down a path without surprising an agouti.

As I write a capuchin monkey has been jumping up and down for fun on the corrugated tin roof of the room making a noise like someone repeatedly kicking a metal dustbin. Usually it is the howler monkeys making all the noise.

Mal Pais to Montezuma

I don't understand. Last night I was disturbed time and time again by Montezuma's revenge. But we only travelled to Montezuma today. How and why did it exact its revenge in advance?

Luckily it was only a journey of 15km from Mal Pais, albeit along fairly poor apologies for roads, and took less than an hour. Even luckier was the fact that the hotel keeper at the 'Luz de Mono' had already prepared our room and let us in early.

I spent most of the day dozing on the bed, Christine did some shopping, reading by the swimming pool and went to a barbeque in the evening. It is a very nice family run hotel which exists as a point of interest on the SatNav so has obviously been going for some time. It is infinitely better than where we had just come from.

We managed a walk down to the beach just before sunset, but we are on the southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula now so we have lost the flamboyant sunsets of the western coast.

I'm feeling brighter now, after a day of not eating and alternately drinking cups of tea and coca-cola. I'm sure I'll be OK again tomorrow.

Mal Pais to St Teresa

Breakfast was interesting as the brass cutlery we were provided with looked and handled as though it had been manufactured in the Bronze age. A triumph of naive styling over practicality. Are these people unaware of Sheffield stainless steel?




We walked to St Teresa. All of 4 km along the beach. It took 6 hours to get there and one hour to walk back. Stopped at Playa Carmen to get some cash from the ATM.

However the discrepancy in journey times is mostly explained by the many swimmable rock pools created by the falling tide.

They were protected from the Pacific waves and American surfers by rocky outcrops surmounted by pelicans. A gritty sand underfoot largely comprised of comminuted sea shells ensured excellent visibility.

We used the snorkels to their best advantage this trip and saw many and varied fish.

We celebrated getting to St Teresa by purchasing a sort of granita on a stick, the eco-artisanal equivalent of an ice lolly. St Teresa has the same execrable road as the other settlements, mostly trafficked by ATVs with milk crates strapped to the front for groceries and surfboards strapped to the sides.

Then walked back along the beach to our latest favourite restaurant, Caracolas, for a couple of beers as the sun set ( it set rather slowly tonight) followed by another excellent fish supper featuring Mahi Mahi.