Costa Rica "Best Of..."

 In standing with our sporadic tradition of wrapping our trip with a list of the things we want to remember and celebrate about a place, here is our family "Best of..." list for Costa Rica. They are listed in order of age, from Parker to Mike. 

Best...

• Food: 
• Jugo naturale/batido - watermelon (P), pineapple/banana (S), cas (C), watermelon/banana (M)
• Snack - batidos, patacones, and plantain chips (everyone)
• Meal - anything with french fries minus the anything (P), refried beans in a bag w/tortilla chips (S - below), casado con pescado (C)

• Tropical fruit - mango (P), cocao fruit & granadilla (S), guayabana (C), papaya (M)

 

• Nature: 
• Animal siting - beach snails (P), Coatimundi & Iguana (S), Blue Morpho & red-eyed tree frog (C), Capuchin monkeys (M), toucans and scarlet macaws (everyone)
• Tree - Rainbow Eucalyptus (C)
• Beach - Playa Espadilla (everyone)
• Hike - Sendero Fumeroles, Pocosol Biological Station

 

• Pig impersonator - 2 toed sloth

• Travel:
• Hotel/lodging - Valle Escondido in Monteverde (everyone)
• Place to go back to - Pocosol Biological Station, Bosque Eternal de los Ninos
• Pool - Vista Ballena (P & M), Baldi Hot Springs (S & C)

 

• Spanish word/phrase - "unintelligible gibberish" (P), "donde esta el bano?" (S), "buenas" (C), "con gusto" (M)
• Place to take the extended family (looking at you Nana CC/Opa/Nana) - Arenal Observatory Lodge 

• Activities: 
• Way to wait out the rain - do whatever Sybil says (P), play house/school with stuffies (S), doodle in travel journal (C), read (M)

• Way to spend a night - playing family charades (everyone)
• Way to wake up at 4:30 a.m. - scritch-scratching of squirrels on the roof (P), alarm birds (S), goats on the balcony (C), cuddles from S & P (M)

It's not lost on me what a tremendous privilege it is to have the good health and resources to be able to travel to other countries. We try not to take advantage of the responsibility that comes with visiting another country and culture, and we do our best to learn from the people and experiences. I'm always grateful for the new perspectives I come away with after seeing a tiny snapshot of life in another place on planet Earth. I hope our kids find it as mind opening, valuable, challenging, and fun. 

We learned that Costa Rica has tremendous natural beauty and comparatively easy access to a mind blowing array of flora and fauna. The tourist infrastructure is a well oiled machine, and the roads aren't nearly as scary to drive on as everyone says (though expect to go slooooow). Rainfall is measured in feet, not inches, but Ticas (people from Costa Rica) never seem to look wet. The costarricenses we encountered were kind, warm, and formal, and understandably a teeny bit over tourists and the saying "Pura Vida". 

We're heading back to Houston tomorrow morning. We're excited to get back to a regular sleep routine and see friends and family, but all of us agree that we could spend more time here and love Costa Rica. The summer adventures aren't over yet, however! We spend a few days in Houston before returning to Austin for a week to host our nieces Laila and Mia, then we head out to New Mexico and Colorado for our typical summer camping trip. 

Uvita Bonita

Our final stop had us exploring around Uvita and Dominical, the Costa Ballena region.  Our first stay was at Vista Ballena, a beautiful hotel up the mountains from the coast with a beautiful overlook to the ocean and the namesake landform.  The Parque Nacional Marino Ballena surrounds a sandbar/landform that looks like a whale tail when it's low tide.

Mostly I was excited that they had a pool shallow enough that Parker could swim/play without us having to be within arms reach at all times.  Sybil is a strong enough swimmer now that she can venture into the big pool alone with just our eyes on her.  

The Vista Ballena view was why infinity pools were created.  We were living it up!

To take a break from the beach, we decided to have a waterfall day.  We brought suits with the intention of some natural swimming, but El Pavon (not surprisingly with all the rainy season rain) was a bit too powerful/unsafe for us to venture in.

How'd that boulder get there?  Nature is awesome.

The girls did a great job managing their disappointment of not swimming, and with our heads up on the way out we saw a waterfall we missed on the way in.  This one was perfect for climbing and exploring.

Still at Vista Ballena enjoying a picnic lunch and chips in a can.  We had our first grocery stop because our room had a mini-fridge.  We had held off on buying any snacks because we had no way to store them in our previous rooms.  We quickly discovered you can't leave any food out overnight because it will be covered in tiny ants by the morning.  The mini-fridge proved to protect our food for at least 48 hours.

This beauty of a frog was posted up on a column at our hotel sitting very still to wait out the dry morning and the coming of the inevitable afternoon/evening showers.  The girls (and me) enjoyed gently petting it.

Back to the beach!  In the morning we visited Playa Ventanas for some wave jumping and frisbee throwing on the beach.  We came as high tide was rolling in.  There are two ventanas (windows) through the bordering mountain of this cove that can be walked through during low tide.  At high tide you get a great show of seeing the waves crash through with awesome noise and mist.  Other highlights were watching the hundreds of crabs digging holes, sifting through the sand for food and scurrying about.  And Sybil and I had a toss with a beach friend from Britain.

In the afternoon, we went for a beach hike to the Whale Tail.  Our third national park of the trip!

The best time to visit these beaches is at low tide which allows you to walk out to the whale tail land formation.  

Beautiful beach and tropical forest.  Every once in awhile the clouds would part and reveal the tall mountains just off the coast.  How drastically the mountains rise up from the coast reminded us a lot of Hawaii.

Our next stay in the area was at an apartment style bungalow.  The girls have been enjoying downtime listening to The Descendants, Oliver, Wicked, and Encanto songs.  During the nap we were woken up by two goats on our second floor porch peeking into our window.  The girls had fed them carrots and banana in the morning, and they escaped their pen and they came knocking for more.

Final beach of the trip.  Parker and I walked from our final hotel, Villas Rio Mar, to Playa Dominical.  We didn't spend much time here, but we hope to be back for a future trip and some surfing lessons.  These seemed to be the most consistently awesome waves.

Manuel Antonio NP - "Take only pictures, leave only footprints...and one purple Croc"

 As we drove out of the mountains, I steeled myself for 10 days at the beach. Mike and the kids love the beach, so we split the trip 50/50 between mountains and beach. We were headed to a hotel right outside of Manuel Antonio National Park, a highly recommended destination due to the pristine beaches and wildlife so thick you can't throw a coconut without hitting something. Mike knows, because he threw a coconut at the base of a tree to try and break it open, and he accidentally hit a camouflaged iguana (it, miraculously, seemed unharmed). 

On the drive to Quepos, the nearest city to Manuel Antonio, from Monteverde we stopped to see the crocodiles under the Tarcoles River bridge. There were so many, and some of them were huge. 

The first afternoon we arrived it was raining, but that didn't keep us from hitting up the beach anyways. The girls and Mike stayed out there in the rain jumping over waves for a couple of hours, then we went to dinner at a local falafel place. 

Our first National Park pic of the summer! Our hotel was perfectly situated 50 meters from the beach and 200 meters from the entrance to Manuel Antonio National Park. We reserved an early entrance slot at 7:00 a.m. since the girls have been waking up around 5:30 a.m. here (the birds are chirping and screeching at 4:30 a.m.) and I also read that it's better to go early to see wildlife and avoid the crowds. 

Within 5 minutes of being in the park we spotted our first wild sloth thanks to an older couple who had gone with a tour the day before and told us where they saw one. 

Our next wildlife sighting ranks among my favorite of the whole trip, a blue morpho butterfly. We were walking down the trail and a blinking apparition appeared in front of us. The underside of a blue morpho is brown, so when their wings are lifted in flight it blends in with the understory. But the top of the wings is a brilliant metallic blue, so you see flashes of blue when their wings are down. They are also enormous, so it was magical to have them fly right by and almost land on us.  

We made it to our first beach destination, Playa Manuel Antonio, and nearly had the beach to ourselves for the first few hours. The tide was in and the waves and riptides were too intense for swimming, so we played in the sand and walked down the beach for a few hours until the tide was lower and waves were calmer. 

This is where the iguana assault occurred, and proof to PETA that it was still alive. 

  

A portrait of before and after. They played in the sand for hours, digging and piling, throwing and burying. I mostly read my book, happy to have some time to relax. About an hour later when we were ready to go to the next beach, we couldn't find one of Parker's purple crocs. A hazy memory came back to me of hearing her tell Sybil at some point in their play, "I'm burying my shoe!" We combed the beach trying to find it, to no avail. Our only hope is that it is unearthed by the tide and some thoughtful beachgoer throws it away, because the thought of contributing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gives me nightmares. 

Sybil on Playa Manuel Antonio.  The tide went out and waves got calm enough for us to swim for a couple of hours. 

 

After a few hours at the first beach we went to the snack bar to eat lunch, and that's when the wildlife sightings picked up again. Squirrel monkeys dropped fruit seeds on our heads, we first heard and then saw howler monkeys, and we also saw a ton of capuchin monkeys (above, with a baby holding on to it's mother). 

We took a short hike around Sendura Catedral, a peninsula that juts out into the ocean and connects Playa Manuel Antonio with Playa Espadilla Sur, the other major beach in Manuel Antonio National Park. During certain times of the year, it's a great place to see humpback whales migrate, but now is not the season. We swam and played some more. 

You can see the beach in front of our hotel in the distance, and we didn't want to walk the couple of miles all the way back out of the park and then to our hotel since we would have to carry the single shoed Parker most of the way. The tide was low enough that we could scramble over the rocks at the end of this beach and be within 100 meters of our hotel. 

Sybil and Parker, beach ready on our second morning. After dropping off our laundry in Quepos and buying some replacement beach shoes for Parker at a local market, we hit up the beach for the whole day. Mike rented boogie boards, and we had a great time swimming, boogie boarding, creating houses, and collecting cool rocks, shells, and coral bits that had washed up.  

Parker's collection of coral. 

Sybil's colorful collection of shells and rocks. 

Mike went for a run, and I got in some yoga to pretend like I'm doing something active.

It was Dia de Los Padres (Costa Rican Father's Day), and I really enjoyed watching Mike play with the girls on the beach. He's attentive, loving, playful, protective, silly, and just all around the best dad to these awesome humans. 

The next day we were set to meet up with Rick Airey and his family. Rick was the first coach of Doublewide, and is an Austin Ultimate legend. Rick and his family live in Costa Rica, so we planned on staying with them in their house near Perez Zeledon for a few days. They decided to move back to central Texas a few weeks after we booked the tickets however, so instead we met up with his family at an incredible hotel called La Mariposa. This was our view from our balcony. 

And this was our view at breakfast...un arcoíris! There were beautiful scarlet macaws flying around the hotel, and I could hear a troop of howler monkeys as I wrote this post. 

We made the most of our time together hanging out with Rick's awesome family. His partner Melanie is a joy to talk to, and our kids absolutely loved having their two awesome kids (Gabe - 10 and Maya - 8) around to play and swim with. We played on the beach, then swam in the pool, then played at the beach again, then swam in the pool some more. We only stopped to eat or sleep, but barely. 

The second day on the beach, their daughter Maya cracked open a coconut while they were playing deserted island. Have you ever tried to break open a coconut before? It's not easy, but it was no problem for Maya. We were all rewarded with a yummy coconut snack.

We're excited that Rick and family will be moving back to Texas, so we're hopeful that we'll see them again soon! 

Reunited and it feels so good - Monteverde

Sybil and Parker don't always get along, they are sisters after all, but it was such a joy to see their interactions after being apart for a week.  [Cara and I were pretty pumped to see each other as well.]  Within 3 minutes of Parker and I walking out of the Liberia airport, Cara and Sybil pulled up with smiles and waves!  It could not have been planned/executed any more perfectly.  We had about a 2.5 hour drive to our next destination in the mountains of the Monteverde region.  Before hitting the road in ernest, we stopped for a traditional Costa Rican lunch, and I had my first pinto gallo (rice and beans)....I truly felt like I had arrived.

S&P love the chicken soup and rice.  Later at this lunch we saw our first iguana.  At first, Cara thought it was just a statue.  She almost had me convinced until it quickly moved as we got closer and startled me and the girls.  Little did we know that we would see iguanas at every outdoor eatery we would stop at during the coming days.

The frog pond at Valle Escondido in Monteverde.  This past year/spring was a rough one for me after Papa died in the fall.  Although I was excited about travelling to Costa Rica, I could not muster the motivation to put effort into planning the trip and instead treated it much like our previous international adventures-pre kids.  Thinking we'd just mostly wing it.  Cara picked up on how disengaged I was from the planning process and after months of research, she booked a bunch of hotels and eco lodges while I was out on a night bike ride. 

After just our first meal at the farm to table restaurant on site, I realized what an awesome job Cara did.  This place is amazing!  They practice permaculture on site and teach classes while also running their hotel and restaurant.  They also maintain miles of trails throughout the surrounding rainforest that lead to waterfalls and into the adjacent valley.  But most importantly to the girls, they have an awesome green space with a frog pond just in front of the restaurant where we would enjoy most of our meals and also just steps from our room.

The girls spent several hours over the 2.5 days we were here catching tadpoles and creating a mini ecosystem in our frisbee to observe them before putting them back safely in the pond.

The amazing view from the top deck of the restaurant. You can see over 40 km to the Nicoya Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean when the clouds parted.

Our first morning on site, we took a hike through the surrounding rainforest.  Although we had great views of the valley and a waterfall, we were a bit disappointed that we did not see a sloth and only a handful of capuchins from a distance.  I did also get to see my first impressively large ficus tree.  Sybil did her best Tarzan impression while hanging from the vines.  They were impressively strong and easily held her weight.

Cara and Sybi have been on the road for a week, and we still had not seen the sweet 4WD machine that was safely transporting them throughout the volcanic mountains.  This little Mitsubishi is not quite the Cactus Killer, but it is super fun to drive and gives us a lot of confidence as we navigated the steep, slick, and sometimes very rutted roads of the mountains of Costa Rica.

After naps and during the inevitable afternoon rain storms, we went to an indoor sloth sanctuary.  During a Houston style thunderstorm we learned about 2-toed sloths and got to observe them up close.  Most of the sloths in their sanctuary were rescued as babies after their moms had been killed (mostly by road accidents).  The two toes describes their front paws, all sloths have 3 toes on the back.  Who knew their noses are so pig like?  Other sloth facts we learned: They sleep 17 hours a day, there body temp. is very low which is one reason they have slower metabolism, they are the second most sedentary mammal behind the koala, they leave their tree once a week to poop which provides fertilizer for the tree and marks their territory, they have a varied diet of leaves and fruits, in the wild they grow moss on their fur which makes them even more camouflaged, and THEY ARE AWESOME!

Me, Cara, and three sloths

Although they don't move much and mostly sleep, this sloth put on a show for us!

Blowing Off Steam at Arenal Volcano

We had heard and read about the awesome hot springs in Costa Rica near the hot springs town and tourist paradise of La Fortuna. We stayed at the Arenal Volcano Observatory and Lodge located right outside Arenal National Park and, as you can see below from the picture from our balcony, a frisbee pull away from Arenal Volcano. 

The Arenal Lodge has 7 miles of trails on the property through primary and secondary forest, but is much more developed and accessible than the lodge at Pocosol and would be perfect for traveling with extended family. The forest was also different and reminded me more of the temperate rain forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, made up of mixed coniferous and deciduous forest. Our first morning there we saw spider monkeys off of the restaurant balcony. 

Our first day was reserved for Hot Springs. The one I wanted to go to, Kalambu Hot Springs, was closed so we went across the street to the very swanky, very over the top, but also amazing Baldi Hot Springs. They boast 25 different pools of varying temperature. 

Sybil just learned to swim this spring, and she can't get enough, so we were in the water from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a quick 45 minute break for a buffet lunch. We played "whales" for about 3 hours, and  (thankfully) she found another kid to play with (kid travel tip: bring sinking pool toys for hours of entertainment). It rained the entire afternoon, but it was perfect to sit in the warm pool and have cool rain falling from above.  

The next day we went on a tour of Don Olivio's family finca, or farm, where they grow cacao and coffee. They also had about 12 different fruits growing on the property, and we got to taste about 8 of them right off the vine (banana criollo, papaya, pineapple, guyabano, sugar cane, orange, cacao, and mango)! They had lychee, star fruit, dragon fruit, and vanilla, but they aren't in season. 

It was really neat to see the whole process of growing and processing chocolate from start to finish. Sybil loves to eat the fruit around the seeds (the seed, or "bean", is toxic for all animals except humans, which is why the Maya/Aztec societies considered it sacred and special). We had a coffee/hot cocoa snack with beans straight from the trees we walked through. We also saw the tiniest sliver of sloth, so Sybil picked a stuffed sloth as her trip souvenir at the end of the tour, Slothy, who will feature heavily in future blog posts. 

On the way back to the lodge we stopped at Arenal 1968, a hike that winds through, on, and over, lava flows from the last major eruption of Arenal Volcano in, you guessed it, 1968. 

Sybil on the 1968 trail. You can see the dark black rock and large boulders that blew off the top at times, but mostly it's covered with vegetation and just a nice walk through the forest. 

We finally found someone else to take a photo of the both of us, and Slothy. 

We passed the afternoon hanging and swimming in their enormous jacuzzi hot tub with a couple of other kids, and then I dragged her on a quick walk to the frog pond at night. We saw a snake curled up on a leaf, and another red eyed tree frog. 

The next day we went on the hanging bridges tour at Mistico Park. It's a very accessible and short walk over about 16 bridges (many of them, suspension) that give you a pretty awesome view of some of the canopy. It was terrifying at first, but Sybil's boldness inspired me and I got over it. We saw coatis, lots of hummingbirds and butterflies, and some spider monkeys very close up. 

We were also treated to beautiful trees and flowers.

We wrapped up our time in Arenal with more afternoon swimming in the hot tub with new trip friends, a trip to La Fortuna to eat lunch at an awesome local soda and drop off laundry, and a night of gaming in the hotel game room (Sybil has learned checkers and chess...kind of...on the trip). The next day we were off to our next destination, Monteverde, and on the way we were very excited to pick up Mike and Parker at the Liberia airport. 

Sybil was an awesome adventurer the whole week, but the volcano wasn't the only thing blowing off steam in Arenal. Sybil was getting pretty sick of me, so it was really nice for her to meet other kids at the hotel and gave her an opportunity to play. 

Can't wait to get the band back together and continue exploring this awesome place together!