Rio de Janeiro, New Year's Eve

Before the big event on Copacabana beach, we shared a few home and quality-made Caipirinhas with our great hosts from the first night, Claude and Iveth, in their flat at 200 m from the beach.

We then went to the beach, where every year the dress-code is white. Thank you Arnaud for respecting the tradition!

Every year this event gathers 2 000 000 + people from all around the world. This picture shows the crowd but also the great weather we had...

...and so does this one!

13 minutes and 6 seconds (True story!) of fireworks...

...after which our national David Guetta made the show!!! Woof!

After a short night of sleep (and a quite adventurous 2h-ish journey back to the hostel), we went around the center and Ipanema.

Here is the quite surprising Metropolitan Cathedral, 60m high of pure concrete...

Paraty & Trindade

After a short time in Rio (the one and only sunny hours of the end of the year), we went straight to Paraty.

On the first day, we went on a kayak tour of the mangroves. Unfortunately, the camera remained in the waterproof box...

For lunch we had fresh fish (considering the time they needed to serve us, I would say they went fishing right after the order)

On our second day in Paraty, we went to Trindade, after a nice breakfast on the beach (with croques monsieur!)

In Trindade, one of the famous spots is the Pedra que engole (the rock that swallows). Here at work with Sevag

 All thats left of him:

Do not worry, he did come out eventually, right on time to enjoy a few hours on the beach.

Cahuita

Yesterday we left Puerto Viejo to go to Cahuita, only one hour away by bus (probably meaning no more than 30kms). We went to have red-snapper in a rasta bar, just infront of la Playa Negra (not to be confused with black beach, La Jolla. Some know why.).

Anyway, the point is still that the sand is black...

Going to the other side of town, one can find beautiful white-sand beaches, and a national park (including the beach). There we went with a guide early this morning and spotted lots of wildlife, as this slow sloth...

The next one is taken from less than 100m away!

Another sloth trying to reach the next tree (it took him about five minutes to figure out he was too short by about one meter).

The same snake as the other day, on flash needed this time.

And tons tons of monkeys... Here is one with its baby.

After a 6-hour walk, we chilled on the beach, and were surrounded by many others (videos to come).

Cyber is closing, we'll have to write more later. But we are flying back tomorrow night!

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca

We crossed the whole country of Costa Rica from the Pacific Ocean to the Carribean Sea on the day. We managed to arrive by 6.30 pm in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a rasta and surf town at the extreme north-east of the country.

Total change of environment over here : the population is mainly black, since the first inhabitants were former slaves from the West Indies (Jamaica...) that decided to settle in Costa Rica to fish for sea turtles.


Here is a view of our hostel, owned by a former hardcore surfer from the Netherlands, and where obviously plenty of surfers are staying :

So what´s the difference between the Pacific coast and the Carribean coast ?
At the first sight, there are much more palmtrees and coconut trees than in Montezuma...




And how is the surfing over there ?
That´s how it looks from far away...


And that´s the way Rasta-man does it !


After a fair bit of walking and cruiser-cycling (on these cool ¨cruiser¨bikes that come from California)...

.. we made it to Punta Uva, another great beach surrounded by the jungle :


You might say, that´s a bit too much of beaches, what about culture ?
That will be the point of our next day, since we are heading to Cahuita National Park...

Isla Tortuga

Another busy day... We went by boat to Tortuga island, about one hour from Montezuma. We got really lucky as we went only 5 people on the boat - to be compared to the usual 25 on the other boats...

On the way there, we saw dolphins, lots of pelicans, and even a mama whale with its baby (already the size of our boat though).

We also stopped twice on the way to go snorkelling, close to the corral.

Eventuallly we made it to the perfect white-sand beaches of the Tortuga island. There we had fish for lunch, and lots of time to chill (without getting too much sunburnt, yipee).

The way back was really bumpy as waves grew bigger, but the day was definitely worth it.

Tomorrow at 9.30 we are taking the boat to Jaco. The idea is to be on the caribean coast by tomorrow night, but we are not really sure we will make it, so maybe we'll have to stop on the way. We'll try to enjoy every day until next Saturday!

Montezuma

After leaving Sevag go back to the airport, we headed to the Pacific coast. A 3-hour chaotic bus ride took us to Puntarenas, where we had to hours to see the city, before taking the ferry to cross the bay.

Again, we got lucky and managed to get a room with views to the ocean (this one is taken from the room!). Prices went steeply up since we left Nicaragua, but it is still affordable...

The ambience here is very chill. Not too many tourists, quite laid-back. Around town, a large forest, with many monkeys, frequently coming downtown.

On the next photo, we see the hostel where we are staying, right on the beach.

And close by is a nice but dangerous waterfall, where people seem to compete for the darwin awards...

Also, we just received a message from Sevag, who safely made it back to Paris. Good luck for tomorrow!

Santa Elena, Monteverde

Yesterday afternoon we arrived to Santa Elena, close by the Monteverde National Park. The second cloud forest of our trip. The particularity of this park is twofold : the forest was never touched (primary forest), and most importantly it looks very much as Tarzan's forest. Ficus there are huge, with complex shapes...

Here is Tarzan's playground...

One of the multiple small colorful birds (and hard to photograph!). We also saw some colibris, famous for their ability to stationary flight.

 

We also took a night walk in the forest, to observe the nocturnal activity. This is a hard to see sleeping sloth (paresseux). It is hard to see because it usually takes a 15-hour nap after any short physical activity (mainly eating untouched leaves).

Now this is more scary : a highly poisonous snake (which name I forgot, let's just call it the deadly snake). In the picture, it is in position to attack - probably because Arnaud took a picture with the flash :-).

A "small" tarentula - that looked big enough to me (about my hand's size, but more hairy).

Tomorrow we are splitting the group. Sadly Sevag is flying back to France on Saturday night (red-eye flight, as we apparently say). We on the other hand will keep on going for another week. 

The original plan awas to go to the caribbean coast, from north to south, and then back to San Jose for our flight next Saturday, but bad weather conditions there are making us change our minds. We will head tomorrow to Montezuma, beach town on the pacific side, and the head down to el parque nacional del Corcovado (which holds itself a 2,5% of the earth's entire biodiversity if I understood properly...). Many more pictures to come !