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 !

Cañas and the Río Corobici

During our stop in the city of Cañas, we decided to go on a wildlife watching rafting tour on the nearby Río Corobici.
The river looked rather normal at the first sight : just water, rocks and trees...



Then we saw some capucinos (white headed monkeys), that we had already spotted on Ometepe island :


But there was way more than that. We saw plenty of big iguanas : the big orange males, and the smaller but still impressive green females...





We also saw a lot of Jesus Christ lizards : these 20cm long reptiles run on their back legs, which really makes them look like small dinosaurs from Jurassic Park... And their name simply comes from the fact that they run on water ! They actually were so fast that we couldn t get any on a picture, so here is one from Google :


The river looked really nice, but we didn´t really feel like swimming...
The local "cocodrilos" were already having a pretty good time on their own !


This rafting tour was our first step into the wild of Costa Rica...
And much more is to come in the Monteverde National Reserve where we will be heading tonight !

The island of Ometepe...

Once we finally decided to move on, and leave the wonderful beach of Las Maderas, we crossed the Rivas province from part to part to go from the Pacific ocean to the Ometepe island within the huge Lago de Nicaragua. This trip involved a combination of a truck ride, a chicken-bus ride, a taxi ride, a lancha boat ride, and finally another two and a half hour chicken-bus ride... We left at 10am and got there at 6.30pm, yeepaw !

We stayed at Finca Magdalena, the farm of a former coffee plantation on the side of the Maderas volcano. This was our starting point for the 3-hour hike all the way to the top of the volcano !

The volcano is covered up with "cloud forest" : the following pictures are the best explanation for this kind of very wet and foggy forest !

It took us 3 very wet hours to get to the top, hiking through a trail turned into a narrow and muddy river... "Normal conditions", as a local guide would tell us...

Actually, in a way the conditions looked like a "Tahiti douche" TV commercial... Pierre definitely noticed that :

Obviously, there was absolutely no view from the top nor from the inner crater lake, but the atmosphere was just mystic !

The sky cleared up on the way down, so that we could have a nice view of the Ometepe double-volcano island :

And this is the sunset view from La Finca Magdalena, where we stayed for 2 nights :

We left at 7am this morning in order to be able to get on a chicken bus, catch a boat, get a cab and hop on a bus and reach the border with Costa Rica as early as possible.

After two and a half hours queueing to get our exit and entry stamps, we finally made it to Costa Rica !

We then made a first stop in Liberia, before eventually reaching Canas, where we ll spend the night.

Tomorrow morning we are going on a wildlife boat tour on Rio Corobici, and then we ll head to the Monteverde National Park to get some more wildlife watching !