At 2pm on New Year's afternoon we bid farewell to Yorle and Lynda, thanked them for the amazing banana pancakes and great hospitality over the past few days, and set out on our Jeep/Boat/Jeep excursion. The "jeep" was more like a van with it's shocks almost completely shot from constantly making trips up and down the mountain on rocky unpaved roads. The jeep ride was a 2 hour ridiculously nauseating tour down the steep and winding mountain roads, all we could think about was thank goodness we didn't attempt to get on the 8:30am tour!
When the ride was thankfully over we were transferred onto a small ferry boat that took us across a gigantic man made lake towards La Fortuna. La Fortuna is a progressive, touristy area that became popular due to the notoriously active Arenal Volcano, which has become "suspiciously quiet" over the last 27 months. It houses many flashy hotels, expensive restaurants, boutiques and a large national park around the volcano composed of jungle and wild life. Until 27 months ago, the volcano lit up the skies at night with thundering light shows of red magma rocks blasting into the air on a 5 minute basis. Our last "jeep" ride took us straight to our hostel and gave us a chance to take in all the beauty of the clouded over volcano and it's surrounding landscape. After we had had a chance to settle in, we set out on a mission to find an ATM. Finding one was an easy task. finding one that would let us take out money was another story. We walked to 3 banks and tried to take out variations of large and small amounts of American and/or Costa Rican Collones, and not one machine was willing to spew out the money! Here we are thinking, "great, stuck in a foreign country with a bank card that has gotten locked because the lady at the BMO in Toronto forgot to include the notice on our account that we would be travelling". We walked back to our place, grumpy and hungry and spent an hour waiting on hold with BMO to find out that there was nothing wrong with our card, maybe 2 of the banks were not compatible with ours, and the one that was compatible was out of money! We tried to laugh it off, but nevertheless who wants to walk around aimlessly after a long nauseating day when they are starving and tired?
Wednesday, January 02
We were woken up at several times from revving motorcycle engines, barking dogs, yelling Costa Ricans and other types of street noise. The windows in these countries are made of thin panes of glass that never seem to shut completely and we were right on the corner of a main street, but we didn't mind making it an early morning. We went down for our free breakfast and opted for 2 HUGE fruit plates and toast. We spent the morning hanging out reading and surfing the net.
At 2pm we left on a jungle tour to the Arenal National Park in search of monkeys! Low and behold... we not only saw monkeys, but also tucans, red eyed frogs, a three toed sloth (with it's baby) and local raccoon type creatures whose name we can't recall at this time. They took us on a guided walk around the grounds, where we learnt about the history of the volcano and some of the jungle around it. David even ate a live a termite out of a tree with some of the other people in our tour to see how spicy they tasted!
You could tell our guide was very knowledgeable and passionate about the park. He knew exactly where to look for things, stopped for every tiny little detail, he even stopped to show us crystallisation in the different rocks on the street. He took us to a beautiful waterfall, over a hanging bridge, we hung out at the natural hot springs and ended it off with a free local dinner at "Just Good Food", which was just good.
Thursday, January 03
After another free early morning breakfast in La Fortuna we headed to the local bus station by 7am for our longest travel day yet. 4 busses and 12 hours later we arrived in Puerto Viejo, a super laid back Caribbean beach town close to the Panamanian border. It was dark when we arrived but the main street was lit up with restaurants, bars, and people selling bracelets on the street. It took us 45 minutes to find La Ruka, the place we had reserved because none of the locals ever heard of it! Apparently it was just bought over buy new people and they had recently changed the name. Our room was super cute and everyone was so excited when we finally arrived as they said they had only signed the papers for the place last week and we were their first reservation. We took a 10 minute walk down the strip to a restaurant they recommended to us called "Tasty Waves" for trivia night. We didn't get there in time to join the game, but we played along silently and ate the most delicious burrito and fish taco's ever.
Friday, January 04
A new morning in a new town with no plans was exciting for us. We set out in search of breakfast and to find the beach. We settled for eggs, toast and gaio pinto (their fancy name for rice and beans) and café con leche (coffee with milk). The beach that was right across the street from our place was full of trees and rocks, so we knew we needed to search for a better area. We heard if we walked 30 minutes down the strip we would find it, but decided to rent $5 bikes for the day instead, and set out on our excursion. We biked for 8 km and finally reached a beach called Playa Uva and settled down under the clouds for a lazy afternoon. The water was beautiful and quite warm for a cloudy day.
When our bellies started rumbling we packed up our stuff and hit the grocery store for an easy cheap lunch and fruit for dessert. Our plan was to leave for panama the next day so we had some homework to do. We walked around to see how much the shuttles would cost to make it an easy mission verses another local crazy bus day and decided it was worth the extra $10 each. Our next step was to figure out how to fake an ongoing ticket out of Panama. We didn't want to get stuck buying another Tica bus ticket that we now decided we were not going to use, and thus wasted $118. We came back to the hostel and researched a bit, went to the internet café back in town to attempt to print out a fake itinerary and realized the info we researched was no longer valid and we were stuck! Thankfully the hotel owners brother was able give us some advice that got successfully got us our fake itineraries and our homework for the day was done. We ate leftovers for dinner and then joined some other travellers outside to hang out. The clouds seemed to have brought in the mosquito's that night and we got eaten alive, David got 6 mosquito bites around 2 knuckles of his right hand and it swelled up like crazy. Good thing for those malaria pills, but we are still scratching constantly as we type.
Saturday, January 05
At 7:30 am we got picked up by the air conditioned shuttle bus. It was us and 7 girls from Chile that made the trek across the Panama Frontier. The girls were obviously very religious, because they spent the first 45 minutes doing some kind of prayer chant thing. It took about an hour to get to the border and an hour to get from there to the boat taxi that brought us to the Island of Colon in Bocas Del Toro. It was another cloudy day but the islands looked beautiful from the boat. We didn't have a reservation booked yet as everything online was either all booked up or out of our budget, however several other travellers told us not to worry that there were hundreds of options and we would for sure find something. We arrived to Colon at around noon and went hostel hopping. Every place was fully booked or could only offer us beds in a shared room. We continued to look around for what seemed like forever but was only an hour when we finally came across "La Veranda". It was a guesthouse a little bit out of the craziness of the main strip, quiet, cozy, with a beautiful outdoor terrace and they had a room available for us. The search was over. We ate lunch at a local restaurant and ran into some guys we met the last time we were crossing the border into Costa Rica. They joined us for lunch and talked about our travels in between. We later came back to the house to relax on the terrace. We met a lot of our fellow neighbours while outside. Two couples from Vancouver, some guys from Holland, and some people from the states. For dinner we picked up some chicken from the grocery store and made a delicious home cooked meal. 
Ah, the dreaded mozzies! Try Dr. K's guaranteed to stop bites from itching cure: Dettol Soap. Check at the supermarkets. The soap is marketed all over the world in various languages and flavours. You could also try a pharmacy (if they sell stuff like soap). It's the third world's best kept non-secret. Even Dr. T's dad is a Dettolhead.
ReplyDeleteIf you wash the bites twice a day with Dettol, they won't itch, you won't scratch them and after 4 days you won't even see that you were bitten in the first place.
You gotta check the little symbols on the back of your bank card to see if they match with those on the bank machine. There's lots of banks that do not have agreements with various Canadian banks which is why it's a good idea to have more than one bank card. I travel with both a Scotiabank and TD bank card. It would seem you managed to sort out the money issues though.
So wild children, I'm glad you both are having fun. The nature reserve tour sounded amazing.