We made it to San Jose last night and I have half an hour before we head to the airport. We are at the Raddison in San Jose. It’s supposed to be near a museum and a park but there’s a major highway right outside the window and I went for a walk this morning and didn’t see any directions that looked promising. Since I couldn’t find the museum, I decided to swim. San Jose is in the Central Valley, so it’s not super hot here. That means pool water is cold! There was a Dutch couple in the pool so I asked them how the water was. They told me it wasn’t bad once you were in. That was sort of true, but it was still cold. I did some laps then soaked in the hot tub before laying in a chair in the sun like a lizard trying to soak up as much warmth as possible before the cold sets in.

Yesterday morning, we did a paddle board/kayak trip. That was super fun. We saw some turtles, birds, and monkeys, but I spent most of the time talking to Moses, our guide. It was really good Spanish practice for me. Moses has family in Costa Rica, Panama, and indigenous background. He was really an interesting person to talk to.

We have 15 minutes before we leave so I need to finish packing and head downstairs. Hopefully it will be a smooth flight. I’m glad I got some exercise in the pool this morning since I’ll be sitting for the rest of the day.

Wednesday morning we took a jungle river tour as a last adventure of our trip. Ivan had set us up a return ride with Brian for 2 pm, so not a lot of time for fun stuff as we had to get the scooter gassed up and returned to the rental place and pack up.

Wednesday was probably the hottest and most humid day of our trip. We were looking forward to a hotel with working air conditioning. We also took advantage of the ride a/c as well!

Our tour was at 8 so once again we were on our own for breakfast, it sounds like the hotel would provide some sort of boxed breakfast but Emily walked over to the French bakery and got a few things.

The river tour was set up through the Punta Uva Dive Center, I recommend using their services if you are ever in the area

The tour was about two hours long, very easy trip up the river and back. No real current to speak of, the water was brackish. There was a small creek that was probably fresh water that was at the turn around spot and the rest was sea water that filled the channel probably at high tide.

Big photo drop there. We had a good tour, there are monkeys, a couple of sloths, a lot of turtles and few birds.

We did make it to San Jose and around noon we will head to the airport. It will be a long travel day after that as we won’t be in St Louis until about midnight. I am ready to return to the snow and cold, Emily is not looking forward to the snow and cold.

Neither of us found Caribe Town to be everything that TripAdvisor made it out to be. They were unable to cancel our last day there and refund us even with multiple days notice that we would be checking out early. Nor were they able to do a price adjustment for our promised room with a/c not having it halfway through the stay. They did offer two free days stay within a year and didn’t charge us for the 5 mocktails and one cocktail. We didn’t get two days of breakfast, just the fruit plate and juice. Coffee is at seven but nobody is cooking before 7:30. The place was clean and everyone was very friendly. The furniture was not very comfortable and worn. The pool was a big disappointment as it really wasn’t a swimming pool unless were really short since it was 3 feet deep and was mostly for sitting with stools snd a bench. The concrete in and around the pool was stained, probably needing resurfaced. Staff wasn’t as knowledgeable about things in the area since they arrived at the beginning of November. Overall not a bad place, things do occasionally break, but not someplace we would be very likely to return to.

The area in general was okay, Punta Uva was the highlight for us, easy and safe shore snorkeling. Sadly the best season for water activities in the area is August, September, October and November. All of those fall outside our normal travel times. Our guides from the dive shop indicated that Bocas del Toro, Panama was good all the time. It is another location that includes a second travel day to access, so it may or may not be an option in the future.

Not sure if there will be more posts about this trip or not. I may go through some of the pictures and edit them to show some of the animals better. Possibly update anything forgotten.

As always if you’re interested in coming along feel free to ask about when and where we are headed next and we can see what we can work out. If you just want to meet up for part of a trip we can help get you where you want to be. If you’re interested in somewhere we’ve been and need information please ask.

Don’t forget to sign up for the email delivery of all our new posts as they are posted!!

Be safe!

So, as it turns out, you really do pay traffic tickets at the bank here. It’s weird, but relatively straightforward. We got that taken care of fairly quickly this afternoon. It’s too bad that money isn’t being used to build two-lane bridges or sidewalks or something that people could use.

I spent all morning in Zoom meetings interviewing students who are on academic probation and want to come back a semester early. Some of the cases are relatively straightforward. Students who had been doing fine, then had a health crisis or something like that. Other students need to find a different path for their lives. I finished that around 1pm. My colleagues thought my Zoom background was fake. One of them wanted to know if I had birds because she could hear the birds chirping in the background. They all encouraged me not to come home once it became clear that my tropical background was real.

We have to leave for San Jose tomorrow afternoon, but we set up a paddle board/kayaking trip for tomorrow morning. I think that will be fun. We set it up with the dive shop, and they seem to be really good. We are going at 8am so hopefully we will get to see some animals.

Today started slow, Emily had zoom meetings this morning so I listened to a book and watched the A/C repair people figure out they need a new compressor. He said he could fix it but it would be cheaper to buy a new one. It has to come from San Jose. The other day I watched the handyman take the shroud off the internal unit, he disconnected the wiring and then took the whole shroud off, the repair man took the vent deflectors out, the filter, took the door to the manual controls off and then took the shroud off. He also put it all back together before he checked it. The handyman checked it then put it back together. The A/C guy must get paid per hour on the job.

This afternoon we went to the bank and paid my ticket for not wearing a helmet. $203.25. I will not be an international fugitive, no wanted posters will be at the airport when we try to leave the country.

We did a little shopping and then went to the beach a caught a few waves. I got a couple of tasty waves and some that were not. They were still coming in fast and hard. Probably some in the six to eight foot range. They really have some power. We didn’t stay out too long as we were losing ground trying to get out far enough to catch the waves, every step we took the next wave would knock us back a couple when they doubled up.

We spent some time in the pool after just to keep cool and in the water. It’s going to be a while before we get to be in a large body of water again. Hopefully it will be a good boating season. I still have to repaint the boat and get the carbs cleaned but I’m looking forward to some tubing behind it this summer.

Tomorrow we are going to be heading back to San Jose at two, before that though we are doing a float tour on the river to see what we can. We are using the company that I used for scuba they offer some trips.

I do want to give a shout out to Ivan our driver from our last trip, he set us up with transportation from San Jose and again going back. Our driver Brian from our trip here is coming back, I lost his number so I couldn’t set it up with him directly.

Be safe!

As you probably all read in Bill’s post, yesterday did not go our way. The AC is still broken and I doubt it will be fixed before we leave. We got stopped by the tourist police and now have to figure out how to pay a $200 ticket for not wearing helmets even though half the other people weren’t wearing helmets either. That was a total shakedown. The hook holding the hammock broke and dumped Bill on the floor – at least he had a pillow under his head. I also finished reading a book that I had enjoyed until it ended really badly with all the main characters ending up dead, unhappy, or unhappy and then dead.

On the bright side, I did go for a nice walk yesterday afternoon along the beach. There is a huge coastline here and there is a path along it. Some of the path is on the beach and some in the wooded area along the beach. You can walk to all the beaches here and I might have been able to walk to Panama, I’m not sure, I didn’t go that far. It was a very pretty walk, and I saw some monkeys. I also stopped to talk to an elderly fisherman. On my way past him the first time, he had caught a tiny fish. I asked him if that was for supper and he said yes. On my way back, he stopped to tell me he had two little fish so he had enough for supper and lunch the next day. I hope he had some beans and rice to go with it because they were tiny fish!

Today went much better. We did a Magic Chocolate Waterfall tour. We were close enough to the Panamanian border to see it. It was a tour to an indigenous community to learn how to make chocolate and use medicinal plants. It was a pretty good tour. There are a lot of medicinal plants here that we got to taste and smell. Our guide had is try quinine, which tastes terrible and a bunch of other plants that I don’t remember. If I get lost in the jungle, I’ll probably still die but at least I’ll die knowing that there were plants that might have saved me. One of the elders of the community also showed us how to make natural fingernail polish and lipstick, which we got to try, and we made some chocolate.

Chocolate is surprisingly easy to make. The beans have to be fermented, then dried, then roasted, rough ground with a stone, then ground to a paste in a meat grinder. The newly ground chocolate is bitter but if you add a little sugar and milk it’s magically transformed. Our guide made us fire-roasted bananas with homemade chocolate and some chocolate milk. I bought three balls of 100% dark chocolate to bring home.

We were on the tour with a Swiss family and a French couple. The Swiss family had two kids, a boy who was probably 12 and a girl who was around 10. Both of them had fun with the interactive parts of the trip and their mom translated everything from English to German. The French couple were interesting to talk to. He was a travel agent who organizes trips in Scandinavia and she is a language teacher, French and English.

After the chocolate tour, we went to swim at a waterfall. The water was cold but it was fun and really pretty. It started to rain while we were there but we were already in the water so it didn’t matter that much. We got fantastic pineapples and coconuts with straws so we could drink the coconut water when the swim was over.

This afternoon, we tried to take our boards to the beach but the water was too rough and red flags were up. It didn’t seem that bad to me, but no one else was in the water, which I took as a bad sign. About 1 person drowns here each month, and I decided to try to live another day, so we went to our crappy pool instead. Our hotel is okay, but not one I’d be enthusiastic about coming back to. There are lots of ways they could make it more comfortable.

Tomorrow will be our last full day here. We are going back to San Jose a day early because it’s a long drive and we don’t want to miss our flight. I’m going to look for a hotel with a good pool. I have a Zoom meeting all morning. Work keeps sending me messages reminding me that I have to go back to my real life soon. People have booked next week with meetings and apparently we are getting a blizzard tomorrow in Iowa. We have to figure out how to pay this stupid traffic ticket tomorrow. The officer who stopped us told me I could pay it at the bank, but that sounds sketchy and I’m skeptical about whether that works. Hopefully we can make it to the beach or find something fun to do. I want a new tea cup, so I’ll look for one of those when we go to the bank.

So we are winding down here, the ocean has taken an ugly turn. Red flags as far as the eye can see. Or at least all the beaches we went past that had flags.

Emily did want to try this afternoon just down the way from us but she opted to not be a statistic. We came back and hung out in the cold small pool at the hotel. I am surprised at the design of the pool. It has a large amount of seating even though there is not a large amount of guest space in general. It has a “swim up” bar seating that we’ve seen at the larger hotels where it is mostly partying and all inclusive. Those pools are not what I would recommend swimming in, this one though is not used a lot so I’m hoping that the users do not use it as a lavatory as well.

The big deal for today was going to the Indigenous area and visiting a homestead where they make chocolate for the tourists. We got a brief education on the Bribri culture and a tour of the property followed by a chocolate making experience. We got to see how it was dried, roasted and ground into paste. Per the usual at multiple steps the chocolate was made available for everyone to stick their hands in and get a taste. After our guide made a hot drink with the chocolate. He said it is best to drink with just water but he added sugar and milk for some and just sugar for others. I have heard while here a few times that straight cacao will repel mosquitos.

After the tour and communal chocolate drink we got to go swim at another waterfall. I do have to say the La leona waterfall was a better hike. This was mostly rudimentary stairs taking you down to the river behind some guys house.

River water is cold but it was a good waterfall and I enjoyed the time there. There were a number of other people there. We were told that all the rivers are down at this time. There was a guy who jumped from the cliff into the pool below but he only did it once. As I was considering it is when I was informed that the water was down. Maybe if we come this way again.

As for coming this way again, that remains to be seen. There are a few nice things about this area, the snorkeling at Punta Uva and for me shore diving, and it is about an hour from Bocas del Toro Panama. I would like to visit there, we had planned on it when covid had hit and canceled our trip there. We could go though Panama to get there and that may be the best way, but I am thinking it was going to be a very long ride. Getting here during the day wasn’t too bad as far as I am concerned. It would be another hour on that and it would mean the loss of two days off our fun times. We will have to research it.

Neither of us feel very strongly about staying at Caribe Town again. Someplace in Punta Uva would be a better choice. The hotel in general is nice enough. The furniture isn’t the most comfortable, the chairs in the sitting area are not that comfortable. The espresso machine only does espresso, a coffee maker or even a electric kettle would be a better option. Our room has experienced some issues, the A/C stopped working, the temperature hasn’t been too bad with the extra fan, but the air is moist. Our suits and towels don’t dry hanging up inside or out. This is not optimal. There is nothing to set luggage on in the room to make it easy to access suitcases and off the floor. They had just painted and there is a tv mount on the wall that I have used to hang shirts and swimsuits since there is not tv. We don’t usually watch tv but occasionally we will if the weather is bad or we need an easy day, I will put on a movie. I am unclear is there had been a small refrigerator in our room that went bad or if the owners were just going to put one in, they are in Panama picking one up according to the word around the bar. That will be a nice addition.

Tico time is not one of my favorite things about Costa Rica, this morning it was easy and faster to have peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast so we could make our ride. They have coffee on at 7 but you can’t get breakfast at the hotel until they are ready and that is sometimes after 7:30. Then you have cook time and we had been scheduled to go at 7:45. We also have to clean up after and brush our teeth before going so, pb&j it was. Restaurants here though in general I think cook meals one table at a time before they start the next order. It takes forever to get your bill to pay it. That is a culture thing that is nice for those who want slow as molasses in winter time, not so much for anyone who has a schedule to follow.

Be safe!

Not much excitement went on today. We took a ride over to Puerto Viejo to get a picture of the sign about crocodiles. On the way there we had a run in with the law. Breaking the law… I was given a ticket for not wearing a helmet while driving the scooter. It was an interesting experience, they had to look over my passport, could have went badly I suppose if I hadn’t had my passport. Technically you’re supposed to have it when traveling around. Normally we do not carry them but we had brought the little backpack that locks. We had worn our helmets for a while but then we opted out as it seems half the people do and half do not. The scooter guy told us the regular police don’t usually care and the tourists police do. We hit a tourist police check point, they also didn’t seem to care about some of the riders that went by while we were being talked to. If I don’t pay the ticket they charge it to the scooter company. We will pay it, I’m sure the scooter company will take it from the deposit.

This afternoon I was listening to a book and relaxing in the hammock and the hook broke after I had been in the hammock for quite a while.

Our air conditioner is still nonfunctional. They had it going but the guy who fixed it stuck a screwdriver in and shorted it out, he said that when it warmed up it was too much of a draw on the 20 amp fuse that should be a 30 amp. I think he should’ve left it taken apart and running and kept whatever he was moving around with his screwdriver around from touching.

Sometimes you have issues while traveling, hopefully things will improve with the air conditioning tomorrow, they have a technician coming. Most things are just an inconvenience and don’t really affect how good of a trip you have, you just have to roll with things and enjoy the good things.

Tomorrow we’re going on a tour, it’s to an indigenous community for how the live and make chocolate. There will be a side waterfall swim as well.

Be safe!

This morning we went to breakfast and while we were eating our Air Conditioner stopped working. They are thinking there is a short somewhere. There was a guy that came and did some work at the box and they got it to work again then there was a loud pop from what I was told.

They will have to continue working on it tomorrow, tonight we have an extra fan they use for the exercise area. It’s not been super hot while we have been here, a little humid at times and it does warm up when the sun is out. Hopefully it stays that way.

We went snorkeling again this morning and I stopped to borrow some flippers, I like flippers they help move me though the water. Trying to swim with my arms while holding the camera isn’t the fastest. while there Francisco said he was taking someone out at 2pm and I was able to go. He gave a deal on the dive and didn’t charge me for the flippers.

The water quality wasn’t as good as yesterday.

Not much else went on today. Tomorrow we will have to see what the water conditions are. The swell is coming and things are already cloudy so we may have to start doing some of the land based activities.

Be safe!

We have had two really awesome days of snorkeling, but that doesn’t give me a lot to write about. I don’t take a camera when I snorkel because it’s too much trouble but I did pull some good pictures off the internet so you can see what I’m talking about. Punts Uva is going to be one of my favorite snorkeling locations. The water is safe, the visibility is good and the reef is big, interesting and easy to swim to. I can also go alone so there are no rules and no one to set a time limit on me except for Bill who is in charge of our scooter unless I want to walk a couple miles back to the hotel. I’ve been snorkeling while Bill dives, and it’s super fun. Yesterday, I saw a turtle, a huge sting ray, a small reef shark and a sea snake. The stingray I posted above is a relatively small one. We’ve seen a couple of them. The big one was in relatively shallow water so I was able to swim down and sit on the ocean floor in front of it.

Reef Shark

Green sea turtle

Today, I think I saw the same little sea turtle – it’s not very big so I suspect it’s the same one. It probably lives in the area where I was snorkeling. It seemed less worried about me today and I floated peacefully beside it for a while. As long as I wasn’t moving much, it watched me but didn’t seem too worried. I also saw a peacock flounder, which was really pretty. They have yellow and blue circles so I thought it might be mimicking a blue-ringed octopus. Those are some of the most toxic animals in the world, but apparently they only live in the Pacific, so I guess the little flounder had rings for a different reason. It’s weirdly similar to the octopus though.

Peacock flounder – they are weird little creatures with eyes offset to one side.

I’ve seen a bunch of these sea centipedes. They come in different colors.

Most of the sea urchins here are dark purple and about the size of a ping pong ball, but today I saw a blue one that was baseball sized.

I’ve also seen some interesting little jellyfish. Most of them are also about the size of a ping pong ball. They are mostly clear but some have pink or blue trim or pink frills inside. It’s really surprising how colorful everything is. We’ve seen lots of parrot fish, blue tang and a bunch of other colorful fish. The coral also come in all kinds of different shapes and colors. Brain corals are the most common but they come in brown, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

Brain coral

I have been taking advantage of the French bakery every day. They have really good chocolate eclairs. Last night I had a chocolate mousse with passion fruit filling. It was a weird combination but pretty good. They make good macaroons too. We’ve met interesting people. Bill dived today with a German guy and yesterday with a French diver. I’ve gotten quite a bit of French practice here.

Our air conditioner quit this morning. It’s not that hot here at night but it’s humid. The hotel gave us an extra fan so it should be okay. The repair guy is supposed to come back tomorrow and try to fix it.

My only real complaint with this side of Costa Rica is that everything is crazy expensive and the food is not very good. Every meal, even just pizza, costs between $40 and $70. The pizza we had yesterday was greasy. I had a veggie I burger today that I couldn’t eat. There aren’t a lot of things that I can’t eat, but this was pretty bad. We had really good Indian food and some pretty good jerk chicken from a Jamaican guy with a food cart. The French bakery has good pastries, but otherwise, the food situation is a little bleak. No place is perfect.