Tilaran,
Costa Rica
Monday, March 24, 2008
We left our Aussie friends and got a shuttle back from Playa Matilde and had a relatively easy journey from San Juan del Suir, direct to the border with some other tourists we met who were travelling the same route, we went in a minibus, its a bit more expensive than the chicken buses but saves so much time and meant we didnt have to go via Rivas. The Costa Rican border was an absolute nightmare, we arrived about midday and it seems no-one really cares what you do there is no-one pointing people towards desks or offices and little boys wavce entrance forms at you asking for a donation, again we have to pay some sort of admin fee of a couple of dollars and with these Canadians we met, eventually worked out the procedure, after haviong walked across to the Costa Rican side, we were told we had to go back to get an exit stamp from Nicaragua, we were so hot and sweaty, was pretty horrible. We got a bus in the end to Liberia and then as we were hoping caught the last bus of the day to Tilaran, a small town in the mountains not too far from Monteverde. The drive was really different and the Costa Rican highlands are amazing, it looks like moorland for the most part and was sparsely populated by a few farms. We got there about 8 and it was a wierd little place, got some dinner and found out that the bus we wanted to Monterverde either lñeft at 4am or midday. So we got up at 3am in this, noticeably colder, little mountain town and sat woth a load of stray dogs in an empty bus stop till the bus arrived halñf an hour late. We were the only people on it and couldnt sleep because of the blairing Christina Aguilera and wierd spanish covers of Leanne Rhymes. Strangely the bus filled up really fast picking up people off the roadside about every 20 metres, we got to Santa Elena about 6am which was rubbish because we couldnt get in to any hostels and nowhere was open.
We got a hostel later on and went to check out the cloudforest with this English bloke we met, Santa Elena was really touristy and full of people on holidays, americans and central americans, particulcarloy families on a weeks spring holiday and stuff, we hadnt really seen this anywhere else but Costa Rica is fgar more accepted as a holiday destination i think than most central american countries, we spoke to one american couple who couldnt believe we had enjoyed Guatemala and Nicaragua so much despite how 'dangerous and poor' it is. These people were all a bit annoying but the cloudforest national reserve was actually really quiet, its so wet and is absolutely submeregd in clouds, we saw some cool birds including hummingbirds and some amazing plants, 25% of the cloudforests mass in moss and lichen and apparently these many species are some of the most impressive in the world, but we weren´t really knowledgable enough to appreciate them, just looked like very hairy trees. We did the canopy tour on a load of foot bridges built over and through the forest which was very im,pressive and the next day also did a zip wire thing across massive valleys in the forest and through the trees, that was awesome, the longest was 750m. Costa Rica is much more expensive than the rest of Central America.
