Monteverde and Santa Elena
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2006
1
35
110
Trip End
Ongoing
Santa Elena ***,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Well Santa Elena and the famous National Park Monteverde was a bit of a disappointment really. We had a massively bone crunching journey from La Fortuna over to Santa Elena so it would want to have been wonderful to be truly worth it. It`s gas, Costa Rica is really modern and cosmopolitan in so many ways but it still has the dusty, unpaved roads in many parts...that just KILL the neck and shoulder blades! Anyway, we settled the nearest town to the park and went looking for tours.
There are more tour agencies in this place than people but we ended up booking with the nice folks in the hostel. One mistake, one classic. Monteverde Park is famous for its cloud forests and amazingly diverse animal membership. There wasn`t much of a cloud forest considering it was no longer the rainy season but the animal life was even more limited. Collins and I made the fateful faux pas of booking a tour over suspension bridges in order to guarantee a great session of wildlife spotting..BIG mistake! The argument put forward by the company is that you see more wildlife than on the ground..So amid promises of monkeys, quetzales and maybe even the odd Jaguar, we set off! I was expecting a series of quaint, wooden bridges to link us up on an unmarked trail. Instead, we found metal bridges high up above the forests that linked stone wedged pathways. There were technically ten bridges to pass over.
the "suspension" bridges in touch with nature
For the first four, we could hear the roaring sound of trucks and the gentle hum of a crane..the last four, we could hear the shrill screams of young and old who were trying out the zip-lining. The chances of seeing animals were anorexic slim to none. We left disgusted after doling out 15 USd each which is a lot of money in Central America.That afternoon, I decided to take another chance and dole out 30 USd (student`s price..oh yeah!!!!) to do some of my very own zip-lining. For those of you who don`t know, zip-lining is basically just sliding along one nylon (I think) line with your legs hanging down in the open air.. You lean back, holding onto the ropes holding you up with your weak hand and holding onto the zipline with your strong hand. you are held up by the pulley and you go whizzing through the forest...absolutely crap description sorry. Try googleing it! Did this with a company that had 16 zip-lines. They also did a spot of rappelling with us and a Tarzan swing. It was a real adrenaline buster and well worth the mulah. Collins missed out but I was glad cos I couldn`t have taken the slagging. I was positively crap. Couldn`t manage the breaks and went crashing into a tree trunk at one stage. I was the groups guinea pig but in one way, it was good cos you had the element of surprise every time..esp for the Tarzan swing where you had to step off a platform and they just drop you basically..very cool
Costa Rica is almost like going home for us at the moment. Collins and I employ the policy of staying in the cheapest accommodation we can find. We follow this policy almost without exception. Consequentially, we have been staying in absolute dumps over the last few weeks. We`re still following this policy in Costa Rica. It`s naturally more expensive but their cheapest options are clean, have showers and amazingly enough, we have a roof on our bedroom! Happy Days!
While descending from Guatamala, we have gradually been seeing more Western looking and dressed peeps. Ticos (Costa Ricans) are the essence of Westernhood. They just look Spanish really. The men are actually really good looking, the women are pretty too although many of them are a little overweight. I like the people so far. Even though they see loadsa tourists every day, they still maintain a friendly attitude which is admirable.
The countryside we`ve seen so far is surprisingly very similar to Ireland. Itīll probably be very different when we reach the Pacific (which is our destination in the morn) and the Carribean
