N 10.50229
W 84.69499

Tile Floors/homes
I haven't mentioned this in the earlier entries but all of the homes here are covered in slick tile floors from the inside spilling out onto the porch. It's easy to wash, cool to walk on and blends the outdoor porches in to the inside of the buildings seamlessly. Even some of the more run down houses seem to have shiny, clean looking tile floors.

River Tour



The river tour was everything we expected. We saw plenty of wildlife, I got lots of pictures and gave my camera a good workout. Filled my 2gb card plus another 512mb which I moved to shooting full res jpg instead of RAW.



The birds were the easiest to photograph, at least when they were holding still, though I got some passable shots of the monkeys and the posterior of a sloth.


The bats were one of the more interesting finds, they slept in small troupes along the underside of some of the trees along the water. We pulled right up to them and could have touched them. I had the long lens on and couldn't switch fast enough so stuck with that and got these shots which were decent enough.



Boat
Our boat was one of the pontoon "Floating porch" style boats that are common on US rivers, outfitted with a canopy and plenty of seating.

Guide
Our guide was very knowledgeable and between him and the boat captain found everything on the list of animals they said we were likely to see. He seemed to know a fair bit about the wildlife and was more than just a guide pointing out scenery and animals. He stopped on several occasions to attempt to retrieve trash from the river.

Pineapples
There were massive pineapple farms growing on the way to the river tours and harvesting was in progress, it takes about 18 months from planting to the first pineapple and then another 8 months and a second one is grown, then the plants need to be ripped out and replanted.

Teak wood
Teak wood is farmed around here and a few farms grow it to harvest for furniture.

Arcade
Before I could lift my camera it was gone but I saw the side of a building that at first looked like some sort of lower half of a dragon or lizard painted on the side of the building. As we approached it quickly turned out to be the alien from the Alien movies, as well as a number of other game and movie characters painted on the side of what looked like a video arcade or game shop of some sort.

Food provided
Our river tour provided lunch which was a typical regional dish chicken with rice. A mix of yellow rice, chicken, carrot and beans it was very tasty and the chicken was excellent and tender. Some sort of tropical juice mix was served with the meal, also quite good.

Restaraunts:
All of the restaurants we've visited in town have had bi-lingual menus and a fair mix of local and international fares, lots of steak is on the menu as well as chicken, shrimp and fish.

Hotel Steakhouse
The first night we didn't brave going into town for food and instead dined at the hotel steak house side of the restaurant. The meat was rather thickly cut, the sides were bland and not particularly hot when served though the meat grade was okay. Fried plantains were served with most meals and were bland and fibrous, had I not tried one at Nenes, I would have written off plantains as uninteresting and not tried them again.

Don Rufino/Rufino's
One of the more upscale looking places in town, they feel more like a place you would find back home and was a rather comfortable first venture into town for food. My tilapia was excellent as was Jon's mixed grill. They had a good bar and the staff spoke enough english to get through the meal easily.

La Choza De Laurelle
All of the places in town are open air but with a much higher ceiling, this place felt more open to the town and was a bit more of a dive, though the food was decent. Seating was at picnic tables and I think they would have had a better rating if they hadn't run out of their signature roasted chicken. My pepper steak was quite good though Ryan's buffalo steak was a bit tough.

Resturante Los Nenes
Probably the best of the three we visited in town. All of the places were either recommended by the hotel or one of our tour guides. This one took a loop around the block before we braved driving down the dark alley which the sign pointed us down. We found the little restaurant tucked away down an unlit alley beckoned on by a bright Coca Cola sign with the restaurant's name on it. Everything we had here was excellent from my father's shrimp to my garlic chicken and Ryan's steak. We tried the tres leches cake for dessert which seems to be a popular dish with the large dairy "Dos pinas" (I think the spelling is right, "The Pines" in english) that is around here. The chicken is completely different from what you would expect in the US, tender and juicy, I suspect its closer to the free range organic stuff you would find in Whole Foods market.

It's been pouring since last night. We have the river boat tour today and hopefully finishing up with a massage at the spa. More on that later as we have to get an early breakfast and get down to the tour bus.

1/6/08
N 10.50229
W 84.69499


Rain
The rain here is interesting, for the past few days we had occasional showers that would go from a drizzle to a complete downpour and back to clear in the course of about 10 minutes. It looks like there must be much bigger storms in the rainy season since everywhere there are drainage ditches that are several feet deep carved into the paths around the resort and troughs big enough to swallow cars on the town streets. We got into a pretty heavy downpour during the first part of the horseback ride and my camera got a good soaking before I could get it covered but its still working perfectly fine, I seem to recall something about the e300 being water resistant but I'm not sure, I'm willing to take the risk though for some of the photos I'm taking back with me.

La Fortuna
The town of La Fortuna is just down the street from our resort, we went in for dinner last night and had some decent food, much better than the resort steak house which was a slab of reasonably good meat but sliced too thick and crudely grilled. I had Tilapia with a thin cheese and avocado sauce which was quite tasty. Dogs seem to be wandering around everywhere in populated areas, they seem to find a comfy place on a street corner or by a building and take a nap and seem to be quite content. Many of the local establishments advertise "Imperial" which seems to be the local budweiser/miller equivalent of beer, its not half bad if a bit bland compared to homebrew/microbrew.

Insects
I expected there to be more problems with insects up here in the rainforest area but so far we've only seen one mosquito. I've made sure to have insect repellant on whenever we've gone into the forest but around the buildings there are barely any apart from the occasional fly or spider.

Spelunking
Today we did the Venado caves tour. I didn't bring my camera and I was correct to leave it behind, without a water tight box it wouldn't have survived the journey anyway. The tour had a photographer along for part of the tour though so I have pictures from inside. Its great that high quality digital cameras are so readily available so you can go do a tour and walk away with a CD burned of your adventures. These pictures do not do a very good job of relaying the experience though, a simple flash makes the caves look illuminated but in fact they were very dark. We were issued halogen head lamps which helped navigate and my Dexlight flashlight performed very well as supplemental lighting and in high power mode was the brightest light on the trip. In low power mode it gave a nice strobe effect on some of the waterfalls and worked perfectly being submerged during some of the deeper sections. About half way in there was a large structure of fossilized coral, in the middle of inland costa rica. There were many narrow passages, a couple challenging climbs and one passage that we got to float through on our bellies since there was no other way to squeeze through. The water was very warm and comfortable and the workout from the climbing kept us warm and comfy despite being soaked to the neck. Wildlife included cave crickets which looked like huge spiders, actual physical huge spiders, a large number of bats and one crab that was finishing a meal that seemed to be the lower jaw from a deceased bat. Jon is finding he has a number of phobias through all of these activities and claustrophobia seems to be one of them after some of the squeezes. The climbs could have been dangerous if not taken carefully as they were rather high and no climbing gear was used.

Tree Fences
On the ride out to the caves, our guide explained that the fence posts we see everywhere are lopped off trees that are simply stuck into the ground and sprout leaves and roots, basically making living fence posts that barbed wire is strung between to make the multifarious cattle pastures.


Rainforest preservation through tourism
Tourism seems to be expanding quite well in this area though there seems to be a large number of the cattle pastures that people are saying are destroying the rainforests. I think the best solution to the problem is to make tourism so popular that the rainforest as a destination is worth more than using the land for grazing. So the best way to save the rainforest is to visit it and bring your tourist spending money out here. There are a number of construction projects going on, some seeming to have stalled, others moving along quite well.

1/5/08
1/4/08
N 10.50229
W 84.69499

Canopy tour



We went on the canopy tour today, basically a series of zip lines going from tree to tree up in the jungle. I got a few pictures with Ryan's point and shoot but overall it was a difficult photography venue since I needed both hands when on the lines and there wasn't much time on the platforms between runs. On the way up we saw a rather thick trail of leaf cutter ants but didn't have time to get any pictures. I highly recommend the zip line canopy tours for anyone that visits here. One of the runs ran along just above the river, I think some of the runs got up to at least 40mph before curving back up to slow down.

Horseback riding




I've never ridden a horse which surprises even me given that I grew up in western Mass which is quite rural. This is definitely something I want to do again though I think I need to take a break for my ass to recover, it's quite sore and bruised this evening, even after a soak in the mineral springs. I think its going to be worse tomorrow. I wish I had a better way of carrying my camera since it was a great chance to snap some pictures, the camera was bounced around quite heavily, especially when we kicked into a gallop. I need to get my legs in better shape though, it was a bit difficult holding on for the gallop. I switched horses at the top of our ride I think because Peka and Dar looked very similar to each other, I had Peka on the way up and Dar on the way down, I prefer whatever saddle Peka had versus Dar's, the handle was a bit more slender and taller and the stirrup length seemed to fit me better. I suspect when I ride in the US next time I'll probably kick a little and say "Vamos!" and the horse is just going to come to a grinding halt, snort and turn around and look at me funny.

The resort gave us all wristbands like we're at a giant bar or club, the nice plastic ones that wont fall apart in the hottub but its still an amusing note.