A mini post while I wait. Costa Rican money is neat. 1,000 colones is about $2. But they say “1 mil”, which sounds like 1 million, which sounds like a lot.
The coins are boring, every single one looks the same but different sizes.
My favorite bill is the 5 mil, because it’s yellow. Or the green 10 because it has a sweet photo of a sloth.
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We went out and I went into the water with our toughie camera. (not my new scuba housing, though). Then back here a bit, then out for dinner at a place called De Paso. The mango smoothies and rosemary potatoes were really good, the pork and the snapper were not at all. We left filled, but disappointed with the meals.
I love my water camera!
We woke up around 10am and made breakfast and tea and coffee, as is our tradition when we can on vacation. Our plan was to head to the Sloth Sanctuary today, and then see what the rest of the day held. It’s about a 20 minute drive from Puerto Viejo and we left with 30 minutes to spare.
Driving through PV is a pain. The road is narrow, there are potholes everywhere, pedestrians will walk off what random sidewalks there are. Oncoming traffic is brutal, cyclists are coming at you and behind you, and sometimes when cars will try to pass you when they think you don’t know how much space you actually have. It takes all your attention to keep it together. No bad stories yet, just relating an experience. 🙂
We picked up 2 hitchhiking tourists on our way, a couple, one from Poland and the other from Australia. They were standing just outside one entrance to the Cahuita national park and wanted a lift 5km up the road to the next entrance. They almost came to the Sanctuary with us, but decided to do that later in the day still. We saw them as we left, which was fun.
We barely made the 11am tour, paid our $25USD each and off we went. We both decided that this tour was well worth the money. There can be some sketchy animal zoos and sketchy handlers, but this place looked and seemed really on the up and up. Our tour guide was super knowledgeable and friendly, and we saw tons of space for rehabiliated sloths to climb and learn to be slothlike in the forest again. Here are some photos!
This sloth, named Toyota because he’s Toyota Tough, has only 1 arm. Miranda and I had seen a documentary about this a few months ago, and apparently he lost his arm after being electrocuted by a power line. An electrician found him badly wounded and the sanctuary had to take his arm off and nurse him back to health. He looks pretty happy to be alive, and has survived 5 years with them.
Fun sloth facts: they don’t drink water, they only get liquid through eating plants. They only go down to the ground once a week to take a poop and urinate – once a week, only. They eat every day though, and it takes a month for the food to be digested – 1 week per chamber of their stomachs. They aren’t lazy, they’re just super efficient. They can move super quickly if they have to, they just don’t have to right now.
This is a baby sloth in a cage. They can rehabilitate adults, but they haven’t figured out how to help babies. Baby sloths don’t learn any of the skills they need to survive in the wild, as they need a year with their mothers to learn it all, and if they are abandoned or orphaned they can’t survive on their own.
After looking at sloths for an hour, we had a little boat tour down a river that had been cut off from it’s source.
A baby alligator.
There were lots of monkeys climbing around, and I managed to use my 100-300mm lens to get some good photos of them in the trees.
Wild bananas.
This isn’t a road, it’s the river with a ton of little leaves in it.
Unedited, the shadows just worked with the green leaves and orange leaves.
Miranda is such a kidder.
We had lunch at one of the local bars in PV, some pasta, some fajitas and more Imperial and then decided to go back to the place to rest. It’s super hot and super humid and we didn’t sleep great. We ended up spending enough time here that I managed to get my photos edited (I did crop down and lighten the monkeys, they were all in shadows…) and uploaded and write this.
I’d hoped to go snorkeling, but the waves are so huge that there’ll be nothing to see around the silt. I’d like to go swimming anyway, but we’ll see how the energy levels manage for the evening. The sun will be going down really soon, so we may have to take a quick dip before we leave PV tomorrow, on our way to La Fortuna.
Lots more photos today! We started at 8:30am with a buffet breakfast in the hotel. Standard hotel fare, but it was quick and convenient and at 10am our car rental place arrived to pick us up and drive us to our chariot for the next 2 weeks.
Miranda had done a ton of research on various car rental places and decided on Vamos, a decision which turned out wonderful so far. These guys were super friendly, and also the best deal in the area – because they don’t use brand new cars. Our RAV4 has a good number of scratches and a few dings, but whatever, we’re going to be driving it through some strange places anyway, so whatever!
Here’s a few photos along the drive to Puerto Viejo.
The drive was around 5 hours long, but it didn’t feel that long for some reason. There was a lot to see while driving, which is part of why I like doing it.
We arrived in Puerto Viejo and quickly found our accomodations for the next couple days. This town is neat – the guidebook says that it’s only just growing out of it’s rasta/hippie roots, and it shows. Lots of people walking the streets, lots of people on the beaches swimming, and a ton of good food to eat!
We were pretty tired after the drive, so we wandered and got some groceries and planned tomorrow and fought with WordPress about uploading the photos that Miranda took while I was driving. 😛
The SIM cards and data plans were $18 each, from yesterday. It was something like a $1USD a day for some megabytes per day, or $18 for the month for 4gb, so we spent the extra dollar not to care. Service isn’t perfect – ie, nobody puts up a cell tower in the middle of nowhere, but it’s good in towns and we’re using it lots for the maps and the translation.
I don’t have enough battery life to really do this justice…
We woke up at 5:30 for an 8:30 flight. Nexus pass lets you sleep in a bit, as going through both security and American customs only took 15 minutes total with it. Big line up otherwise.
Our flight from Vancouver to Phoenix was wickedly late taking off as there was big weather problems in Phoenix that was slowing down all arrivals there so we had to wait for our turn, 3 hours before it would be a problem. Our problem – we only had an hour and 15 minutes of layover in Phoenix, so any delay was brown-trousers time! We left Vancouver an hour and 15 minutes late…
So naturally we had a few moments of panic on the flight. We looked up alternative ways to finish our trip to CR, but in the end had to leave it to “we’ll see what they have when we get there”.
We got out of our plane at 1:30pm, with our next flight literally pulling away from the gate at 1:30. We ran through the Phoenix airport, hopeful that we would make it, even if our luggage didn’t. Got to the service desk and were told that the flight was delayed because of a “crew issue”. No explanation of what that meant, but the gossip later on was that a flight attendant didn’t have a passport and the flight needed 3. Whoops.
Easy flight to San Jose, we met a really friendly guy and had a ton of space – Miranda had a nap in the entire row behind me. I started re-watching Deep Space 9, because I’ve heard it gets good. The pilot is pretty damn cool, but the first 2 episodes after it start what I think is a slow decline into mediocrity. I’m patient.
Landed in San Jose, grabbed our bags and bought some SIM cards. The mobile kiosk was nestled amongst such other important things as baggage complaints, baggage claim and currency exchange. Lets you know how important some people think mobile phones are. I tend to agree. We spent dinner Google Translating random things we thought of.
We were going to a decently rated restaurant in a nearby casino, but decided to turn back when Miranda saw the bouncers had guns. Not our favourite, as Canadians. I only saw a closed door with some burly looking dudes in front of it and thought I’d rather not go somewhere that looks as unfriendly as that.
Beer and waffles for dinner!! The local beer is called Imperial, and it’s an even less offensive version of Corona. I’ll probably have a few more over the next couple weeks, but I’ve also heard that CR has a growing craft beer industry, which I’m excited to discover.
It’s super windy, and we turned the AC on in our room before we left so it’s a little cold here. 😛 Room is nice, it’s a Holiday Inn, so looks like a Holiday Inn. Miranda says she wanted to go to Costa Rica, and doesn’t know where we are now. I’m sure it’ll be nice tomorrow. 🙂
Tomorrow at 10am our car is delivered and we start trying to navigate our way to the Caribbean coast! YES!
I’m going to write tonight, but have a photo on my phone and my tablet is charging so, here’s dinner!
Cerveza y gofres para cena!
We went to Denny’s after noting that the guards outside the casino/sports bar had guns.
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