San Jose (1) July 2008

We were then in San Jose (Capital of Costa Rica) for a few days. Along the highway from the airport to the hostel there were a few people on crutches hobbling along the middle of the road! The hostel itself was really nice – free internet access, a restaurant, and clean, comfortable rooms! In the centre of town there were painted fibreglass cows everywhere! My favourite two were a pole dancing cow! and one with animals of Costa Rica painted on. We spent a day looking around the centre, mainly shopping. We went to the National Theatre on a tour. It was created when Costa Rica was particularly well off due to a boom in banana and coffee sales. We saw the most famous painting of Costa Rica done by an Italian, which appeared on one of their monetary notes. It isn’t a particularly accurate image of Costa Rica as it has a man carrying a whole bunch of bananas which isn’t physically possible, and both coffee and banana plantations are portrayed as beside the ocean, when they are actually away from the coast. We took a 12 hour tour visiting 4 different locations on our final day before we joined Raleigh. Firstly we were taken to a coffee plantation for a tour and then breakfast. We were served their national dish – basically a rice and beans mix – which was delicious. Then we were taken up Volcano Poas. It was pretty cool; you could see the layers at the side of the crater from each eruption, plus the sulphurous pool in the middle of the crater. The La Paz waterfalls were pretty cool too! There was a butterfly garden, hummingbird centre and a bird sanctuary that was full of really beautiful animals! Hummingbirds are pretty cool – they can fly in all directions but cannot stand still! We had lunch there, which was a buffet full of pineapples, salad… We then continued on a boat trip along the Sarapiqui River. Boats go up along this river to Nicaragua carrying food deliveries. We saw lots of wildlife – howler monkeys, a snake duck, a crocodile, an iguana, a kingfisher… Shortly after seeing the crocodile we saw some local kids playing in an inflatable dingy further down the river!! We spent our last night in our hostel’s sister hostel, as they’d overbooked. There were paintings all over the walls of Costa Rican Jungle, which was cool, although there was a dead cockroach in our room, which wasn’t so cool!