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Friday, July 13, 2012

San Jose to Monteverde!

Wow, it's been a while since I've written. So much has happened in the last few days! Here's a long post about what I've been doing since I last wrote. I'm hoping these blogs will inspire me to go travel again sometime when I think I don't have time to do it. The recent days have been better partly because I'm more used to traveling on my own now. The city shock wore off a bit and now I'm in beautiful Monteverde.

Grab a cup of coffee if you plan on reading this one:

I ended my last post sitting in Pangea hostel in San Jose. That was probably around 10pm and after that I went to bed. The only problem was that there were hundreds of people in this hostel and the bar blasting music was right outside my window. My room had all girls in it who tried to go to sleep pretty early too. I don't know if I actually got to sleep though until after midnight since that was when the music stopped. Pangea Hostel was definitely an experience and not one that I would prefer to do again. Other than the noise, it's was okay though. They had great showers though!


I woke up the next morning semi-rested with another whole day in San Jose. Because I didn't really want to stay in that hostel again, I got up early and walked all the way across town in search of Casa Ridgeway, run by the Society of Friends office in San Jose. With my trusty Lonely Planet map, I found the hostel all the way across town on a cute, little one-way street. I went inside to ask if I could see a room (learned that's important!) and if there was space. It was probably a little odd to show up at 8:30am and barge in on the guests eating breakfast, but the staff showed me their dorm and I told them I would come back with my stuff.


On the walk back to Pangea, I decided that Casa Ridgeway wasn't nice enough to move for just one night and that I would just deal with Pangea again. Once I got back to Pangea, I went back to my room to figure out what I was doing for the day. First though, I had to call the IU Bursar and spent 20 minutes on the phone with them asking why I had such a big bill on my account. I got that figured out, but in the meantime, everyone else had decided they wanted to stay at Pangea and the hostel was full when I went downstairs to pay for the second night. This wasn't part of my plan, but Pangea wanted to give me two options: I could either stay in the TV room pull out couch or the movie theater lounge for $10. Those were not even options to me since there was no way I wasn't actually staying in a room so I decided Casa Ridgeway would have to do. Back upstairs I went to pack my bags and get out of Pangea.

Back on the street outside of Pangea, I had to hail another taxi with no idea how I was going to explain where I needed to go. The taxi driver was super nice though and he ended up calling the hostel and getting directions from them. He also happily gave me a receipt, which has been difficult throughout this trip. I got to Casa Ridgeway and checked in and immediately was glad I changed hostels. Pangea really wasn't my type of place anyway.

Once I was settled in at Casa Ridgeway, I headed back to downtown to go to the Museo de Oro. This is a museum that had a lot of Pre-Columbian artifacts and especially gold found in the tombs. It was underground at the Plaza de Cultura. Lonely Planet says this plaza is one of the safest in the city because of the underground museum.

Let's see...after the Museo de Oro, I went back to the hostel and decided I was going to go to Monteverde. I had been debating about it and couldn't decide if it was worth it, but I was really ready to get out of the city and thought that I would regret missing THE place to go in Costa Rica if I didn't go. I wandered to the Mercado Central but there wasn't much to do there since I didn't need to buy anything. I also tried to go a Costa Rican art gallery but it was closed so I just went back to the center of town. It was a good walk though since it was far from where I had been (oh it was also raining and I had decided to leave my umbrella at the hostel because it hadn't rained at all...oops). Next I went to the art market which was really fun. It is totally a tourist spot, but it had tons of jewelry, bags, sarongs, etc. The vendors were pretty aggressive and were trying to barter with me. Since I didn't plan on buying anything, I just wandered through just to see what was there. In the end, I bought a bracelet from the vendor that left me alone the most. I am hoping to go back sometime next week to get anything else I want before I leave the city. I had dinner at the hostel (cereal, papaya, and a red pepper) and headed to bed super early. I ended up having the whole dorm room to myself so it was a little too quiet, but much much better than Pangea.

The next day I had breakfast at the hostel (included) and talked to two other guests. One woman was Italian and traveling around the world and the other woman was French on vacation here, but she had also done a year-long world tour. She spent 3 months in Bolivia and convinced me I need to go there! Apparently there are tickets that you can buy to go anywhere in the world with no reservations. Wish I could do that!

After breakfast, I packed up and left my stuff at the hostel to go back into town for the morning. I ended up going shopping for underwear (I don't know how I didn't pack enough) and I went to the National Museum. This place was interesting because it was housed in an old fortress from the time when Costa Rica had an army (also where an important general lived). Inside there was a butterfly garden, photography exhibit, the army barracks, and the super fancy rooms of the general's house. I kind of rushed through the exhibits since I needed to get back to the hostel to get myself to the bus station at 2:30.

I ended up back at the hostel at 11 because I was worried about not getting a seat (Lonely Planet said to reserve ahead specifically for Monteverde and I hadn't). I took a taxi to the bus station and got there about 12:00. After walking around trying to figure out where to buy tickets, I found a window and stood in line. When I go to the front, they told me that it was not the right office and pointed to a deserted looking building with no one in it. It turned out the Monteverde bus staff was at lunch and not coming back for another 2 hours. So much for getting there early to make sure I got tickets.


Not long after I got there, a Norwegian man and his teenage son got there too. I ended up talking to the dad for most of the time we waited and I heard all about their trip. They had been in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. We finally were able to buy tickets and get on the bus (it wasn't at all full!) Other than making a stop somewhere along the way and having to switch buses and move our luggage for no apparent reason, we continued on our way and I arrived in Montverde around 7pm with a reservation for the hostel Josh (English guy I met in Alajuela) was staying at but no idea how to get there.

I quickly found out Santa Elena is only a few blocks total and my hostel was 300m from the bus stop so I found it easily by asking people along the way and being pointed up a rocky, dark road. Once I got there, Josh and new friends he had made were there making dinner. I ended up eating some of their pasta and then we played Jenga and cards until midnight. They were heading out early the next morning, but I met two other people who asked if I wanted to go with them to the reserve the next day so I decided to do that since I didn't have any other plans. Everything in Monteverde was working out quite nicely!

We took the 8:30 bus to the Santa Elena Reserve, which is one of two places where you can visit the rainforest. Monteverde Reserve is the other one. I'm not really sure what the difference between the two is. We did a two hour walk very quickly since the group I was with had to make sure they got the 11am bus back to town for their zip line tour. Since we really rushed through, I decided to stay until the next bus at 1pm. That meant I had two more hours to walk around the forest. Not many people were there, but we didn't see any animals to speak of. We passed a guide showing people a huge snake in a tree, but I couldn’t see it even when he lent me the binoculars. It's hard when someone is saying, "see that big tree really far off, now look at the tree next to it, on the small branch to the left."

I came back to town around 1:30 and wandered a bit. I'm actually staying in Santa Elena, which is the town tourists stay in. Monteverde isn't actually a place people stay- it's just the Quaker community that lives here. I bought lunch supplies at the grocery store (baguette, turkey, lettuce, mango) and ate lunch at the hostel. I also made reservations for Tortuguero and paid for two more nights at the hostel. So far my non-planning is going pretty well now that I'm out of San Jose. I did learn to make hostel reservations online though from now on!

Last night we went on a night tour to see animals. Our guide told us he would do his best to see animals but it wasn't a guarantee. The tour ended up being a lot of walking and looking and seeing something interesting every now and then, but overall it good to have the guide and he told us information about each animal we saw. We saw:

bats sleeping in a tree
stick insects
tarantula
kinkajou
viper snake (so poisonous it can kill a human and way way too close for my comfort!)
scorpion
glow in the dark fungus on trees
frog (all of the frogs are really little in Costa Rica. I didn't know that- the guide said computers make the rainforest frogs look big)
sloth (yay! I've been wanting to see one!)

After the night tour, I split a bag of pasta with the French girl I had been hiking with and we went to bed early.

I'm finally on to today! Today has been a nice, relaxing day for me. All of the people I met moved on early this morning and I wasn't planning on doing any more tours. I really like the hostel though and the timing is working out well since I am staying one more night here. Today I walked around the town again and a little bit out of town. I tasted some coffee (yuck!) and now I'm back at the hostel catching up on work. I'm sitting on the balcony with a puppy in my lap. This puppy is probably the most adorable puppy I have ever seen. I don't like dogs much, but I would take this one home if I could. The hostel owner said the puppy isn’t hers and it showed up today. It's clearly lost because it's clean and must belong to someone. She said she'll keep it if it doesn’t find its owners.

I think I'm going to head back to town to do the rest of my shopping and maybe get some ice cream or something. People left me salsa so I think I'm going to have nachos for dinner. Time to see who my new roommates are too!

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