Courtney got back from Costa Rica on Saturday. Unfortunately, she spent most of the day in the Fort Lauderdale airport waiting for the snow and ice to clear from Chicago so her plane could take off. She sent a little synopsis of her trip, which I am reprinting here along with some photos.
This picture is from the Arenal National Park. The Arenal Volcano is the biggest volcano, but you can't climb it because it's active. There is a smaller one called Cerro Chato next to it that you can climb up. I hiked with a Canadian girl I met at my hostel. The Cerro Chato hike was neat, because it's sunny at the bottom, but then you hike up into the mist and fog. I kept thinking it was raining in there, but really, it's just all the moisture condensing and falling on the leaves. At the top of Cerro Chato, you can climb down into the crater where there is a lagoon, and you can swim, but it was so foggy, you could hardly see a few feet into the lagoon. It was a little too spooky for me to want to swim. So next we hiked to the waterfall and went swimming there instead.
After all our hiking, a group of us from the hostel went to the hot springs in the evening. It wasn't what I expected -- it was more like a spa than a natural pool of water. And the place was huge. They had 12 or so different pools, and they all had a different theme, like one was a giant jacuzzi tub with jets and one had lots of (man-made) waterfalls you could sit under. The water is naturally heated by the volcano though, and it was a really fun, nice place to relax.
The second day, I did a full day of group tours - first was waterfall rappelling and then zip lining. I liked the rappelling the best, and it was fun to hike down in the canyon between rappels. The views from the zip lines were really nice though. The next day, I left for Puerto Viejo, the beach town on the Caribbean coast.
In Puerto Viejo, I rented a bike everyday and rode around between all the different beaches, which were all so beautiful. I went swimming a few times, but the waves were pretty strong. It's a popular spot for surfers.
One day I took a bus to Cahuita and went hiking in the National Park there. I saw a ton of different animals: sloths, monkeys, lizards, insects, etc. Another day, I went to the Jaguar Rescue Center where they rehabilitate injured animals. They let us go into the monkey cage and play with the baby monkeys. This monkey stole a girl's lunch and then climbed a tree and ate it.
