"It's crazy, no?"
This was the opinion of a Costa Rican taxi driver on the fact that the sun sets at different times throughout the year back home, because in Costa Rica, the sun sets at about 5:45. Every day. Imagine how blown his mind was when I told him there are some places that have days with no sunlight at all.
This holiday left me with a proper conundrum in relation to the blog, not one of those made up conundrums like what colour pin to use in the map, but a proper one as this holiday didn't even fit with the name of the blog. The address of the blog has always been
europeanmusings.blogspot.com and the title at the top has always said "adventures in europe" having been initially created to talk about a single trip I took 10 years ago, the name and address has always remained accurate with all of the subsequent holidays as I'd still never left the continent before (Actually, technically I have as Turkey is in both Europe and Asia, but I still consider that to be Europe so that still fit).
Costa Rica isn't close to being in Europe, Not being as many people assume a part of Spain, but over 5,000 miles away in Central America. The options seemed to be, don't write about it (I don't understand what you mean), make a new non-european blog (Surely you already have enough blogs?) or change the name and address of the blog (I have no further comments on that option, that seems logical to me). Having pondered on the website issue for a moment and decided that I would just change the name of the blog, so the address is now
travel.wannacorndog.co.uk and the title is changed to "A Travel Blog". Now it can be used for any holidays at all, it's so generic that I won't even have to change the name when they start selling seats on the easyrocket.
This year we decided to have a special holiday, where we not only went further away but for longer and on a chartered flight with in-flight films and everything.
We stayed in a small town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica called Quepos, mainly chosen because the airbnb we found there had lots of pictures of monkeys on it's advert pages. As it turned out, the monkeys were not snapped on one particularly lucky day, Most days while on our balcony or in the pool we would be visited by large troops of either White Faced Capuchins (referred to by locals as the Cost Rican Mafia, one distracts you, the rest rob you) or Squirrel Monkeys.
You can't talk about Costa Rica without talking about the wildlife, it's one of the main reasons people go there and with good reason, the biodiversity is incredible. At home at the right time of year, we might occasionally see squirrels, hedgehogs or rabbits which don't get me wrong is endlessly exciting when it happens, last year when blue tits nested near our house, we were fascinated by it, but in Costa Rica you can see Monkeys and Sloths (not from our apartment but there was one we could see above the pavement next to the zip-coaster in Manuel Antonio), we saw macaws and a toucan and lizards, the lizards are so much bigger than you find in Europe, here you get Iguanas.
The next town over from Quepos is Manuel Antonio, they're both very small and incredibly close together, that it's almost pointless them being separate towns, but they are because they both contain all 4 ingredients of a town in Costa Rica (School, church, bar and a football field - obviously). Manuel Antonio is basically one big hill, so to get there it still makes sense to take the bus (plus it only costs about 50p). We travelled here on our first Monday to visit the National Park, the parks quite small at just a few kilometres squared but it is quite well known so it's a popular tourist destination. It also turns out to be closed on Mondays, so we failed, there's quite a nice beach at the same end of the town, so it wasn't a completely wasted day, plus we decided to wander back up the hill just until we found a restaurant to get a bit of food. Unfortunately, it also turns out nothing seems to be open in the day, there is nothing like walking uphill in the blistering heat to make a couple of miles seem infinite.
On attempt 2 the following day, we actually made it inside the national park, the best bit was probably sitting in the picnic area and watching Capuchins steal people's lunches, just to live up to that Mafia comment.
It wasn't just Monkeys (though to look through the photo's on our camera you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just 12 days of hanging around with Monkeys, don't you try and pretend that doesn't sound like a great holiday). There's was loads to do while we were there and the lady that ran the apartment complex was really helpful and would help book us on to whatever activities we wanted, so we had a go at a few new things, like white-water rafting.
I nearly had a go at white-water rafting once, in 2008, me and Titch were in Bad Gastein where it was one of the available activities, we chose instead to do canyoning, which was basically the same thing, just without the boat, since then I have thought I'd like to give it a crack some, but just never got round to trying it (it's not like it's been a dream or anything, this would have been quite easy to at any time, you can do it in Wales if you really want).
We decided to just do the more gentle rafting course, so there was very little of falling out the boat (there was just one occasion where that almost happened) but it was fun, the guide would try and make us surf the waves (which we were not good at) and ride down while spinning like a washing machine (which we were). They had a professional photographer out taking photographs, which we had to pay for if we wanted them, it's probably not a big reveal to say that we did buy them as I've probably already put at least one next to this block of text. We decided that we would probably miss having the photos more than the money, we could get more money, it's much harder to make copies of photos you don't have...
Then 2 days later we had a go at horseback riding in the town of London (named after a small little known English city), riding horses takes some getting used to, but it can be immensely satisfying when he does what you want him to.
What was quite good about the trips we went on, was how they all included food as part of it, it was generally the same thing, for breakfast it would be Gallo-pinto, which is rice and beans, usually with scrambled egg, then for lunch, it would be Cassado, which is... rice and beans, plus veg and chicken or fish, there are a lot of rice and beans in Costa Rica.
On our way back to the airport, we decided to fly from Quepos airport back to San Jose as it took about 20 minutes rather than the 3 hour taxi and actually cost about the same. It wasn't an option on the way in as the flights had stopped by the time we arrived because it is only a tiny airport and it only operates during the day because (and this is true you can look it up) there are no lights on the runway.
The British Airways flight that brought us to Costa Rica was the largest plane we had ever been in, but in flying back to the airport, we also rode in the smallest one we had ever been in during this holiday, it was a tiny 12 seater where the only crew is the 2 pilots, one of who sits momentarily in an empty seat for the brief safety talk "Remain seated, No smoking, enjoy the flight" just before lift off. Oh and the empty seats, it turned out that we were actually the only people on the plane, so for the price of 2 relatively cheap tickets, it was like we had hired a private plane.
We could see Quepos from the sky, easily recognisable by the harbour, I found the most striking thing about the view to be just how little there was around it, that's how the whole place is, nothing but trees and mountains. Leaving this holiday was harder than most, we had literally just spent 12 days in paradise.
Finally, did anyone know that this is how pineapples grow? For some reason I'd always envisioned them hanging from some sort of tree.
