Family Trip I: Costa Rica

The two weeks during my Christmas break my family came down to visit for the holiday season. They arrived on Christmas eve and we had a rental car for the first five days. It was nice to see my family but I was kept busy translating because none of them could speak any Spanish.

With the car we were able to visit places that I couldn't visit before. We went to the nearby Volcano Tenorio, which luckily we had a 4x4 for because the road was steep and windy and very poor. By the time we got there it was almost too late to enter the park and we had to rush to see a very impressive waterfall.

The next day we went to the beach at Playa Grande. We intended to watch the turtles come in to lay the eggs but there wasn't enough space for that night so we spent the day on the beach. The following day we headed to the nature reserve of Monteverde which is high up in the cloud forest and is one of the most popular places for tourists to visit. The drive up had spectacular views and bad roads. It was extremely cold (for Costa Rica) in Monteverde and we spent most of the time there in sweaters and jackets. We took a canopy tour which had many ziplines including one that was more than a half mile long. We went on two nightwalks which was a different perspective on the Costa Rican jungle. We had a guide who led us with a flashlight through the trails looking for different night animals. We saw lots of sleeping birds, and different types of insects and frogs. We also came across a bunch of tarantulas living in their nests waiting for insects to walk by. There were also some night animals. We saw a porcupine, a two-toed sloth, and an olingo, which looked like a brown lemur.

After leaving Monteverde we had to return the car to the capital of San Jose. On the way we stopped at the "Crocodile Bridge" where there were dozens of crocodiles lying about in the river including some giant ones. In San Jose we arranged a 15 hour bus ride to Panama City. We were originally intending to leave the next day but there were no seats available. Luckily, the other bus company had a special trip on New Year's Eve that was practically empty. This gave us time to check out the old building in downtown San Jose and take a trip to the nearby Volcano Irazu. I had been to this volcano before but it was very cloudy. This time the view was excellent and we got a great view of the craters and the slopes of the volcano. It wasn't quite clear enough to see the Pacific and Atlantic oceans but it was impressive nonetheless.