Nice ride into Crazyland

So this was a bit of a crazy day. Last night Coraleigh started complaining of her ear hurting and not being able to hear that well. After looking at it I saw that her ear canal was nearly swollen shut. We went to el doctor de medico in Samara (the next town over) and he asked if she had been swimming or gone to hot springs. We have done both so he took a look in her ears. She definitely had an infection in one ear and both were clogged up with wax. He said it was common for people from cold climates to come down to Costa Rica and get ear infections. I forget why, but still seems kinda weird. Anyway, he flushed her ears with an alcohol and water mixture and out came “the most [wax] I’ve ever seen in my life.” The doctor and I were just laughing. Coraleigh loves the Q-tips a bit too much I think so it got all jammed up in there, then when she went swimming the water just stayed in there and it got infected. She got drops and pills and we paid and went on our way. Gotta review the travel health insurance policy tonight…

The drive in our rental car to the border was easy. It rained quite a bit, but we never got lost or anything. We drove straight there and it was a beautiful drive through forests and small towns. When we got close to the border there was this huge line of trucks. Literally it was about 2 miles long. Since I’d seen our interbus drivers do it I just drove in the opposite lane all the way to the front of the line and they just let me pass. The Alamo return place was in this muddy craphole and the guy in the office wasn’t even there for the first 15 minutes. He finally showed up and we got our car returned. He was nice and drove us the rest of the way to the border and kinda pointed us in the right direction. We first had to go inside this building and get our Costa Rica exit stamp. Luckily we were exiting and not coming in because that line was huge. We got back into the rental car and he dropped us right at the border where he couldn’t go any further. We just walked across and it was raining and everything was muddy and puddles everywhere. We had to squeeze by semi trucks and then stop at a random tent thing and show some police our passports. They let us through and that’s when the vultures attacked. Cambio, taxi, bus, blah blah blah. Guys waving money around and everything. Then we got approached by this guy that was like an official border process guy. He led us to all the proper booths and lines, gave us forms to fill out, told me who was trying to rip you off and who was good, etc. So first we had to fill out our entry forms and pay the $7 entry fee. Our passports were stamped again and we received our tourist card and $2 exit receipt as well (to be paid when we leave). I got some Nicaraguan cordobas from the ATM and paid all that stuff. We also had to pay some random $1 fee thing and got a little ticket for that when we passed through the gate. All a very confusing process that we would have never known how to do had it not been for this border guy. He, of course, worked for tips but he was so helpful that I didn’t mind paying him. He made everything go very fast. He also got us a taxi for only $40 from his friend to Granada (a 2 hour ride). I think this was a really good deal because the price listed to get back to the border at our hotel was $80 here in Granada.

Let me tell you, though, that it was all a pretty freaky process. The border area was chaos and we stuck out like a sore thumb. Everything went OK, though, as the guy informed us that they like and want tourists so the police are watching out for you.

This place is definitely 3rd world. On the way here we saw oxen pulling banana carts and donkeys pulling trailers like it was 1880, and random cows and horses just on the sides of the road or walking down the middle of it. The view to Ometepe was awesome, though. Two huge volcanoes side by side just were poking up out of the massive Lake Nicaragua. I can’t wait to get out there. We drove into Granada and our retarded taxi driver couldn’t figure out where to go even though we had a map. We even got our bearings and were telling him where to go before he knew where he was. What a bonehead. Our hotel is really nice and clean and the A/C is also nice. It’s pretty hot here. I can’t wait to take a shower since the water was out this morning in Carrillo. Coraleigh jumped in the pool to rinse after the water went out since she’d already put shampoo in her hair. Hahaha.

Granada seems like a nice city. It’s all Spanish colonial architecture with cathedrals, plazas, and brightly colored buildings with tiled rooftops. We climbed the belltower in the church right near our hotel to get a view over the city around sunset. We then walked to a restaurant called Dona Conchi. It was really cool inside with candlelit courtyard all filled with plants and a fountain where we could see the moon. Coraleigh said it was romantical, haha. I had shrimp in garlic and wine sauce (and like in Greece it came with French fries even though the presentation was fancy) and Coraleigh had vegetable lentil soup and some kind of special salad with watermelon, pineapple, cantaloupe, cheese, olives, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and a yogurt dressing. It looked pretty interesting; she said it was good. This is considered a nice restaurant I think and after everything including some fruit drinks and water was about $25. Well we are here and made it through all the craziness, over 200 miles, a rental car, a chaotic border, a confused taxi, and a new city. Time for a good shower and sleep.

Nicaragua here we come

While yesterday was all about relaxing and enjoying doing nothing, haha, today was about making arrangements for our next destination. Granada, Nicaragua. :-)

We’ve booked our hotel, Terrasol Hotel, which got really good reviews on tripadvisor.com, an awesome site we use all the time. Our room includes A/C (super important in 95 degree Granada), WiFi, breakfast (supposedly made by one of the owners who is a really good professional chef), and laundry service (we reeeally need laundry service now, haha) for $40 per night.

We also spent some time today figuring out our mode of travel options. Up till now we’ve been using this fantastic bus line here called Interbus which picks you up at your hotel and drops you off at your next one at your next destination. It’s really quick and comfortable and costs about $40 per person. Unfortunately it doesn’t go anywhere near where we need to go next. :-) Our only options to get to the Nicaraguan border from here are a Taxi, the local bus, or a rental car. A taxi we found out today would cost $180 so that was obviously out, haha. The local bus would require 3 transfers, has no A/C, would probably take a lot of extra travel time, and the seats are so tiny that Tyler’s legs would be all uncomfortably jammed up against the next seat up, picture a sweating 6’1” man in fetal position (we tested this out today) hahaha. A rental car amazingly cost only $80 at Alamo and they have an office in Penas Blancas (the border town), so we can just drop it off when we get there! It’s a very comfy efficient little Toyota Yaris and Tyler and I are SO happy that it’s so affordable as it will really make our lives easier tomorrow. I know $80 sounds like a lot for a rental, but compared to other companies this was the best deal (they all charge between $50-$100 to drop off at another location). We still will have to take the bus (a nice larger direct to Granada type one) once we cross into Nicaragua up to Granada but at least we will have avoided what would have been the worst part of the travel.

So we were just looking through our photos taken yesterday and there were only 3 taken, haha shows you how much we did. Two of the photos were of this scary looking huge cat (larger than any house cat I've ever seen) that I call Demon Cat, hahaha I seriously think he’s part tiger or something. The other photo was of the towel art that we came back to in our room. At the end of our trip I’m going to make a blog post showing all the hilarious and awesome towel art that we’ve gotten in our hotel rooms. :-)

We also tonight caught our last Costa Rican sunset on camera.

I now know where saline nose spray comes from

Another gorgeous day in Carrillo bay (see the video link below). We started off the morning like we said in the last post, eating breakfast with an amazing view of the bay. We then decided to take another walk down to the beach cause it was like 93 degrees out with clear skies. The water felt so good that we jumped in and spent the next two hours or so trying to body-surf the waves, some of them were kinda too big though so Tyler and I got some pretty thorough sinus cleansing. Haha.

After we got cleaned up in the hotel, salt water makes you super sticky, we found out when the local bus leaves (it wasn’t on time and we walked probably for 30 min, haha) and hopped on that to go to Samara, the larger next town over, about 7km away. We walked around and explored for bit and had some late lunch. Lunch was the typical Costa Rican fare, fish, rice, beans, fried plantain, salad, and mystery salad which this time was potato and beet which was pretty good. Samara is a nice clean town with abunch of shops and has its own half moon bay as well with a beach almost as nice as Carrillo, though much more populated. After that we caught the bus back to our hotel and found that our lizard was back in our room eatin our bugs. :-) Oh also on the walk up the driveway to the hotel we must have seen about 100 lightning bugs! It was so cool, it was so dark out (it gets dark here at about 6pm year round), that we just kept seeing light flashes all around us like a field of falling stars. Anyways, we’re in our room now and kinda tired, and its only 8pm, haha, so Hasta Manana!

Video links:

Panoramic view of Playa Carrillo

We just got the pictures from whitewater rafting the Rio Pacuare from the CD today in Samara. They are added in the "We're back..." post below.

Pacific Ocean paradise

We made it to Carrillo. It is the most pristine beach area we’ve ever seen. There are no houses or condos or anything on the beach at all except palm trees. The sand is white, the water is warm and clear, and the sunsets are amazing. Our hotel is set off to one end of the half-moon shaped bay overlooking the beach and ocean. We are literally the only guests here at the hotel so we got the best room with a great view (and A/C for once, so nice!). Check out the video of our room here.  We can hear the waves at night and we had another in-room lagartija (lizard) to eat bugs for us. The town of Puerto Carrillo is tiny; there are only a few buildings with a couple hotels and restaurants. Most of them are closed, this place is deserted this time of year. I don’t understand why because it’s so nice, pushing 90 degrees and sunny for a majority of the day. It still will usually rain in the afternoon, but not like it was at Arenal. It only last for about 30 minutes.

The view from our breakfast spot was perfect this morning and we are still sitting there now typing this post. It has a completely unobstructed view of the bay and palm trees.

Dinner last night was great. We ate at a place up the hill called Hula Jungla. We were also the only ones there. We had a homemade pizza that they cooked in a wood-fired pizza oven for us. It had tomatoes, mozzarella, and olives. Delicioso. We also ate there for lunch, haha, like I said its one of the few places open. We had homemade fajitas and lime margaritas with these weird limes that are orange inside instead of green. We could hear them in the back slicing everything up. The fajitas were only $4. Well this isn’t going to be a long post because there just isn’t much going on here. This is not a bad thing after our busy past week of traveling, rafting, ziplining, etc. Its beach time. Adios.

We're back! 3 days in Arenal

Once upon a time in a land far, far away...   We went white water rafting! Haha, it was so amazing. We got picked up really early, 6am, from our hotel in Puerto Viejo. We then rode a couple hours half asleep to Exploradores base camp near Siquirres. There we were served breakfast which consisted of eggs, rice and beans, toast, fruit juice, granola and yogurt, and the usual pineapple, papaya, and watermelon. Pretty standard stuff, but tasty. They had good facilities there and places to lock up our bags. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a waterproof case or anywhere to put my camera so I couldn’t take it along. A girl in our raft had a camera, though, and we bought the professional pictures because they looked pretty good. Hopefully those pictures will be coming soon.  And the ones from the CD we bought did, we just got them from off the CD today in Samara.  They are added below.

This is going to be a long post so be ready.  3 days of awesomeness all in one!


If you ever to come to Costa Rica, we both highly recommend doing this rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare. It was seriously incredible, and it also made Captain Thrifty happy because they provided transportation on to your next hotel. To take the Interbus (like we took from San Jose to Puerto Viejo) would have cost $49 each to get to Arenal. The rafting trip including transportation was only $115 each and it included breakfast and lunch so it was a really good deal. Anyway, back to the rafting. The Rio Pacuare is listed as one of the top 5 best rivers in the world for rafting. It ranks up there with the Colorado and the Nile and with good reason, because you feel like you are in an Indiana Jones movie all while hitting class 4 rapids or higher if it’s rained the night before. You travel through 18 miles of primary rainforest, canyons and valleys. We had four people in our boat plus 2 guides, one was in training which was interesting and we’ll talk about that later. After breakfast we got in a small bus and took the half hour ride through this insanely steep and twisting mountain road. I swear half the time our rear tires were locked up and we were just sliding down the hill. The guides were just chatting away like nothing was going on. We made it, though, and after getting all geared up hopped in the boats. There were two boats and hardly anybody on the river because it’s the slow season. Yay slow season! Oh and we also had some safety kayakers come along with us. We started off with some wimpy stuff and the guides were messing with us trying to send us through rapids sideways so I wasn’t really holding on and fell right out of the boat like an idiot. Coraleigh rescued me :O) (Tyler now owes me his life haha –Coraleigh). The next few hours were amazing. We went through all different kinds of awesome rapids surrounded by steep mountains and waterfalls straight out of Romancing the Stone; all this covered in the lushest vegetation you’ve ever seen. We even got to go under the waterfalls in our raft. It was totally unspoiled rainforest. We saw several blue morpho butterflies, some more Jesus Christ lizards, and a few different kinds of herons, but just the scenery was enough to leave you in awe. We stopped for lunch at a cool spot that was kept up by some indigenous people of the area. The lunch was pretty good, especially all the fresh fruit. We sat on a split log bench overlooking the river to eat. The weather was perfect as it has been every morning since we’ve been here. We went swimming several times in the river; it was so nice to just float down with the current in the calmer areas. The guides tried to convince us there were crocodiles and piranhas, but once they said you had to stick the oar in the crocodile’s mouth cross ways when “dey come atchoo like dis” (as he spread his arms like giant jaws) we knew they were lying.

For the second part of the trip the main guide sat to the side and let the trainee take over. That was interesting, as I mentioned earlier, because he screwed up a bunch. Several times we went through rapids sideways and one time we ran through this rapid that kinda rolled up a rock wall. Yeah he ran us straight into that and our raft went up to about a 75 degree angle. Coraleigh and I were on the low side and got knocked out of the boat by the people on the other side falling on us. I ended up downstream and a kayaker picked me up. Coraleigh ended up next to the boat and two other people also fell out. Basically the entire boat except the guides. It made for a more interesting trip, though, so we didn’t care. It was fun! After that we went through an area that looked just like Indiana Jones with a narrow canyon, an old rotting suspension bridge, vines hanging down, and waterfalls coming down both sides. The water flowed slowly through there so we got to jump out and float around while drifting through the canyon. Amazing (kinda overusing that word, but it just was). Toward the end of the trip the clouds started to get darker and you could hear thunder in the distance. About 15 minutes from the end the rain started to come down HARD. This was no Seattle rain, this was serious rain, good thing we were already soaked so it didn’t matter. Who would have thought it rains in the rainforest? Haha. After unloading they had good places to shower and change there at the base camp. My shirt that I left in the bus (since they said we would be taking the same bus to Arenal) drove away somewhere and they still say I will get it back. I doubt it. All in all an amazing trip, awesome scenery, exciting rafting, just minus a shirt. Haha

It was a long drive, about 4 hours, to Arenal and it rained really hard almost the entire way. The road was pretty slow going through all the hills. Plus trucks and cars seem to enjoy randomly stopping in the middle of the road and everyone has to go around. At one point there were four lanes of traffic on a two lane road, haha. We were both starving by the time we got here after all the hard work rafting; they really make you paddle hard. Anyway we got dinner in the overpriced restaurant here at the hotel, but our table was right next to the wall of windows with a direct view of the volcano. It erupted while we were eating dinner and you could see red hot rocks tumbling down the mountainside. Very cool. Our hotel is actually an observatory built by Smithsonian scientists studying the volcano in the 70s. It became popular so they fixed it up and started having tourists here. It’s nothing fancy, but the grounds are all protected rainforest with trails and suspension bridges;

you actually have to walk over a suspension bridge to get to our room from the main buildings. Right around the hotel is all very well manicured with tropical plants. Right in front of our deck is a row of this sweet smelling flower that’s so strong we can smell it inside our room and it attracts hummingbirds like crazy.

There are so many that they look like bees buzzing around instead of birds. All different colors, there are supposedly 27 different species of hummingbirds just in this area. A huge list of birds in the area is in our room, hundreds and hundreds on several pages and that’s just around here! We can hear howler monkeys screaming in the afternoon off in the distance. This place is really awesome. Our room has a big picture window with chairs set both inside the room and outside on the private porch looking directly at the volcano (see the video link at the bottom of the post). It’s so close, only a few miles away, you can only see the top if you go out on the deck or crouch down in front of the window. It’s that close. You can literally see the rocks rolling down the side, crashing and breaking apart with steam and ash flying. Last night I was woken up by what I thought was thunder at 5:30 in the morning. I was mad because I thought we would get rained on for our ziplining, but I opened the blinds and saw nearly the entire side of the volcano was on fire with rocks and lava rolling down the side. I was so out of it and it was dark so I couldn’t find the camera. Still it was a sight to see that’s for sure. I got a picture of it afterward still smoking and it smoked all morning too.

Yesterday we took a tour around the property here. Like I mentioned it’s a large area of rainforest so it was quite a hike; it took three hours and that was with a ride back on a tractor. The tour was free and our guide told us the history of the volcano and took us to see a waterfall and a bunch more rainforest. The waterfall was straight from a postcard.

That afternoon we went to Tabacon resort. It’s a veritable thermal wonderland and an amazing place. Its waters come straight from a diverted spring and are naturally heated by the volcano. Very hot, probably 106-108 degrees in some pools.

I can’t even describe how awesome this place is. Waterfalls, private pools and streams, tropical plants everywhere on winding trails;

we spent about 5 hours just sitting in different pools alternating between hot and cool, letting the powerful hot waterfalls massage our backs and shoulders. We ate dinner there as well which was delicious Mexican food.

Finally onto Sunday, I told you this post would be long… (We just heard a loud eruption from the Volcano and the sound of tumbling rocks, but it’s raining so we couldn’t see it… darn). Today was also really great. For any of you that have ever done ziplining you know what I’m talking about. These lines were insane, some of them over ½ mile long and 1/8 mile above the ground at around 35mph. We took a 15 minute ride on a Doppelmayr lift up to the first platform for a few practice runs on very short cables. Once that is done, they don’t mess around. The next cable is 650 feet off the ground. There were amazing views of Arenal Lake and the volcano was very close as well. Pretty freaky at first, but so much fun. Coraleigh got a little twisted on her first run and it slowed her down so she didn’t make it all the way to the platform and was just hanging out there so she had to hand over hand it up the platform, but she handled it really well and didn’t even care. I thought she was going to freak out. I’ve got some videos attached from ziplining at the bottom of the post.

After the adrenaline fix in the morning we went to La Fortuna to just hang out, get lunch and find an internet café to book our next hotel. It’s a pretty small town with not a lot besides tour agencies and restaurants. We ate lunch at a good pizza place and I found out I am probably going to lose at fantasy football this week with their wifi :O( We also bought some granola bars and water at the “MegaSuper”. We found an Interbus office where the guy didn’t speak English and were able to book a bus to Playa Carrillo on the Pacific Ocean and 3 nights in Carrillo Club hotel. It looks amazing and was only $50/night thanks to off-season rates. It has a view over a completely non-developed half moon shaped bay with a white sand beach. (More big rocks tumbling down the mountain… damn rain). So that was our last three days. What did you do? Hehehe

Video links:

Coraleigh Ziplining

Our room at the Arenal Observatory Lodge

Camera attached to my back on the zipline

The first line, 650 feet high

I'm in heaven...

I know I'm probably going to say this a lot, but what a day and some amazing pictures!  We started early with breakfast at our new hotel, La Isla Inn.  We both slept like the dead after our long day yesterday.  Breakfast was cooked to order and really good.  I had desayuno tica tipica (beans, rice, toast with butter and jam, and eggs.  Coraleigh had un panqueque.  It was like a huge fluffy pancake.  After some rushing then waiting and more waiting we finally made it to Cahuita National Park for our wildlife tour.

I usually don't like tours, but this was totally worth it.  We would not have seen even half the stuff we did had we not had the guide.  Luis, our guide, was really knowledgeable and spoke pretty good English.  He pointed out two and three-toed sloths, howler monkeys, giant iguanas, lizards that run on water, herons, butterflies, bullethead and leaf-cutter ants, white-faced monkeys, an eye lash viper, blue crabs, hermit crabs, huge termite nests and weird tunnels, and a lot of cool trees and some more of those closing ferns.  I took tons of pictures and some video too.  So many cool things that are not shown here too; babies latched on to howler monkeys and sloths.  A giant iguana perched on the skinniest little branch a good 100 feet up a tree flapping his neck fat around attempting to court the female the next tree over.  A curious white-faced monkey about 2 feet away from Coraleigh's head just eating berries.  Oh and this great howler monkey almost crapped on us and then he showed his sack.  lol. 

 At the end of the trail we came to a point with the nicest clear blue Caribbean water that we've seen yet.  It was close to a reef too so there were lots of coral pieces on the beach.  One piece I picked up had about 5 little hermit crabs in it!  There is life crawling in every crevice of everything here.  So we spent about 45 minutes waiting there at the point for our boat to come (so we didn't have to hike the same trail back).  We had some fresh pineapple and watermelon and went swimming on the beach there.  I took some pictures straight out of a postcard or calendar.  They were everywhere!  Finally we took off in the boat and got red eyes because of the sea spray over the edge of the boat from the wind; our tour guide hunkered under some life jackets.  The tour place dropped us back at our hotel and we got changed and went to explore the "downtown" of Puerto Viejo. 

Our hotel is on Playa Cocles which is great; it seems a little more popular for surfers.  We thought it was the nicest, cleanest and least buggy around (the sand fleas can be bad on other beaches like Punta Uva).  After some walking there we headed into town which was about a 15 minute walk.  There we wandered through little local art tents, Coraleigh bought a nice silver bracelet and we had lunch at Mojos.  It seemed popular and was run by two guys, one American and one Australian, one hyperactive and one dreadlocked surfer.  Food was ok, not the best we've had, but it was food.  And of course, like we've been getting anywhere we had jugos naturales.  Natural juices, they are so good here.  Coraleigh had passion fruit (maracuya) and I had strawberry (fresa).  They blend it fresh and it costs like $1.50.  Mmmmm.  Not much after that;  we're getting ready for dinner now and are packing up.  We have a really early morning for our whitewater rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare tomorrow. 

We're going out of internet range for about 4 days starting tomorrow; the Arenal Observatory Lodge has no internet.  They're out in the middle of nowhere, but only about 1 mile from the base of this Volcan Arenal.  The room we reserved has huge picture windows with great views of the volcano and its lava flowing and ejected rocks the size of cars tumbling down the slopes (for all you moms out there, 100% safe and bandito free).  The area is supposed to be some of the most picturesque and lush in the country.  Hopefully its clear enough to see!

Update:  While we were out waiting for all the pictures to upload we found the best place for dinner.  It's just down the road from our hotel and its called Bar Sol del Caribe.  Another strange combination just like dinner last night.  Louis Armstrong playing on the radio, gourmet-style fish dinner, freshly blended pineapple juice, all served up by a guy in flip flops in an open air sand floor bar with a banana leaf roof.  hahaha.  The food was amazingly good.  Great last night in Puerto Viejo, now we don't want to leave!

Video links:

Howler Monkey

Hermit crab

Leafcutter ants

Shy fern

White-faced monkey

Manzanillo bike trip

 

Today felt like our first real day of vacation. :-)  We weren't on a plane or a bus or waiting for a plane or bus. haha  We woke up kinda late, had a leisurely breakfast, said goodbye to Erin and Shannon who were continuing down to Panama, and then set out on our $5 bicycle rentals to find a hotel for the next two nights since Banana Azul was all booked up. It was such an amazing beautiful ride its so hard to describe. We started out with the goal of going down to Punta Uva but were enjoying the ride so much that we decided to continue down to Manzanillo. (side note - Tyler is looking up how to say "fart" in spanish, apparantly you have to say 'throw a fart', which if you're interested, haha, is "me tiro un pedo", he is cracking me up right now. He just ran the spanish through a translator and it said "I shot a fart", hahaha omg. its been a loooong day). Ok anyway back to our ride..

We bicycled down the main road here, which was an adventure in itself since most of it was either really rough and unpaved or full of muddy potholes or huge puddles; it took us both beside the ocean and through the jungle. At Punta Uva we stopped at the beach, which is one of the most gorgeaous beaches I've ever seen, SO warm and clear, and walked about a mile down it. We were feeling pretty good and the weather was great so then we decided to ride further south to Manzanillo. This part of the road took us mostly through jungle and it was so awesome, at one point we heard monkeys, they were super loud but not near us, and the sounds of the birds were almost deafening. It was stifling hot too so we were super happy whenever we could fly down a hill or when it would rain a little, it felt so good. :-)  In Manzinillo we had a really good lunch of fish, salad, rice, beans and fried plantains and I had a delicious fresh passion fruit juice. yummm  On the way back while we were stopped for a moment Tyler noticed something on the side of the road so we both looked closer and found this amazing plant that was closing its leaves whenever rain hit it. It doesnt sound like much me telling you but it was crazy! It closed its leaves so fast we almost thought it was a bug or something. We got it on video to show you here.  You can also hear the birds and jungle noises.  Pretty cool.

So on the way back we managed to find a new hotel for tonight and tommorrow night which is nice and a good deal. Its called Isla Inn and is on Cocles Beach. Its not as nice as Banana Azul but meets our needs.  After we booked it we continued on back to Banana Azul to return the bikes and pick up our bags. We had riden all in all about 16 miles! haha, so we were thrilled when the Banana staff invited us to jump in their pool. They also have a pretty good tours reservation desk there so we took the opportunity to book two things that we wanted to do in the next two days; a 4 hour guided wildlife jungle hike through Cahuita reserve and an all day class 3-4 river rafting trip down the Rio Pacuari. The rafting company is also going to drop us off at our next location we plan to stay at, Volcan Arenal.

Tyler wanted me to add something about "leafy bug".  When we got back from dinner, which was really delicious authentic italian pizza set to reggae music, there was a weird looking bug on our door.  After looking closer we realized it looked exactly like a leaf with the veins and everything.  Very strange.