Costa Rica - Overview

My holidays this year took the form of a quick trip home to the chill of upstate NY to visit my family for Christmas, followed by a ten-day tour, courtesy Caravan Tours, in Costa Rica, accompanied by my family and my boyfriend. I was a little worried about this tour going in - going with them was my mom's idea, and I had never done an organized tour group like this before. Reading the itinerary, I became firmly convinced Caravan was determined not to let us do anything fun - no horseback riding (never mind the fact that I'm allergic to horses), no whitewater rafting, no ziplining, offers to allow people to sit out walks of only 1/2 mile in length, etc. I was wondering if I'd signed up for the tour of immobile retired people.

It turns out I was maybe half right. The group we were in actually had a fair proportion of young people - families travelling with children ranging from teenagers to "grown" children like myself, and even an engaged couple enjoying a sort of pre-wedding honeymoon. However, it seems this was not the norm for the Costa Rican Caravan tour so I guess we got lucky. Also, while Caravan itself doesn't arrange any particularly active or strenuous activities, all their activities are optional so you can opt out and arrange your own side activity, if you'd like. Plus, it turns out that sitting in a bus looking at the Costa Rican landscape or city streets is not a bad way to experience the country when it's raining or really hot outside, and some of the activities that Caravan did arrange were really enjoyable. Having a tour guide who's knowledgeable about the country, and - most importantly - can quickly spot and identify wildlife is really useful, and it's nice not having to worry about anything - just show up and your hotel room is ready, your dinner is ready, your activities are all arranged with transportation. Also, while I know we missed out on some of the interesting areas and activities of Costa Rica, we also got to visit a range of locations that I may have otherwise have missed out on. It was a nice way to explore an area I wasn't at all familiar with. Plus, the hotels were for the most part quite nice, the food was ample and quite good, and the motorcoach was very comfortable.

Enough about the tour group, though. Costa Rica itself is a beautiful country. I have to confess that rainforests didn't look quite as I'd imagined - not as tall or something - but everything was so green and lush. The volcanoes, mountain ranges, hills, and valleys provided gorgeous scenery as we drove through the countryside, as did the constantly shifting weather conditions - from bright sun and blue skies to dense fog in the same bus ride. It was neat seeing the miles of banana trees, coffee plants, fields of pineapples, decorative plants, etc etc - far cry from the type of farmland we see as we drive through California. What probably fascinated me most was the wildlife, though. In our trip, we saw three kinds of monkeys - spider monkeys swinging around a tree; howler monkeys, which provided us with a wakeup call one morning; and white-face monkeys, who are so bold in the area around Manual Antonio that they will band together to steal things from tourists, break into garbage cans, and threaten hikers. But more about that later. We also saw a profusion of birds, including scarlet macaws, toucans, hummingbirds, spoonbills, egrets, etc. We came within 50 feet of crocodiles, within 2 feet of caimans, saw gigantic iguanas, lizards, various types of mammals, two and three-toed sloths (the three-toed are cuter), river turtles, and more. It was all really fascinating.

There were some odd things about Costa Rica, though. It's apparently heavily dependent on touristry - the guide said the three major industries in Costa Rica were technology (chip manufacture in particular, I believe), touristry, and agriculture, in that order. I guess as a consequence, they're closely tied to the American dollar. In just about every location we went to (and admittedly we mostly were in the touristy spots), the prices were listed in American dollars, and they accepted American dollars and Costa Rican colones interchangeably. Many of the people we interacted with spoke English quite well - our guide said that English was taught in the schools (and school is mandatory for Costa Rican children - they have a 96% literacy rate). It made things convenient in the sense that I didn't have to worry about figuring out how to ask things in Spanish, which I don't know, or converting money - my mom converted $20 for each of us at the beginning of the trip and it lasted me throughout the whole tour (of course, I only spent it on souvenirs since meals were taken care of). But it was odd to me how freely American currency was exchanged.

The other odd thing was that, it's a country that's got no military, seems to have very friendly, non-confrontational people, is so invested in conservation and wildlife preservation, etc, and yet about 90% of the houses I saw were barricaded like they were each their own little bunker. Bars on the windows, bars on the door, barred porches, walls or barbed wire fences around the property... some even had the kind of coiled barbed wire along the top fences you usually see in high security areas or prisons. More than one person on the tour commented how it seemed like they were imprisoning themselves in their homes. This was true in the countryside as well as in the cities. You could find an isolated house with nothing around for a while, and it would still be all barred up. My tour guide said that it started out more as a decorative and home security thing and then he thinks his countrymen went a bit overboard. I guess it's a bit of an escalation thing, though - if your house is the least secured on the block, then it's probably the most likely to be targeted for theft. So it just keeps getting built up... It was an odd juxtaposition though - beautiful countryside, little bunkered houses...

I'm probably going to be posting a day-by-day blog so I don't forget what I did on the trip, with more specifics on each location we went to. And we've got a ton of photos to go through...