Sunday, February 7, 2016

Costa Rica day 1!

Mark and I took advantage of my parents visiting to take off and discover the beautiful country of Costa Rica!
A 10-day trip filled with adventures, amazing sights and friendly people... 

We started off by leaving the DC blizzard (and take one of the first flights since the airport had been reopened) and fly to San Jose. We were welcome by a 82 degree sunny afternoon!
After dealing with Alamo and accepting reluctantly to pay an extra $400 for a rental car insurance, we faced the traffic of San Jose for a short time and then took the direction of Monteverde in the central part of Costa Rica... Everything went very smooth until we started to climb in the dark the dirty rocky mountain roads to reach Monteverde...!



Our first night was in a lovely and charming hotel "the Historia Lodge" and we enjoyed our first typical dinner "Cassada" at a local restaurant.
 
Mark noticed that the shoes I had packed would be rough on his heels so we started off (after a hearty breakfast also typically Costa Rican) by going to a pharmacy to get band aids. 
Monteverde is in the mountains of the cloud forest and the weather is very unique: 80 degrees at 9am with a gentle breeze and a mist... quite pleasant when you are walking up steep hills!

When we got to the adventure park it was raining and it was very cloudy... we debated to pay the large amount of money to go zip lining if the clouds were going to hide everything... after talking to several members of the Staff and to each other, we decided to get the whole package since this was a once in a life time opportunity...!

We started by a walking tour with a guide through the cloud forest and 7 hanging bridges... The guide was so knowledgeable and pointed out so many things that we would have missed otherwise such as birds, a tarantula and huge diversity of vegetation...





 
Time for something we had wanted to try for years: zip lining!!


As we were going up the mountain via cable cars, we started to be in the middle of the clouds and could not see anything!


Here are some views from the last zip lines where you can see the hanging bridges we walked earlier that day... We ended our series of 8 zip lines by bun-jee cord jumping from a platform! What a fantastic adventure!