San Jose… to Tortuguero… via…
My wife Andrea and I have been visiting Costa Rica for the last couple of weeks prior to visiting the conference… as others are going to be in the area I thought it might be good to help others to know some things worth seeing.
We landed in San Jose. Our first day was a day trip visiting Volcan Poas, where we were lucky to see the crater of this dozy volcano. A couple of nights in the sleepy town of Orosi in the Central Valley, from which we hiked the Yellow Church Trail.
Our journey then took us to Jaco on the Pacific Coast for 7 nights (where I focussed much of our time researching blog technology and building this site, and with the help of Alfi Tifi, testing it and getting it ready for the conference.) Jaco is quite touristy compared to much of Costa Rica but is in reach of National Park Manuel Antonio (closed Mondays).
In general, we’ve been travelling around by public bus, a slow and sometimes bone-shaking experience, but one that is economical (<$4 for any journey) and exposes us to the culture and people of the towns. We’ve been lucky with these buses, and on a couple of occasions caught connections on the street on the way to the bus station that, according to the timetables, we should have missed. That said, everything here works on tico time… so there’s no hurry… Taking a taxi to Jaco for instance would be about $120, or the private coach companies would be about $25 for the same.
From Jaco Andrea and I progressed to Monteverde, via Puntarenas, staying 2 nights to visit the cloud forest. We elected to take the 3 hour tour bus and cross-river journey to La Fortuna as the alternative by bus around the lake was something like 8 hours!
Volcan Arenal is a live volcano - quite a spectacle. The Tabacon hot springs at La Fortuna were quite spectacular - the water is geothermally heated and you can sit at a drinks bar in the water and watch the volcano erupt. Pricey but worth it. You can do this as a day or night stay-over from San Jose - its certainly a highlight.
From La Fortuna we bussed to San Jose (4hrs) followed by 2.5 hr trip to Puerto Limon. Perhaps it was the time we arrived (9pm) but that seemed quite a scary place: we were glad to get into the hotel away from some grabbing hands… ask me and I’ll tell the story…
The next morning we got up early to get to Moin. Moin is the southern-most tip of the canal system that runs up the east coast to Nicaragua. A 4 hour boat ride through forested National Park through led us to Tortuguero, via sights including one crocodile and a 3 toed sloth.
Tortuguero (where we are now) is world-famous as being the principle turtle nesting place for green turtles. We saw these turtles last night under the watch of the Costa Rican Conservation agency. Huddled in the moonlight we stood in awe as these 150lb massive turtles loomed out of the sea, found a place to nest and laid some 100 or so eggs. Nesting is the only time these creatures come out to land, and they have been known to swim from Costa Rica to Senegal in Africa in less than 1 month after.
Tomorrow we leave for some Carribean towns further south than Porto Limon. I’m sure this time we will be greeted by the friendly welcome we are accustomed to 
