(AUSTIN)We MADE IT! We are in La Fortuna, Costa Rica!!
Day Start:
We got up at 7:45 from the Fort LAuderdale Holiday Inn to shower, catch a continental breakfast (we´re still giddy over this fact) and we hopped on the airport shuttle to catch our 10:52 flight. As if the pilot knew that 10:50 was too early yet a 10:55 departure was too late. The flight went smoothly with the exception of one thing: people loved standing around in the aisles. I cannot explain it. It was very annoying. I would say that on average 4-5 people were standing and chatting to their friends while in the aisles of the plane. Awesome. So we landed smoothly, FINALLY bought a watch (neither of us have one haha) for $20, and went through customs.... which wasn´t very thorough.
Had we not been through the harassing Europe thing with drivers trying to control dumb Americans, we would have gotten on an unsafe taxi. Our goal was to take the orange taxi, but as we exited the airport it was like we were bread thrown into a group of New York pigeons. We stayed focused and got with a licensed, orange-taxi-driver. We needed to take a taxi, which ended up costing $2, to get to a local Holiday Inn Express where the Shuttle Bus (Interbus Company) would be picking us up at 3:00 PM.
Funny currency story:
$1 equals 493 colones. Yeah. So when withdrawing colones from the ATM, we triple-checked to be sure that we wanted to withdraw 30,000 colones. Ha.
We arrived at the Holiday Inn Express at 12:30 and had two and a half hours until our bus would come pick us up at 3:00PM to bring us to Arenal. We look behind us, hey there´s a Denny´s! We ate there, putting up a $35 bill which will likely be our most expensive meal of the trip. We agreed that if we got the big burgers that we would skip dinner. That´s what we did!
We hopped on the Interbus at about 2:45 and headed out. There was a male bus driver, us, and 8 women. It was a very bumpy ride, very curvy ride, a somewhat-dangerous ride, but we made it. I spoke to a woman from Germany who spent the last year traveling around the world by herself. Costa Rica was her final location. We arrived at our hostel at about 6:30 PM to the entire 8 or so member family hanging out in the driveway. A little intimidating.
They are very kind and helpful. We even can use the computer I use not and can store items in the fridge (which is great when it´s always 80 to 90 degrees). We just bought about 6 gallons of water from the local market and put it in their fridge :)
We had some stress trying to determine where to go and visit over the next five days, as this hostel serves as our base camp. Finally, we decided to go all out and go for more expensive all-day trips that cost between $50 and $150 each rather than risk our necks on public and unreliable transport.
Man, I am sweating so much right now! Whew. Our room has three beds, and somehow a hole in our ceiling that is covered by the external roof 10 feet higher. Hard to explain. We can lock our rooms, we like the owners, and we have our own room.
Tomorrow we will head to the bank, the market, and the tourist places (we think the owner is only selling the activities where he will get a royalty). At 3:00PM to 9:30 PM we are going on a guided tour of Arenal National Park and the Baldi Hot Springs for $50. Catch you tomorrow!
Aust & Matt
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