Today we headed on the taxi-boat-taxi ride from Arenal to Monteverde. WOW, just WOW. Too many people crammed onto a boat, three to a seat with luggage piled up in a corner, then over an hour on another unpaved stone road, for one of the longest rides ever. The trip to from Arenal to Monteverde was an adventure in itself! The scenery was AMAZING on the way to Monteverde. Green lush rolling hills everywhere, it was like a scene in a film that was computer generated. The vision was so picture perfect it all felt surreal, it was perfect just perfect. A girl in our van got stung by a wasp, glad it wasn’t me! Between Dallas’ near broken toe, my falls and our dozen mosquito bites we couldn’t handle any more injuries.
The town of Monteverde is in a cloud forest. We stayed at Hotel Heliconia which we were told was a nice hotel. Boy are our standards high, we were miserable! Cute like cabins, the floors squeaked everywhere, you can hear next door through the thin walls, there was no heat, hardly any towels, no hairdryer, a spurting toilet, a light bulb openly in the shower, and NO DOORKNOBS coming into the room, weird. The construction was unfinished and half of the shower was wasted. Also, we had to shove a q-tip into the front door to stop the wind from banging it around it’s hinges all night. I understand that you aren’t supposed to flush toilet paper in many parts of the country but that just grosses me out because you’re supposed to be in a nice hotel and then have to deal with the lingering smells. The hilarious part was you had to pay $3 for a safe key, but the safe wasn’t attached to anything, you can walk right out with them if you wanted to – see hilarious photo. For the last 5 days Dallas had allergies, lucky for him when we went to Monteverde his allergies went away. Unlucky for me, I had them for the next 3 days! *sigh* People should send a memo to all hotels to tell them that FABRIC SOFTENER IS A WATER REPELLANT. Therefore, using softener on towels makes them bad towels. Bad towels with no hairdryer for a gal with over two feet of hair makes for an unhappy girl.
BUT the hotel was in town which was wonderful we were able to walk to restaurants and shops, hooray! Today we tried to walk around town to find an internet café where we could print vouchers for our activity tomorrow. SIX places with internet and not a single printer!!! That was really aggravating. Walking on the side of the road with cars only 6 inches to the side of you and the smell of diesel made Dallas ill. I thought it was wonderful fun actually and really a part of the adventure. He didn’t want to die though by getting hit by a car, whatever, party foul! ;-)
We went to a restaurant across the street, Chimera. It was a wonderful change of pace to the casadas we were having. It was a Spanish tapas restaurant and we were in heaven. Coconut shrimp, coconut mojito, slow cooked white beans and pork, coconut rice, chocolate mousse, chipotle onion rings and mango sorbet. Heaven. We really appreciate sophisticated food when our adventures were taking a toll on our spirits. Because of this we realized that we can NEVER be backpackers, it’s definitely and amazing traveling style and we do realize we are in the minority in these parts. We have found that people who travel to Costa Rica appear to be more experienced travelers, people don’t usually come here as a first vacation location. After lunch we went to a bakery for some sweets. I can’t stop eating!!
Our event tonight was the twilight tour / night walk. It was a guided tour at night so you could see the day animals coming in and the nocturnal animals coming out. We saw two tarantulas, a sloth, a wolf spider, lots of birds and a porcupine (I think). Our guide Javier was wonderful, articulate and personable. It was scary at times, you were walking around in the dark forest with just a teeny flashlight!
We decided to have dinner at the hotel and had an amazing lobster (finally, for only $26 too) that rivaled my favorite lobster in Newport Beach (lobster en fuego). Seriously, my favorite food on the planet. COCONUT flan!!! This was the 4th coconut flan of the trip and was my favorite!!! I need to learn how to make this stuff. And tres leches cake, YUM.
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