Rainy Quepos, Costa Rica (Nov 23, 2010)

After a good night's rest, we got up early in the morning and left the hotel from Monteverde to drive to Quepos. Our drive took us through some beautiful mountains and clouds. We arrived in Quepos around evening time and settled into our hotel to get some rest.

Soaring through Monteverde skies (Nov 22, 2010)

We woke up early in the morning since we knew that we had a long day ahead of us. Today we would visit the cloud forest of Monteverde. I was hearing a lot from my friends about how amazing cloud forests are and we would enjoy the hike.

Once we got to the entrance, we bought our tickets and waited for our tour guide. In the meantime, four other Americans joined us as well. It seemed that the guide would be taking the seven of us for the guided tour of the forest.

Reptiles in Monteverde (Nov 21st, 2010)

Today we left La Fortuna for Monteverde but before our departure, we realized how amazing the view of the Arenal Volcano was from our hotel. Being photography geeks and all, we pulled out the tripod I had brought along with me and Omar took some great shots with his DSLR and I snapped a few pictures from my cannon as well.

After packing up and checking out, we started the drive from La Fortuna towards Monteverde. It was interesting to realize that the line-of-sight distance from La Fortuna to Monteverde is very small, however, there is no direct route to Monteverde. One possibility was to take a taxi to a boat to a taxi to get from La Fortuna to Monteverde. Since we had a rental car, we could not take this route and hence we had to resort to the only other option, to drive all the way around Lake Arenal to get to Monteverde.

Arenal Volcano (Nov 20th, 2010)

Arenal Volcano

November 21st, 2010

We woke up early in the morning knowing that we had lots to do during the day. After eating the tasty breakfast at the hotel, we headed out towards the volcano hike that we had explored the night before. We arrived at the same entrance to the hike and the previous night's tickets were valid for today so we were able to enter quickly. It had been raining on and off all morning so the trails were all muddy.


After crossing the hanging bridge, we made our way towards the lookout point closest to the volcano. As we climbed up, I realized how my time at the gym was going to come handy during this trip. I think if I hadn't been frequenting the gym, I would be unable to finish this hike.

First Day in Costa Rica (Nov 19th, 2010)

November 20th, 2010

After our little adventure in Panama City and a near-miss of the flight to Costa Rica, we arrived in San Jose in the late hours of the night. As we landed, our manual driver, aka Omar, became really sick due to lack of sleep from finishing up his work prior to the trip. Once we had our luggage, we made our way to the car rental agencies and asked about prices and car conditions. Eventually we settled on a rental company and they drove us to their offices to get the paper work done.

Some of the people advised us not to drive at night to La Fortuna since we did not know the roads or the language. However, being head strong about our schedule, we rented an automatic transmission 4WD and a GPS system and proceeded to drive to La Fortuna. Pointers on car rental: never rent older model cars. We learned this the hard way, however the car served us well through our trip in Costa Rica.