hotel

Our Hotel

The tour starts with a meeting tonight, so we have the whole day to ourselves. The guys slept until 1 pm, hopefully beating back some of their colds. Quesadillas for lunch around the pool, and then Sarah, Eric and I headed out for some touring of our own. Kevin stayed back at the hotel to keep fighting off his cold.

We took a cab to the National Museum and learned some of the history of Costa Rica and Central America. The highlight, though, was visiting their butterfly garden – an enclosed area with about a dozen different butterflies, interesting native plants and some exotic spiders and other insects thrown in.

I’m not sure what kind of a tree this is – the plaque under it said Jacaranda, but I don’t think they grow these beans.

These giant caterpillars are about 4″ long. Sorry, don’t know what they become.

The underside of a Morphos butterfly

The top of a Morphos wing. It was lying on the ground like that, honest!

Yellow Aphids. I’m used to green ones.

After the museum and butterfly garden we took a walk around the plaza. It was a busy Sunday afternoon, but we were happy to grab a cab and head back to the hotel.

More napping, relaxing and hanging out ’til dinner, then our intro meeting with Paul the tour guide. It looks like there will be about 46 people on the tour, from all around the US.

Back in the room, Sarah and I were flipping around the TV channels, half in Spanish and half in English. We ended up watching the climactic chase sequence from one of the Dirty Harry movies on TMC. Clint was racing around Oakland and San Francisco offing bad cops in the process. After fifteen minutes Harry sent one of the cops into the San Francisco Bay – peering over the edge of the aircraft carrier’s wood runway he delivered a classic Dirty Harry line… only we couldn’t understand it. Fifteen minutes of Dirty Harry, and we didn’t know it was in Spanish!

The last stop of the day was at the some hot springs. The spot is a popular hangout for locals and tourists alike and is fed by water naturally heated by the volcano. There are a number of pools, and as you go higher up the hill the pools get hotter. We were imaging a spa-like experience of relaxing mineral pools, but instead it was very commercialized with tiled pools featuring loud 80’s rock blasting out over the in-pool bars (“wet bars”, vs. the “dry bar” near the entrance where you can sit at a table). We toured all the pools, spending most of the time in one with waterfalls and in a cooler pool below it. Interesting, but not a highlight of the trip.

Much more interesting were the elephant towels on our bed when we got back to the hotel. Towel animals showed up at a number of our hotels, but the elephants were far and away the coolest. Each one is made of a bath towel for the legs and a hand towel for the head and ears.

Elephant Towels

True.

“Pura Vida” is a common phrase in Costa Rica. Literally “Pure Life,” it is used to express happiness, approval, friendliness, and a reflection of a culture that loves life and the beautiful gifts of Costa Rica. We were taught the phrase on the first morning of the trip, and it was used liberally throughout the rest of the days (and not just by us tourists!).

This image is a time exposure painted with a Maglite flashlight.

The Doubletree is a resort-type hotel right on the beach. After checking in around 4pm we went for a walk along the beach – enjoying the beautiful weather and watching some of the locals net fishing. We followed that with a drink on the pier while watching the sun set.

Puntarenas has a gorgeous beach.

And I have a gorgeous wife.

Net fisherman.

Beach, pier, and a very bright sun.

Sunset and a cocktail.

After dinner we relaxed for a bit, then Eric and I went for a walk back out the pier. Once at the beach we saw that there was an algae bloom happening of phosphorescent algae that I’ve seen in Southern California before. When the algae get churned up they glow blue. We first saw breaking waves lighting up as if they were being hit with a spot light, then we realized what was happening. We continued out to the end of the pier, where the pilings would cause the water to light up every time a wave came by. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we started noticing bursts of blue underwater, presumably made by darting fish. Then we noticed splashes near the surface where fish would rise to eat smaller fish, then a blue streak would shoot back down deep – they looked like meteors under water. This submerged fireworks display was dazzling, and we enjoyed it for about half an hour before heading back in, sad that for the first time on the whole trip neither one of us had a camera with us.

San Jose, Costa Rica

Dirty Harry

Hot Springs and Elephant Towels

Pura Vida

Puntarenas