Why You Should Visit Costa Rica (2/2)
February 29, 2008 – 9:05 pmHere are some highlights of adventures I personally experienced:
Rappelling down a waterfall is utterly fun and absolutely safe—unless you’re like me who almost fell, in which case it was still at least utterly fun. I’m a city boy, so galloping on a horse was perhaps the scariest thing I had done in my life up to that point. Ziplining comes in a variety of heights and distances. It’s technically ziplining even if you just swing across a park holding a crossbar gear that’s sliding across a length of rope, even if there is sand just a few feet below you. What I did was sliding across over a hundred feet of hard wire with a thick forest over a thousand feet below me. That was pretty cool.
Do you see that white dot? It’s the helmet I had to wear while ziplining. The rest of that smudge is me.
These things you can probably do in America too, but they’re certainly a lot more affordable in Costa Rica. You might think about the plane ticket (if you’re used to flying across the Pacific or Atlantic, then the ticket will actually seem cheap), but there’s a sure-fire way to make your trip financially worthwhile. Need some expensive dental work done? Go to Costa Rica. The doctors there will do it for a fraction of the American price. Even including the plane ticket, you would be saving money. The dental work in Costa Rica is excellent. I never saw a bad smile when I was there.
The Cloud Forest in Monteverde is stunning. When you get to the top, you can see the Continental Divide that runs from Colorado all the way to Panama. Have any ideas why they call it the Cloud Forest?
If you want something a little more…natural (you’ll come to realize that “natural” is a buzzword that tourist agencies use for packages in Costa Rica) than an indoor spa, then how about a hot spring powered by a volcano that you can see in the distance? The natural hot spring I went to (sorry, no longer remember the name), the higher up you go, the hotter it gets. I was never able to stay in the topmost spring for too long. Part of the fun is having that exploring-the-jungle feeling as you walk across real rock and push through leaves to find new hot springs of varying sizes and temperatures. On the bottom, you could swim up to a bar and buy drinks. Near the top, squint and you can see the glow of the lava flowing down. Don’t worry. Take note of the “squint” part. The mouth of the volcano itself is quite far away.
Many resorts in Costa Rica boast being “all natural.” Well, they certainly come a lot closer than most resorts in most countries. At one particular resort, Selva Bananito, there’s no electricity (but there is hot water). When you go to dinner, it’s all candlelit, and you need to take off your shoes before you can step on the wooden floor. You have to use their soap, shampoo, and conditioner because the drainage system goes to the plants, and the owner (it was a German guy when I went) doesn’t want them to be contaminated by any products that are less than all natural, even if they’re bio-degradable. An environmentalist’s dream.
My favorite resort of all the ones I stayed at is La Playa Ocotal. Despite being a city boy (or maybe because of it), I love natural sceneries, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Every morning, you have breakfast outside overlooking the Pacific Ocean from upclose. At night, you have a candlelit dinner inside (it’s too windy at night even during the summer to dine outside) while listening to the melodies of the ocean.
Relatively speaking, Costa Rica is a less-oft visited destination. It won’t stay that way for long, not with the government and businesses touting “eco-tourism” in Costa Rica, which with all due credit is one of the only countries in the world that can honestly tout something called “eco-tourism.” So if you want to see this beautiful country before it becomes another Venice, this is why you should visit Costa Rica…now.
