Viva le Visa --- Costa Rica, Jan 2019

Xavier arrived in December to move to the US for his job and to be with me, but we learned that his visa starting in January would mean he would have to leave the country and return again within a certain time frame. So, we used this as an excuse to take a trip to Costa Rica.
Our first instinct was to go somewhere neither of us had been before, but I had only visited CR's Pacific coast and had so many places I still wanted to see on the Caribbean. Additionally, I had enough knowledge of the country and how to get around it that we knew it could be a more relaxing adventure before his job starts.

We arrived Friday night and stayed in a Hostel after eating at a local Central American restaurant a local had recommended to us.

Saturday, we walked across almost all of San Jose to get to the bus station because we thought it would be the best way to explore the city. We walked through some rougher areas of the city, and while asking the locals for directions (Xavier was practicing his spanish).

Does this photo remind you of a similar photo I took of Xavier? I took a photo of him in front of wings during the fête de la musique the first time we met in Marseille (Its one of my favorite photos of him and was my phone background for almost 2 years, so it was fun to take this shot!)

  We arrived at the bus station and bought some mandarins to eat for the ~ 4.5 hour bus ride to the eastern coast. It was a nicer bus than we expected, since the last bus I took from San Jose had involved a lot of chickens, standing the whole time, and only the locals. Xavier learned that if you let your girlfriend sleep on you, she may drool.

When we arrived in Puerto Viejo to the most beautiful sunset and a tempting gelato shop (Xavier had dulce de lèche and banana, while I had pineapple and mango). 

We then walked through town on the way to finding the bike shop where our Airbnb host works in order to connect with his friend who would help us find his home.
When we arrived, the bike shop was closed. When we called him unsure of where to go (we had no direct address), they said that they would send a cab for us, and we rode to a little outside of town, then up a gravel/rock road some to a empty White House under construction.

There, our Airbnb host was waiting in a 4x4. He's Italian And moved to Costa Rica after vacationing here, but speaks almost no English. He put Xavier on the front of the 4x4 wearing his 50 liter pack on his stomach, and then put me behind him holding onto his waist while I was also wearing my pack (nice to meet you!). We rode slowly up some steep rocky hills up the small mountain to a gate to see our treehouse.

The sleeping area is indoors, but the kitchen and the rest of it was outside. It was perfect!

The view of the forest fro our porch

 

Our Shower View

Sunday we woke up and walked to have breakfast in town- Callo Pinto is the local dish of rice and beans and eggs for breakfast. We visited our Airbnb host's shop to rent bikes for the week and then rode them down the coast. We stopped at any beach we found beautiful. 

We stayed in the shade while Xavier cracked coconuts to eat and I flirted with the local dogs. All the dogs here are so sweet and calm. They're very independent and roam around with their own daily agendas and dog friends they like to visit.
 
 

We stopped at the supermarket and walked the steep uphill path back home. Xavier cut our pineapple and we made a coconut, pineapple, & rum smoothie while we got ready to go to dinner at a Caribbean cuisine restaurant nearby. 

The next day, we went to Caribbean’s for a coffee plantation tour. Our guide was from the area and a journalist by trade, but came back to the area to grow her ancestors' cacao.

We learned so much about the culture of the area and the importance of cacao. The local tribes view chocolate as cleansing and used it in their daily life in addition to birth, death, and marriage rituals.
 

They have been fighting a cocoa tree fungus epidemic with two methods: creating hybrid trees (pink, orange, blue, and white) and letting the fungus cocoa fruits rot on the ground at a tree's base to slowly immunize it against the fungus over a long period.

We ate some tree termites and they tasted like lemon leaves. Our guide taught us that some of the local tribes use them to flavor their chocolate like lemon.


 

We had the opportunity to eat the raw beans and cocoa butter from the area where they were drying them on the mountainside - the beans were bright purple! The more expensive beans were white, because hey have the most cocoa butter.

We continued our hike and then tasted the chocolate bars of each of the different farmers on the mountaintop. All were 72% cocoa and 28% cane sugar from the area. We tasted and rated each according to our preference. Each lacked preservatives and all the flavors were different and unique in subtle ways (like wines). There were even tasting stations to add combinations of salt, spices, etc to the chocolate and make your own mixture.

 

We tried drinking chocolate, which (in this area) is a mix of allspice, cayenne, honey, vanilla, and chocolate.

The next morning, we rode our bikes to the Jaguar rescue center

The Jaguar rescue center was remarkable. It is run all by donations. There are over 500 animals there' their main goal is to rehabilitate the animals for return to the wild.

Our tour was guided by a woman who is receiving her PhD in sloths, and she is the only sloth PhD so far. We learned many interesting facts about this unique animal and the current challenges it faces with environmental changes.

Sloths:

• The rescue center receives about one sloth per day due to electrical transformers injuring them, people injuring them, and their frailty with global warming environment changes.
• The rescue center just purchased tracking collars to be able to drop the sloths further away when they release them (they often try to return, and the center likes to check on them).
• Sloths take about one month to digest one leaf. When they need to have a bowel movement, they have a specific "poop dance" where they grind up and down on the tree, then lose roughly 1/3 of their body weight in the act. Scientists cannot understand why sloths feel so inclined to come down from the trees (where they would be very safe) for their bowel movements, as that is when they are the most vulnerable to predators and completely defenseless. 
• Large populations of sloths have been born without limbs or other mutations due to pesticides and inbreeding caused by human deforestation.
• If it gets too cold  (think global warming and a weather change by a few degrees) they can’t warm their body temperature/maintain homeostasis and their metabolism completely stops (as if they are in a coma). The bacteria in their stomach & intestines die, and they can no longer digest. It takes intensive care to recover a sloth from this.

Capucin monkeys

• They have the biggest brain to body ratio of any monkey in South America. 
• They can undo padlocks with keys. At the rescue center, they learned the combo to the padlock by watching and let themselves out. They then opened all the enclosures for the other animals and then locked themselves back in their enclosure.
• In one of the national parks, these monkeys send the females to pose for photos for tourists while the males steal whats in their purse. 
• In order to have the monkeys stay in the wild when released and not return, they carry 30 monkeys to the 'jungle school' each day and let the females flirt with wild monkeys. The female stays out overnight and has a "walk of shame" home several days later.
  When they female becomes pregnant, she will stay with her new wild family.

Other Rescue Center animal facts and occurrences:

• They are not allowed to release the parrots who have been owned by humans or taught words before back into the wild per the Costa Rican govn't, as they are worried that the parrots would teach wild parrots human words they have learned and it would terrify tourists/locals.
• The government also won't allow them to release a baby crocodile they have because they are worried he will try to return to the same area or eat locals some day. He lives with turtles, one of which likes to sit on his head and bully him. 
• During a kids' tour, an iguana fell from a tree onto the back of the crocodile, who ate it and then began shaking it in his mouth. The iguana bits were shaken onto the touring children, who went running around the center screaming. I asked if they then had to make a rehabilitation center for these kids with PTSD.
• The eyelash pit vipers give birth to 30 different babies and have all 13 colors possible for offspring at once.
• Costa Rica is one of the top producers of antivenin for snakes in the world.
• There’s a deer named chai that likes to sneak up and lick the back of people’s legs. Deer "imprint" quickly and think that they’re humans. They also have a naughty pig who likes to escape and chase people on their bicycles (and children to bite ankles).
• The "sand box tree" seed pods explode like dynamite and their spikes act like a bullet to kill people. They can be released at ~90mph

We met a new friend interested in our smoothies!

After our tour, we rode our bikes over 15 km to Manzanillo and enjoyed the beautiful beaches there.

On the way, we rode past one of the guys that i met when i was last visiting here. What are the chances? He had stayed in Costa Rica for the last year because he liked visiting so much.

We found trees to hand the hammock on and watched the waves. 

Afterwards, we biked the same distance back to Puerto Viejo. My bike tire was going flat and the bike back was way harder! We went to a restaurant that was suggested to us by a local who works there. We had tacos and passion fruit caipirinha.

After dinner, we walked on the beach and then returned to our jungle tree house.  I began to feel a little ....queasy. It slowly began to dawn on me that I had gotten food poisoning.

This was the worst.stomach.virus.I.have.ever.had. I spent the night projectile vomiting off the jungle tree house porch while Xavier held me upright.  I’d wake up at least once an hour and yell “babe!” And he’d throw he door open for me to run out and barely make it over the balcony.
It was a long night, and the next day I could hardly stand up without vomiting. Xavier was feeling a little sick as well (although he hadn't had but a bite or so of my meal). Since we had no food at the AirBnB, he managed to walk down our little mountain into town and to a store where he bought me chicken noodle soup and watermelon and other foods to get my strength back. He gets the boyfriend of the year award.

Meanwhile, I laid in the treehouse and watched out sloth friend in the trees.
He was right outside of our window! In the whole day of me being sick, he and I moved the same amount- not at all. It was quite hillarious that my only entertainment of the day was to watch a sloth move less than 2 meters in the trees and eat a few leaves.

(Remember the sand box tree? the exploding bullet seed pods that can kill you? We realized, while laying sick for hours, that there was one right next to the porch- I guess ignorance was bliss?)

Our Airbnb host also brought us bread and was a huge help. When he heard where we had eaten the night before he looked shocked... there apparently was a shooting at that restaurant right after we left and it was now closed.

The next day, when I was recovered, we woke up and rode to Cahuita National Park to enjoy more sun and sand before taking the bus back to San Jose for our flight home.

 

This trip culminated in the release of Maggie Rogers’ album-which I'd been waiting for for months. We listened together on our flight home.

Little did we know that the first day back in the states we would adopt our baby Napoléon :)