Monteverde was our first stop in Costa Rica. Getting to Monteverde is a bit inconvenient, coming from Nicaragua. The public bus option includes a trip to San José to catch the connection to Monteverde, which you could do on the same day if you start really early. We went for option #2, more expensive, but faster: We took a local bus from the Costa Rican side of the border to Liberia, spent almost three hours there, and took a pre-booked shuttle van that dropped us off at our hostel in Santa Elena.

Pension Santa Elena in Monteverde region’s main town Santa Elena was a friendly and relaxed hostel packed with young (mostly US and German) backpackers. We even got to enjoy one of their Saturday night live music sets they have during the weeks coming up to Christmas: A keyboard, a sax and a wonderful female singer performing Christmas songs (including Stille Nacht and Oh Tannenbaum in German!) put us into something like a Christmas spirit while we were having burritos, guacamole, chips and local Imperial beer for dinner.

We had only one day in Monteverde which spent doing a canopy tour in the protected cloud forest reserve. Monteverde is considered the best region in Central America to do canopy tours, which basically means ziplining on cables suspended on trees across the firest or high above the tree tops. We went with 100% Aventura, who feature the longest zipline in Latin America (> 1.5 kilometers!) and the Tarzan Swing—a free fall for almost three (looooong) seconds before you start to swing back and forth. You can call us Tarzan and Tarzan now!