This time we didn’t choose the easy option, which would have been a direct 3-hour boat ride. Instead, we left at 8 in the morning, taking one boat and four different buses (for a third of the price). We arrived at 7 in the evening. A bed and a bathroom hardly ever felt that good before.

Hotel Novelty Playa is a bit out of town, but definitely worth staying there! Host Luis (from Albacete, Spain) is super-nice, the rooms (there are only three!) are gorgeous, and you’ll never want to leave that balcony.

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Getting to Tortuguero was a bus-bus-boat trip, partly on the “Caribbean Highway”, a wide water canal in the Eastern part of the Tortuguero National Park.

Equipped with flash lights and rubber boots, we did a night hike through the rain forest. Our guide Victor was fantastic in spotting animals which would otherwise have escaped our notice: tiny frogs, an enormous bull frog (who can swallow chicken and snakes as a whole!), obelisks, grasshoppers, lizards, termites and their nest, a woolly opossum, dangerous spiders and jumping tarantulas.

We almost didn’t manage to get our shot of the world’s most photographed frog, the red-eyed tree frog. It wasn’t until our way back to the village, when Victor spotted a tiny exemplary of one of the red-eyed tree frog’s varieties.

Fortunately, we didn’t dream of spiders that night. We were probably just too tired.

The next day started early: By 6:15 am, we were already sitting in a lancha with four other people and a guide and were exploring the wildlife of Tortuguero’s waterways. We saw huge iguanas, lizards, caimans and all kinds of birds including tucans and parrots.

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Costa Rica’s capital feels like a mixture of a medium-sized US-American and a large Spanish city. Outlets, US chains, better, bigger and more expensive cars all contrasted sharply with what we were used to see in Nicaragua.

Not too thrilled about the city, we spent most of our time getting some work done in the comfortable patio of Casa 69.

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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!

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