(Costa Rica part I – Long post alert)

This trip was booked on the spur of the moment, after promising my friend Shelly that I would visit her in Costa Rica. Shelly and I go way, way back, having worked together for over a decade. A few years ago, she got married (I was her man-maiden of honour) and moved to Costa Rica, where she now lives with her family.

As the trip drew nearer, I realised I hadn’t put much energy into planning it. I didn’t do the usual, check out the sites, scope the best and easiest ways of getting around or look for places to stay when I wasn’t with Shelly. A few days before I was due to leave I got my arse in gear and booked a hotel that on the surface looked like what I needed for that point in my life – a jungle lodge, nestled on the side of a mountain away from civilisation (we’ll come back to this later).

You see, it was a semi-stressful time. Work was a chore, I had a few resignations due to poor decision-making and communication from senior management and I was being strung around when it came to getting replacements. By mid-August, I followed my team and decided to leave the company for pastures anew.

I resigned the day I was due to leave on vacation and went out singing Beyonce’s ‘Break My Soul’, yep true story. Google the lyrics and don’t judge me!

After a few last-minute hitches, late-night packing, and driving like an idiot at 5:00 am to Malaga for my first flight, I made it to Madrid without losing my mind.

Now I’m not ashamed to say that I am a bit snobby when I travel. I’m usually a VIP lounge and 4-star hotel kinda guy, you know, living above my means and all that but this trip was planned to be different from my norm, but with a 5-hour layover, I reverted to the lounge… (Airport booze is pricey) It was 5 O’clock somewhere, right?

It was almost an 11-hour flight from Madrid to San Jose and I needed sleep, so I decided to knock myself out with a few (5) cheeky Gin & Tonics, strategically downed to coincide with the flight. This is where it started to go wrong…

While drinking and chatting to a few friends, this guy sat opposite me and said ‘Hi’ and dived into his phone. Perfect I thought, I dislike speaking to random people, unless I approach them (I told you I was snooty). By the time I looked up again, this animal had removed his shoes and sat there in the lounge barefoot!

Like, who does that, was he raised by sheep? Shoes off in a public space? WHYYYYYYYY?

Thankfully, it was almost time for me to board so I knocked another drink back and left with an utter look of disgust on my face. I’m not sure if that was due to the bare feet or the gin, but let’s just refer to it as ‘resting Sym face’.

So, do you remember me saying that I hadn’t planned this trip properly? Well, it dawned on me when I sat in my seat. I googled the distance of the hotel from the airport, 96km… not bad I thought until I saw that it would take 2 hours and 45 minutes to get there according to google maps! Not only that, but I hadn’t arranged an airport pickup with the hotel. I frantically sent the hotel multiple emails, trying to arrange the pickup, in the hopes that they would read it and send someone to the airport by the time I landed. I mean they had 11 hours to do it, right?

I land in San Jose (the G&Ts didn’t work), tired and grumpy, checked my phone and no response to my emails. I walk outside and pranced up and down the taxi/bus line, looking for someone holding up my name. Nada, zip, zilch, zero I had to take a taxi!

I jump into the taxi and explained to the driver where I wanted to go, she types the address in WAZE and mutters an ‘Hay que vey ‘under her breath, then looks around smiled and asked if she could pick up her husband to take him on the drive because she didn’t want to do it on her own. I’m like sure, why not. I mean I was dead tired; it was already 18 hours since I had left my house and I just wanted to get to the hotel.

She picks her husband up, and both are yapping away in Spanish, with me just sitting there in the back thinking they’re gonna take my kidneys or sell me into slavery. Thankfully, I understood most of what they were saying and realised that my Spanish wasn’t that bad. Either that or I was deluded.

We’re zipping through the streets; the husband keeps calling random people and handing the phone over to the wife who is driving she’s having conversations with them and I’m getting pissed off (I did not want to die on the first night).

As we left the city and started going up the mountains, the visibility rapidly decreased as the jungle fog rolled in. I shit you not when I say that if we could see 20 feet ahead, we were lucky. But this woman kept speeding around the bends, up the mountains and down through the pitch-black valleys.

All the while the taxi meter keeps ticking over.

We finally get to the Arenal region of Costa Rica and WAZE directed her to take a turn off the main road and up a dirt path on a mountain. We trudged up this dirt path for what seemed an eternity, before getting to the lodge. I later came to find out that it was 4km away from the main road. The cost? 91,000 Colones or almost €150!

I checked in quickly, ordered something to eat and scoffed it down as I only had 20 minutes to do so – the staff needed to leave to go home and I was pretty much dead.

La Tigra Jungle Lodge

The morning after the night before…I woke up in my cottage, it was not 4-stars, but more like 1 star and that star was due to the balcony and view. I was so tired the night before that I didn’t realise I had a room with 2 bunk beds. To set the scene for you, there was only 1 ‘real’ wall and that supported the bathroom. The other 3 walls of my cabin were made of retractable plastic sheeting. So essentially, I was a curtain away from the outdoors.

But like I said, I wanted to do something different to my norm, the views were nice enough though. It’s an eco-lodge, with its own sustainable vegetable garden, hiking trails, a plant nursery and a creek on the property. There were lots of wild birds, a few species of bees and a shit load of insects. Idyllic, if you love that kind of thing. I was booked in for 4 days.

After having breakfast, I decided to explore the property and headed down one of the hiking trails. I found myself wandering from path to path, in my own little world in the middle of this jungle with no mobile signal but gleefully snapping pics.

It was awesome and fit exactly what I told myself I needed. Away from hoards of tourists and into the wild to reconnect with my senses that had been battered after 9 months of working in the most dysfunctional of companies.  What I didn’t account for, was the jungle heat. Sweet baby Jesus it was hot!

The humidity had me sweating like a ‘priest on trial’. I made my way back to my room, changed and decided to head to the pool, that was more than enough nature for one day.

After leaving the pool, it was time to have a nap. But by the time I woke up at 5 pm, it was already dark outside. I had forgotten that the sun sets early in the tropics. I went to the reception to ask how I could get to the nearest town for a bit of nightlife. She told me it was 27km away and that a taxi there and back was €90!

There was no way I would pay that, especially since I couldn’t be sure that it was worth it, I was in the middle of nowhere after all.

I checked into what day tours were on offer – they had some cool ones, like visiting an active volcano, going to a waterfall and hot springs or walking through the forest canopy on hanging bridges. There was a package that combined all four of those or you could do them individually. There was also a zipline and a day trip to Nicaragua on offer. All seemed good, but they all also came with the €90 surcharge to get up and down the mountain. Something the buggers didn’t mention on their Hotels.com posting!

I wasn’t going to pay the surcharge more than once, so took the combo package, which cost a cool €400, almost as much as I had paid for my flights from Spain! Trust me when I tell you that I did that with gritted teeth and a pain in my heart, but I needed to do it.

I had an early dinner (Another Casado), downloaded something on Netflix and had an early night – jungle & chill.

The tour was going to be long, a minimum of 14 hours and I was being picked up at 6:30 am. I woke up, got ready and jumped in my ride, without having breakfast or even coffee (The kitchen opens at 7:30 am).

We drive down the dirt path and again it takes ages, I started thinking that the €90 cost was because they had to replace their suspension after every trip to the lodge.

I arrived at the central meeting point and met the other guests, a collection of Americans; two older couples possibly early 50s, who are friends and travelled together, a retired teacher from Surinam, me and another American couple. The older couple introduced themselves, they were from Ohio and seemed pleasant. The teacher also introduced himself and the other couple just sat on their own, the husband seemed to be in a huff and the wife was just doing her own thing. I overheard them telling the older couple that they were from Texas.

I was starving, sitting on the bus and pretending that I spoke German to avoid speaking to those Americans. I really couldn’t be bothered talking to anyone while I was hungry. The bus dropped us off at the beginning of the trail, the guide explained the route we would take, gave us all water and off we went.

Arenal Volcano

The perfect cone – It’s steaming at the top!

While trekking to the viewpoint of the volcano, I got the distinct whiff of Guava in the air. I looked over, saw a loaded tree and off I went, picking and eating guavas like a savage, but I was hungry and didn’t give a crap what anyone thought. One of the older couples started talking to me ‘Do you speak English she asked, what does it taste like’, she continued. I had no choice but to break my German cover and respond to her in English, explaining what I picked and ate, and what it tasted like.

Our guide points out all of the birds, plants, trees and fruits. She was fantastic, not €400 fantastic, but fantastic nonetheless. We spent an hour trekking, 5 minutes taking pics and then back down we went.

On the hike back down, the American couple started speaking to me again, asking for more information about Guavas and where I had been on previous trips. When I said I had been to 60 countries, she was in disbelief and her husband asked what I did for a living, ‘Import, export‘ I responded, nosey buggers. We find her a couple of Guavas and the conversation continued until she mentioned that they supported Trump and that Europe was going to feel it in the winter for being woke with Putin.

I ended the conversation with a ‘girl bye‘, a resting Sym face and walked off back to the bus. I didn’t utter another word to them after that. Thankfully, they only did the first part of the tour to the volcano and left back to their hotel.

La Fortuna Waterfall

We move to the second leg of the tour, La Fortuna Waterfall. La Fortuna Waterfall – 246 feet / 75 meters high!

It was beautiful, not as beautiful or as mesmerising as the falls I’ve seen in Bali but beautiful nonetheless. You could hear the water crashing down to the pool below, from 100 meters away. At the viewpoint, the retired teacher kept asking me to take pics of him, I saw a sign that said 520 steps to the bottom! I absolutely hate steps – but the choice was to go to the bottom of the pool, or stay there and be his photographer. I was determined to get every penny of that €400! Yeah, you’re right, I am not and will never let that go!

The trek back up the 520 steps was torture but had to be done.

We finished the falls earlier than expected and left for lunch, which was very good. The ceviche was amazing, but I was hungry and ate it before I managed to take a pic. But another Casado was had.

After lunch, we left for the third leg of the tour, ‘The Hanging bridges’. But we were ahead of schedule, so they took us to La Fortuna town, to kill time on the way to the park. It’s a sleepy little town with a conical volcano domineering the landscape.

The Hanging Bridges of La Fortuna

It’s mid-afternoon and I am knackered but chugging along. We get to the park and the guide gives us a briefing. She explains that there are multiple species of birds, bees, insects, monkeys and snakes living in the park. She mentioned that there was an Ocelot sighting two weeks prior and other animals were being spotted but not photographed. Most importantly she said ‘let me go first, as there are a lot of small venomous snakes that sometimes stay on the path and I don’t want you to get bitten’.

I’m like ‘say what now?’ She goes on to explain that there are multiple constrictors and vipers found in Costa Rica and that there have been multiple viper sightings in the park, that these particular snakes came in 25 colours and that a bite from which is fatal unless you receive the anti-venom within 2 hours.

I did the Caribbean thing and said to myself ‘not my black ass‘, moved to the middle of the queue and stayed right there for the whole tour.

Someone needed to tell the story of how the others died and I was determined to make that storyteller be me! The Texan couple were not the friendliest of people, I’m sure they could have made a good meal for a snake or two. Then she pointed out a baby Yellow Pit Viper sat on a leaf hunting its prey. That was it for me, I was done, thanks take me back to the bus!

I’m serious, I was done! I moved a bit more quickly and got myself back to the park entrance and waited for them to return. It was late afternoon and I still had the last leg, the hot springs to do. It was amazing and sometimes, terrifying… and I have no issue with heights. We saw multiple birds, Capuchin monkeys, and the cutest little bees, farming ants, all while hearing the Howler monkeys in the background.

12 hours into the tour, I was dead tired and smelt like I had played 10 consecutive football games after dumpster diving, when we got to the last stop, Tabacon Hot Springs Hotel. It was a fantastic hotel, with the service to match. I got my locker, meal voucher and towel, then headed to the showers.

As I was just about to head to the springs, the night skies opened and a downpour, with lightning and thunder, started. The attendants pulled everyone from the spring, fearing a lightning strike.

Herby enters the scene!

There were scores of people at the springs, but notably only two black people, myself and another guy, Herby.

I know his name because he approached me just outside the showers while I waited for the rain to stop. I was way too tired to pull out my German accent again so I responded in English. Initially, I was thinking to myself, ‘Dude, please leave me alone, I’m not in the mood to speak to anyone’. But he was pleasant and inquisitive and the conversation flowed. We must have been there standing and talking for about 45 minutes before we were all allowed back into the springs once the rain passed.

Turns out, he was on his first solo trip, also at the hot springs for the end of his day and he was amazed when I told him how many places I had been. He suggested that I started a blog to ‘tell my stories ‘.

We continued speaking, and all the while I felt like a prick for wanting to brush him away initially. We went to one of the hot springs and kept conversing about everything from solo travelling, to politics, to me rubbing European socialism in his American capitalistic face (in a joking manner of course) and explaining how unemployment and vacation days work in Gibraltar & Spain. We must have spoken for 2 hours non-stop before we swapped LinkedIn and parted ways. It was a very unexpected encounter but capped off a very good day.

It wasn’t the first time that I was on a trip/tour and bumped into another black person who just wanted to speak to someone like them. I still get amazed when it happens though, as I am not exactly warm and friendly looking.

My driver picks me up and I head back to the lodge, it had been 16 hours since I left, and when I returned at 10:34 pm, it was pitch black, all the staff had left for the day. It was a shower and bed, I overdid it that day.

The following day was spent at the lodge, partially because I was tired but mostly because I refused to pay the €90 taxi fee again. Say what you like, but it’s the principle! I decided that day to take Herby’s advice and start my blog and here we are!

On my last day, it was another €150 taxi ride back to the airport in San Jose. But this time to head to Cahuita to visit my BFF, Shelly! (End of Part 1 of 2)