Quest to See the World

Yesterday after dropping Mom off at the airport I wasn´t sure where I was going to head next, so I sat in the air conditioned car rental office and figured it out with the help of my guide books. I decided to head toward Poás volcano and stay there for the night. I wanted to end up in the town of Vara Blanca, but could only make it as far as Poasito 6km away. I got there around 1pm. It was very green up there with a mist hovering around town and the temperature was cool. There are a lot of coffee farms in the area. I had lunch at some restaurant and asked about the bus schedule. No one really knew exactly what time or if there was another one going to where i wanted to go. My plan was to get close to La Paz waterfall park so that i could go early this morning, but it didn´t work out. I walked around a little and waited for 2 hours, but no bus. I was going to walk, but it started to rain and i was tired from getting up early the couple of days before. I was thinking about staying in some place up in the town where I was, but it was only 3pm and i had already seen everything and was full, so i didn´t need to eat and i didn´t know what i would do for another 7 hours, so I decided to hop the next bus back to San José and take advantage of the time to update my blog and upload some pics, so that´s what i did. I had also figured out that i took the wrong route up to the area and realized that i would need to take a different bus route up the next morning and the bus terminal was just a few blocks from the hostel in san jose. I sat in front of a computer for 5 hours last night, but i needed to because it´s been a while.

This morning I woke up late, at 6am and hopped the 6:30am bus headed to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí, where i am right now. I had read about the waterfall garden and thought that it would be some commercialized natury place, but there are 4 waterfalls and i really love them and wanted to go. they also have a ranario where you can see different types of colorful frogs in their natural-like habitat. I arrived at 8:30pm before the hordes of people on tour buses. The kid at the front desk was impressed with my Spanish skills and decided to charge me as a local-cool, I saved $10. He stashed my big pack for me too while i walked around. The next bus was going to pass by until 3pm and i thought that i´d be sitting around bored by then, but i was wrong. there was so much to see at this place, it was awesome. there was hardly anyone there and they had a ton more things than i knew about. There was a large butterfly enclosure with a lot of tropical flowers and butterflies all around, the frog place where i could take pics of frogs that weren´t behind glass, and orchid garden, a hummingbird garden, an enormous aviary where toucans and macaws and other birds where flying around (the birds had been saved from illegal trade), an old style house with oxen pulling one of the fancily painted oxcarts, 5 huge waterfalls with trails in the jungle leading to them, and i mean in the jungle, I didn´t have enough time and both of my camera batteries ran out of power! I was so in the jungle that I almost stepped on a TARANTULA on the walkway to the waterfall. It was crazy. The place was pristine, not commercialized looking, serene, peaceful. it was just great! After I walked all of the trails available to me I walked down a windy road to a bridge where i could see cars passing by the bottom of the the lowest waterfall. after i got down there i realized that my tour bus had stopped at the same spot 10 years ago when i was here and i have pics of that last waterfall, but the waterfall garden place wasn´t in existence at the time. I´m glad they built that place because there are 4 more waterfalls up above that no one would be able to see otherwise. The developers did a good job of not disturbing the natural beauty very much when building. I could just hear the roar of the waterfalls and see the bright green vegetation with the mountain mist slowing moving in. There are a couple of suspension bridges in there too. It was a wonderful day today-very relaxing and peaceful, all to myself, not a worry in the world.

At 3pm I caught the bus to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí more to the north. Not sure what tomorrow holds, but i´m going to get some good rest tonight.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Central America 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.