VERY JOLLY HOLIDAYS

We're back! (erm, it's also October, but let's ignore that and move on...)

As promised, I won't blog properly about Costa Rica, but must report that it ROCKS. We had an amazing, amazing fortnight that felt a whole lot longer.

Some Costa factoids:
- it is quite small, which makes a 2-week holiday very nice
- turtles lay eggs on the beach there and the eggs look like ping pong balls
- there are very many monkeys there, some of whom steal Pringles tins from people's bags
- there is at least one 3-legged raccoon there
- as a country, it engenders travel sickness even in those who have never previously suffered from it
- it gets dark very early there
- the nicest beer is Pilsen, but the national beer is Imperial
- Carillo Beach airport looks like a bus shelter
- I am very good at Yahtzee there. Perhaps it's the altitude. Or maybe the climate.
- the ice there is made from mineral water
- filet means fish, not the steak we thought we'd be getting (and had been dreaming about) on our last night
- I have it on good authority (Reynaldo at the car hire place) that you could build 100 houses in Costa Rica for what we paid for our flat in London

Ah, Reynaldo - we'll always have La Fortuna... He was a nice man in a car hire place who I had to spend about half an hour with while Maxy waited at our hotel for our taxi (long story). My Spanish and his English ran out at about minute #2, so we communicated via the wonders of Google Translator, typing in what we meant, waiting for the other to read it and then respond. If it had been a romcom, it would've been quite romantic. As it was, it was in a teeny office on a backstreet in central Costa Rica...

We were pretty lucky with the weather and only had solid rain in Arenal - the place with the active volcano - which made our amazing bungalow at the foot of the volcano somewhat frustrating and redundant as it was permanently shrouded in cloud. In fact, I became quite convinced that the volcano was a myth, dreamed up by the inhabitants of a town blighted by constant rain, in an attempt to attract tourists there.

However, after a hike around the volcano in rain so torrential and hardcore that we were soaked within seconds of stepping off the minibus (during which we met a fun American girl who wants to be the first female football commentator in the country), we did manage to see the volcano erupt on our last night there, which was really extremely awesome. Volcanoes are my favourite natural feature.

Our tour operator lady did us proud, by booking us into really amazing hotels - not fancy, but extremely nice and unusual and 'us'. Except for the San Jose Best Western where we spent our first night - we were mortified to find that the hotel restaurant was a Denny's (think Wimpy) and that there was a Subway (think Subway) across the road.

The hotels kind of built to a crescendo - each was a little nicer than the one before, until we got to Manuel Antonio, where our room at Hotel Costa Verde was firstly enormous, then imbedded in the jungle on one side and had a beautiful clifftop view of stunning Pacific Ocean on the other. On our first morning there, I went to peek at what the weather was doing, only to see a family of squirrel monkeys - the rarest monkeys in Costa Rica - scampering right across the huge leaves in front of our balcony! It was like those leaves were the M25 and the monkeys were all commuting, cos there were loads of them. And there were lots of squirrel monkeys just hanging out around the trees of the hotel, too.

We had a really keen and interesting guide in Tortuguero (the place in the jungle that you can only reach by water or air), called Mario. He a little bit made me cry, because people weren't that interested in what he had to say and he was painfully keen that everyone have a good time. But we had a good chat with him on our last night and it turns out that he spent 25 years living in the heart of the jungle, so knows what leaves to eat if you get stranded and stuff.

He told us this amazing story of his encounter with a jaguar, which should've killed him, but didn't. Apparently they're very antisocial creatures so if you come across one, it's because they've come to find you. Mario compared their sense of smell to when you walk into a house where roast chicken is cooking and it smells delicious - that's what the jaguar (and most other animals) smells as soon as a human sets foot in the jungle, even if they're miles away - we're that distinctive and easy to find.

Our tour in Manuel Antonio State Park was a little frustrating, because our tour guide was the only one without a telescope, which all the other guides would set up so that their group could see things like toucans up in the tree really close up, or a bug that they've spotted a few metres into the undergrowth. So we were left squinting and searching walls of tendrils and leaves for animals we could hardly make out, which was a bit annoying. As was the fact that our guide was mad for ferns. She loved the ferns. Couldn't get enough of them. Unfortunately one fern looks just the same as another to me. Except the cool one which recoils when you touch it. In the end, I just started tacking myself onto other tour groups and got a good look at lots of amazing animals, like a baby porcupine in a tree and a humming bird that was - very unusually - sitting still.

A real highlight of the trip was the private transfers that our tour operator lady had arranged for us between destinations in that first week. We had the same driver both times - Gustavo - who was bi-lingual and really nice. We had his whole minibus to ourselves for drives of 3-5 hours and just chatted the whole time, all about Costa Rica. Turns out the reason it's such an amazingly nice country is because it's got a really big middle class, so doesn't suffer from a huge discrepancy between mega-rich and desperately poor people. Also, the government isn't corrupt, which is a bonus, and they're extremely hot on preserving the environment, so don't accept mega-bucks from developers wanting to build up the coastlines into massive resorts, and tourism is very tightly controlled by the government. We felt that everywhere we went - that Costa Rica is really really green and natural and tourists are very much visitors - but none more so than in Tortuguero, where we had to ride a boat down a river through the jungle for about an hour and came to our little hotel/resort place that you could hardly see from the river - the whole place looked like a jungley wilderness. Apparently there are 14 similiarly-sized hotel/resorts along the river, but you'd never know it.

Gustavo told us about how the Nicaraguans are to Costa Rica as the Mexicans are to America, in that they're an immigrant population who get given all the crappy manual labour and how there's a huge gang movement - I think called Maras - poised to invade Costa Rica, which would be really bad news. Apparently there's this really dangerous gang that started among the hispanic population in LA and has spread down into Central America, particularly Honduras and El Salvador, and is now working its way through Nicaragua.

Not only was Gustavo wise in the ways of Costa Rica, but it was he who suggested I drink ginger ale from a little roadside shack when I got really really carsick on a windy mountain road. Hooray for Gustavo!

We chose really well with Playa Samara for our final week, and with the Samara Treehouse Inn where we stayed (all sorted independently of tour operator lady). It turns out that it was the exact same beach where two of Max's best friends - Greg and Jane - got married a couple of months ago, which we hadn't realised when we decided to go there, but which made it all the most special. Especially as Greg lost his wedding ring in the sea shortly after the ceremony, so we had a mission to keep us busy... (alas, we didn't find it.)

The beach was just amazing and the Treehouse Inn was awesome. We had beautiful weather nearly all the time, and when we didn't, we just retreated underneath our treehouse on stilts and read books on our private hammocks!

I read 'I Was Told There'd Be Cake' by Sloane Crosley, which was a pretty funny collection of stories from the life of a mid-20s Manhattanite. A former friend of mine wrote a similar book, which I really hated and this one made me realise why - because Sloane Crosley is similar enough to me for me to recognise myself in her stories, but able to describe her experiences in a way that's way more witty and universal than the self-indulgent writing of the other book. So that was fun.

I also read 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union' by Michael Chabon, who's my favourite favourite author (some may say that that isn't difficult, since I hardly ever read, but he really is terrific), but I was really disappointed and left a little cold by the book, which was a real shame.

What was not a shame however was discovering body boarding! Man alive, it's the most. fun. ever. The Treehouse Inn had its own bodyboards, and as there are only 5 treehouses there with 2 people in each, competition for them wasn't very great. So Max and I spent ages in the sea, zooming into shore on waves. There was a swell on the way to Playa Samara, so towards the end of the week, the waves started getting bigger and a bit vicious, which wasn't so fun, but when we did manage to catch a wave, it was so so brilliant. Especially whenever I caught a wave and was yelping with glee, only to look over to my left to see that Max had managed to catch it too, and we were zipping along together!

We also took a surf lesson, but that didn't go so well. Max had flashbacks of P.E. lessons and never quite managed to get his body and board to cooperate with each other. And while I did manage to get up a few times, it wasn't as fun as I was hoping, because I was always on the verge of falling off, so we scuttled straight back to our bodyboards after our lesson - at least on them, when you're on, you're on and you're riding a wave - it isn't a constant effort to stay on the board or the wave.

It's weird, the whole holiday was almost a little too amazing, because we couldn't quite believe it was happening. I think it was a combination of not having to work too hard for it - tour operator lady sorted everything out for us and we hadn't spent months planning it, as we would've if it had been a travelling trip, rather than a holiday. But also the things we saw were just so incredible that they almost felt unreal - like they were in a brochure of dream holidays or something.

Anyway, we had a wonderful wonderful time and I'd recommend absolutely anyone to go - even those who fear Central America as being somewhere for hardy travellers with backpacks on their backs. I think by now we've established I'm not one of those travellers and I had one of the most exciting, relaxing holidays ever. It was about as 'difficult' as Greece or Spain and it'd be a great place to take children, because it's all so doable, whilst letting them feel like their Tintin on a big adventure in the jungle or on a volcano.