After our coffee tour we headed north to the Arenal Volcano area - we were sure glad Rene' had downloaded the Costa Rica map on his phone to give us directions. A lot of the streets in San Jose aren't even marked but once we got on the main road, it was much easier!
The 2 lane highway took us through some beautiful scenery - lots of vegetation, mountains and cute little villages! One thing that really took us by surprise was not seeing any trash! Usually along the highway you always see trash and Costa Rica was the exemption - it's not only a beautiful country but very well taken care of!
We stopped at a restaurant along the highway and had our first "real" Costa Rican meal - the owner of the restaurant had a huge orchard behind the restaurant and took us on a tour of it - he had every kind of fruit tree you can imagine and we had our first taste of a water apple - the outside looked similar to an apple but the inside had the consistency of a pear!
This papaya tree was loaded with fruit!
After seeing the pineapple growing, I was sure ready to eat some!
The Costa Ricans eat beans and rice for every meal -if you're looking for an authentic meal, you order the "typical" which is always rice and beans, a salad of some sort and either chicken, fish or pork. This meal had an extra serving which was a vegetable based dish. It was all very good!
The distance between San Jose and the larger town that we were headed (La Fortuna) was only a distance of 112 km - yet it took us 3 hours to drive it! The road was twisty with a lot of switchbacks and many times we were only driving 30 to 40 mph. Once we reached La Fortuna, we had a little bit of pavement and then it was onto the worst road I have ever been on - almost solid potholes!! Even though it was only 5 miles or so to the village of El Castillo, it took us over 20 minutes!
But we finally reached the tiny village, got the keys to our 2 bedroom, 2 bath house we had rented and took our 4WD vehicle up this winding extremely steep driveway to our "pie in the sky" as it's called online!
The house and surrounding area was absolutely stunning!!
The deck off the pool was beautiful!
Our house overlooked Lake Arenal and to the right of the picture is the volcano.
The swimming pool was beautiful - too bad we didn't get to use it!! (more on that later)
The inside of the home was beautiful - a gourmet kitchen where we did cook breakfast most days!
We quickly unpacked and made ourselves at home - but not for long because the Super Bowl was calling us!!
2 comments:
What a beautiful place! Wish I was there.
WOW - your house looks amazing! Too bad it was a treacherous trip up but looks like it was worth it!
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