Nueva Aventura

I got to the airport around 11 in the morning to meet Emily. It was a bittersweet day having to say goodbye to people that I have spent so much time with and exciting because Emily was finally going to be here. I was finally excited to have someone with me that I didn’t have to explain who I was to or things I liked or didn’t like. Her flight arrived on time, but it took her about an hour to get through immigration and customs. We had to wait two hours for our shuttle to Monteverde and ended up hanging out in the Denny’s Restaurant because the hotel wouldn’t allow us to wait in the lobby. There were two other people on the shuttle with us and they were from Argentina. They had just arrived as well, and of course there were bound to be a few bumps in the road (literally and figuratively speaking) on the way to Monteverde. We stopped at one of the interbuses’ stops to have a break but what we thought would just be a 15 minute break turned into an hour break. You see though, we were supposed to have a different driver arrive but really the driver had been there with us the whole time talking to the other drivers. The only thing we had to do was get on a different bus. Well, Emily was not prepared for the road conditions that we were going to encounter on our journeys here. I took motion sickness medicine so I could try to sleep. It was so windy and bumpy and we were on unpaved roads for more than half of the bus ride. Finally, the two Argentineans’ left us for Tamarindo and Emily and I each took a row of seats so we could try to sleep until we got there. We arrived somewhere around 9 or 10 and we both were exhausted. We were greeted by Gustavo who runs the hotel Los Jardines and he was very hospitable. He took us to our room, which pleasantly surprised was quite large. We had one full bed, and one twin bed, a partial kitchen, a sitting area with a tv, and a good size bathroom. The view of the mountains was amazing from our balcony. Sunday, we ate breakfast and decided to do the canopy/zip line tour. It was so much fun and a great thing to do here in Costa Rica. We were basically flying in the mountains and at the end we did a Tarzan swing. You definitely felt how Tarzan did swinging through the trees. We were worn out from having a hike from each zip line and wondering through town. At night we partook in a night walking tour which I hadn’t done yet. We had a guide and we all had flashlights, even though mine was for the birds. It got dark very fast and we were in the middle of the forest. We saw walking sticks, tarantulas, a huge ant colony; one that I have never seen before I mean it looked like a huge pile of dirt that you could play on as a kid. The other people in our group were from the Netherlands. For the majority of the time they were speaking in dutch, but they all knew English which was great because I felt like we were not in Costa Rica when they were speaking in Dutch but also the fact that they had great personalities as well made it even better. For dinner we ate at a restaurant very close by that was really good. At the end of dinner Emily and I were so exhausted that we just wanted to go to bed. We had to be up early to catch our shuttle to Arenal. Monday morning after breakfast we waited for our Jeep-Boat-Jeep to come get us. We were going to take a public bus since most people had told us that it was so cheap and easy. Well, they forgot to mention the facts that if we took that option we would be on the bus traveling for twice the amount of time than we needed to. So about 30.00 dollars later we traveled through rough terrain again, wind and rain, transferred from van to boat, crossed the lake Arenal to the other side and met another van that took us to our final destination: Mountain Paradise. Hasta Pronto…