Costa Rica

Nathaniel and I had a great time in Costa Rica. We went with Mountain Travel Sobek, an adventure travel group based in San Francisco with whom we went to the Galapagos Islands a year and a half ago. There were 16 travelers, six of whom were high school age or younger, so lots of opportunities for Nathaniel to hang with the younger crowd. Nice couples from Chicago (with two boys), Portland (with two girls), and Toronto (two very young girls who were not on the trip). A California dad (a California professor, complete with beard (he looked all "adventury", per Nathaniel) and his 14-year old daughter. There were two Davids travelling alone, one from Cleveland and one who was an employee of MTS. The latter, now living in SanFran, is a 24-year old originally from St. Louis and was a really wonderfully nice guy. Jorge was our guide, together with about 2 to 4 helpers at any one time, depending on what we were doing at the time.

We sea kayaked for the first three days on the Pacific side of Costa Rica (camping on the beach--talk about a lot of sand in your tent!), with snorkeling on the middle day. Then we river kayaked to a neat lodge on the north/Caribbean side in Tortuguero Park (a national park devoted in large part to preserving the breeding grounds for giant sea turtles that have laid eggs there for who knows how long). The final two days were white water river rafting on the Pacuare River. This was neat, there were some Class 3 rapids (maybe even one or two that were Class 4), but we made it through just fine. We also did a really neat zip line on the last day.

We (me in particular) came back with little sun-tan--I was so freaked out about the hot Costa Rican sun that neither of us saw much sun without 30 SPF sunscreen on. We saw some amazing wildlife, most notably some small caimans (a small relative of the crocodile), as well as an actual croc or two) and many different species of monkeys (not to mention countless birds--not my favorite, but fun nonetheless).