Costa Rica Part 1 - Where We Stayed

We're back!  After a whirlwind 4 days in 35+ degrees and sunny Costa Rica, we touched down in Toronto at midnight, arriving to some lovely Canadian spring weather - 7 degrees and raining.

We booked the trip in February, with very little idea of Costa Rica as a country - we just picked it from a list, not even really realising how far south it was.  It was a long way.  We learned a lot about Costa Rica while we were there - it is a really beautiful place and the people are lovely.  We always felt safe, and even the roads seemed pretty tame.  The Costa Ricans ("Ticos") we spoke to were overwhelmingly proud of their country, telling us all about the demilitarisation of the country in 1948 and the benefits of their free education and health systems.

For those of you who are, like us, not very familiar with the geography of Central America, here's where we stayed relative to the rest of the continent.

And here's where we stayed in Costa Rica - on the North Pacific coast in the Guanacaste province.

I'll split the photos up into 4 blogs over the next couple of days.  This set of photos is about the area we stayed in.

We stayed in an all-inclusive resort, which in hindsight was a bit of a bad idea.  The idea was that we'd be able to go exploring during the day, and relax on the beach and around the pool in the evenings.  It didn't really work out like that - the resort was in the middle of nowhere, so we couldn't leave without an organised tour group, and it was full of fat tourists lounging around the pool and getting drunk on free alcohol.  We did try to hire a car, but they wanted to hold a thousand dollars on our credit cards, and our bank wasn't about to let a thousand dollar transaction go through from Costa Rica.  There's always next time.  This is the view from our window.

Here's the hotel from the top of a nearby hill - you can see how isolated it is.

We had some bad luck - because it was Easter weekend, there wasn't much going on, so we spent most of Friday and Saturday wandering around the hotel and its beach, but we did manage to get out to see the Arenal Volcano on the Sunday, before leaving on the Monday.

The beach was a black sand beach - I found it really odd.  I don't think my brain could come to terms with a beach that looked like mud.  The ocean was beautiful though, and so warm - we spent hours lazing around in the shallows.

Around the beach there were a lot of dense, scrubby little trees.  It reminded me of Australia, actually.  The north-west of Costa Rica is very very dry, whereas the central part has the mountains and the rainforest.

It had been so long since we last saw flowers.

Stephen was exploring the edge of the beach - Costa Rica had a lot of spiky plants, for some reason, and our attempt to climb the hill nearest to the hotel ended up with our legs torn up and itchy (we're ok now though).  This was also the first time we'd worn shorts since leaving Beijing in October.