A couple of months after we started talking about our Patagonia trip, Brice was asked by Hailey from Run like a girl if he could be the official photographer for their first trail running and yoga retreat. The retreat took place in Costa Rica, at the beginning of December. It didn’t take us long to realize that it would be the perfect way to kick-off our trip to Latin America. I signed up for the retreat as well and with that the first 10 days of our journey were taken care of.
We arrived in San Jose on the afternoon of December 2nd. At the airport we had the option between catching a cab into the city, or hopping on a bus. We went with the second (cheaper) option. Without being familiar with the different neighborhoods and sub-urban areas of San Jose, figuring out what bus to get on was a bit it tricky. But we dusted off our rusty high school Spanish and eventually got on a bus that would take us near the center of town. From there we hailed a city taxi who took us to our destination. The whole trip cost us about 55,000 CPL – about $10 vs.$40 if we’d taken the airport cab.
Brice has now become a master at finding AirBnB lodging for us, wherever we go. For our first night in San Jose, we stayed at Stacey’s Funky Yoga House.
After dropping off our bags we went out for a walk in the city. We somehow managed to find the hipster-most café in town – just around the corner from our place. The place made vegetarian sandwiches and healthy juices, along with some really good coffee.
We then went on a stroll to explore the busy streets of San Jose. And busy they were. It turns out, black Friday (the consumerist, frenzy-inducing sale day following American Thanksgiving) had made its way to San Jose (amongst many other parts of the world). Pretty much every store was advertising “Viernes Negro”. And streets were PACKED. Think the sidewalks of Galleries Lafayettes and Printemps in Paris at Christmas time. It definitely made for an interesting walk, not quite the “off-the grid, lost in a remote part of the world” experience we had signed up for, not yet anyways. But after sitting on a plane for a few hours, we were happy to take all the walks we could get.
At one point, a man on a motorcycle stopped by us and said something along the lines of “Senor, la camera, aqui esta peligroso”, meaning, we shouldn’t be walking around with our big “tourist” camera, in this dangerous part of town. We looked around and not only was the street packed with people, but we also noticed there were police officers at pretty much every corner. Not sure if that last fact should have been more reassuring or concerning. In any case, we thanked him for his warning and kept walking, camera in hand. Frankly, I really didn’t feel like I was in any sort of danger…
We had arrived in San Jose a day earlier than the start of the retreat. Hailey and her husband, Eduardo had arranged, for those who wanted to, a day of river rafting and zip lining (not included in the retreat package). Two activities than neither Brice or I had ever tried, so we gladly signed up for them.
The next day, we met up with a small group of ladies at the Best Western Hotel, and a minibus came to pick us up for our first day of adventures.
Two hours later we were suiting up in life jackets and helmets, ready to jump on-board white-water rafts guided by Adventuras del Sarapiquí – Sarapiquí was the name of the particular rainforest we were going to spend the day in.
The rafting was, assumably, fairly beginner level but with a good mix of rapids in the beginning to get us nice and soaked, and some calmer portions where our guide talked to us about Costa Rican fauna, flora and food.
There were four or five boats going down the river together, and after about an hour and a half on water, we stopped on a pebble beach to enjoy a break and some fresh fruit. That was some of the best pineapple I’d ever had!
We went back into the boat for another hour, and a few of us were even able to jump into the water in a couple of spots to cool down from the sun.
Once we had made it down the river, we went back to base camp to change into dry clothes, then headed off to the “canopy” part of the day, aka the zip-lining. We were accompanied by 3 guides and went down a total of 12 lines, through the dense rain forest. It was a lot of fun, even though it took me a couple of lines to figure out the breaking system.
Said breaking apparatus consisted of a really thick leather “glove”, to be worn on your strong hand, and used by pulling down on the cable when reaching the end of it. At first I wasn’t sure how often or how strong to press on the break, and I actually ended stopping about 2/3rd of the way down the first cable, having to then pull myself forward to the finish – slightly embarrassing. I almost repeated my mistake on the second line, but still managed to make it to the other side on zipping momentum only – only barely. As I landed on the platform, the guide teased me about my breaking technique, and I shamelessly blamed it on the glove. So he handed me his own with a wink. After another couple of lines, the guide asked me with a smile how his glove was working out for me. By that point I had finally figured that I really didn’t need to break at all until the very end so I confirmed it worked much better than the other one. I’m sure I wasn’t the first one to have experienced some “glove malfunctions”….
It took us a good couple of hours to go through the whole network. On some lines we were even encouraged to hang upside down. The final line was the longest. 700 meters for over a minute of zipping over the ground. On that final line, Brice and I got hooked together, so we could slide down as a pair. The line ran through the trees for a bit then into the open and over the river that we had rafted on that morning. We watched out shadows glide on the water, way down below, and for a minute it felt like we were flying. A pretty cool experience, especially since we were
able to experience it simultaneously. The line took us all the way back to our starting point, where our guides had laid out cookies and water, a welcomed snack before heading back to the base.
We hadn’t had lunch yet so we were all pretty hungry after the two activities. Kate and Bea, who were in a different raft than us in the morning, had been talking to a couple who had gone to a restaurant nearby the night before. They said there was a resident sloth that hang around the restaurant. Hearing that, we all decided that we HAD to go to that restaurant and hopefully see the sloth (Brice was especially excited, big sloth-lover that he is).
After a bit of investigating we figured out the name of the restaurant and asked our van driver if he would mind taking us there (it was only a 15 min drive, but in the opposite direction from the way back home).
The food there was really delicious. I had never had plantain before (not that I can remember anyways), and they made fried plantain patties that were just incredible. I couldn’t stop eating!
Unfortunately, no sloth was spotted during lunch (he probably comes out later at night), but we all had a delicious meal, and with our bellies full we hopped back into the van for the drive home.
Daniel, our driver, dropped off the rest of the group at their hotel, and then was kind enough to take Brice and myself back to our AirBnB. And with that we had spent our first day in Costa Rica, the perfect appetizer for the rest of the week: just enough to get our appetite going for what the retreat had in store for us…
