Vagabond and Beyond: Costa Rica, the place to live the American(retired) Dream! Oh and sloths, lots of them!!

We have read enough articles and talked to enough people to know that Costa Rica is going to kill any ideas of sticking to a budget so our objective for our time in this American retiree haven is to get in, see some cool looking cloud forests and animals and insects and get the hell out of the place before another 10,000 Americans decide to retire and live here and jack up the prices beyond a backpackers budget.

Our first stopping off point is Liberia, only a couple of hours from the border (a handy border crossing by the way). Not much to do here but we have become accustomed to moving very slowly and the thoughts of a bus ride longer than 5 hours doesn’t go down well with either us so Liberia for a night it is. And as things to do in Liberia go we were very lucky as there was a cowboy festival on the day we arrived and 10 minutes after checking into hostel # 2 for $24/night (Hostel # 1 wanted to charge $50/night, thank you very much ex Florida residents!!) we walked outside to watch a bunch of overweight cowboys galloping by on their horses and taking a swig out of a bottle of beer, as a few bands drove by on pick-up trucks.

The Lads at the Cowboy Festival, Liberia

Festival eh, more of a reason for the locals from towns surrounding Liberia to come up to the big city for the weekend and wreck the place! One of the horses even seemed to be having a good time as you can see him dance in the below video to the band as he trots on by the pick-up, hilarious looking.

Crazy Dancing Horse

The next morning we headed for the Santa Elena/Monteverde area in the mountains of Costa Rica, known for its well preserved cloud forests where you can explore nature at its best, at an inflated price of course! To our surprise we actually found a decent hostel for $20/night and it came with what would be our first proper hot shower in about 2 months so not a bad start. We decided to skip the 2 hour guided tours as they were about $30 or more each while we opted just to pay entrance to hike solo which was about half that at $14. It might not sound that expensive but coming from neighbouring countries where you can get a guide for 2 people for the whole day for less than $10 it’s relatively very fecking expensive. But hey, we are in Costa Rica (probably never come back if prices keep inflating more than the average retirees belly) so might as well see the cloud forests before they disappear and all that. So we did a 5km trail, an extremely well laid out trail that makes it impossible to drift off and maybe god forbid see an actual insect or animal larger than a centipede!

Giant Centipede, largest thing alive that we saw on our hike

There is 4/5 story observation deck but it being a CLOUD forest you can see about 30 feet in front of you before hitting a dense fog. Although we didn’t see any Jaguars, not even a lazy sloth, the hike itself is very impressive with the trees and fauna alone. The forest is just so green and some of the trees are crazy looking and you really do feel that you are in the middle of a forest alone.

Check out that GREEN!!!! Cloud Forest Hike in Santa Elena

We opted for the less trekked Santa Elena hike over the Monteverde hike and I would recommend it to anyone as we saw no one else the whole time there, while I heard the Monteverde hike has hundreds of group’s snailing around clicking away on the DSLR’s. A lot of people tell you that the guided hikes are worth the price but talking to many I don’t see their point as during the day nearly everything is asleep so the best a guide can point out is a one or two birds. That is why the next day we decided to go for a guided hike but during the night when the forest comes alive.

Sarah exploring the cloud forest with not a fellow hiker in earshot or sight for the day

Sarah’s main objective from Costa Rica is to see a sloth, plain and simple, “I want to see a sloth and I want to see one now : ) !!!” Sloths move feck all, they sleep all day in a tree and come down once a week for a poo so odds of seeing them in the wild is slim. In our search for the slow moving animal we paid $22 each to do the night hike in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest. To me ‘Children’s Eternal Rainforest’ sounds like a creepy place name in a horror film but it’s named in honour of the children from around the world who decided to buy up 56,000 acres of Costa Rica forest after being inspired by primary school children in Sweden who bought some forest after a biologist talked about deforestation in the area back in 1987. We arrived about sunset at the reserve, by taxi as they forgot to pick us up by bus from our hostel (I blame the children, what kind of operation are the running here anyway, probably a tax write off one!).

Sunset over the clouds from the Childrens Eternal Rainforest

We failed to spot the elusive sloth, the recently seen Jaguar, or any cool looking snakes but we did see an orange knee tarantula on the hunt for some food as you can see in the short video clip below.

Orange Knee Tarantula on the hunt

We also saw a wood spider, a rainforest frog, a giant blue butterfly, a glowing beetle and millions of fireflies. From what I can tell it is rare to see a large animal on any of these hikes so you should know this before heading off to some country for the sole purpose of seeing an animal.

Orange knee tarantula on the hunt

We loved the night hike even though the highlights were tarantulas and a glowing beetle but being in a reserve where jaguars do live is still pretty cool. And that elusive sloth problem is about to go away as we find out that the world’s only sloth sanctuary is on the road to Panama so more on that to follow with way too many photos.

It happened to be our 5 year anniversary of sticking with each other : ) when we arrived in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, so we decided to splash out on a fancy hotel for a couple of nights. Our attempt to look like anything but cheap backpackers (wore our least smelly clothing and hid our backpacks in full on covers) failed once I handed over our free upgrade coupon that I printed off for a whopping $2. But who cares, premium suite with everything, buffet breakfast and some wine and a bed with an actual duvet we were in heaven for a little while. There is nothing to do there as far as we could tell from our beautiful view 10 stories above!! One of the days we did go for a stroll among main street but quickly gathered food and drink to bring back to the comfort of our hotel room before we were mistaken for hostel goers.

San Jose skyline from our classy hotel

Unfortunately this swanky lifestyle had to stop sometime and we caught a bus to the beach town of Puerto Viejo (beach towns are definitely not our favourite places to be but there are just so many of them that you have to stop off and enjoy the sun in some) on the Atlantic side very close to the Panamanian border. Again our accommodation was $24/night, not as bad as we were expecting from Costa Rica but we have come to realise that it’s the food and tours that are expensive not the accommodation (at least not the places we have been staying). Oh and the Laundry, to do our washing cost $30!!!! At least 3 times as expensive as anywhere else but let’s just say it was too long since we had done a wash and price could be no object right now.

Lazy cat using a map as a duvet - cheered us up after paying $30 for laundry

Puerto Viejo (old town) was made famous, for travellers anyway, by the famous Salsa Brava wave break. I don’t know much about surfing so I can’t explain why people come to a small town to surf on a very narrow stretch of surf. From our day of observing, a large wave does pop up out of nowhere and there were a lot of surfers out there trying to catch it, this is what Lord Internet says about it “A thick Hawaiian style wave that builds in deep water and breaks over a shallow reef. This is most powerful wave in Costa Rica and the best conditions with an easterly swell which can produce up to triple overhead surf.” All I know is that hundreds of people die off the coast of Costa Rica and Panama every year from riptides so we are staying a very long way from the “most powerful wave in Costa Rica”.

We forgot to take a photo of the famous Salsa Brava but our friend Google Image had one

It was an entertaining day watching all the surfers coming back in and spending ages looking for their flip flops or keys that they buried in the sand. One guy left his flip flops and went home barefoot and another girl had to get a chain cutter for her bike lock. Not much else to say about Puerto Viejo, beach town with bars, restaurants and plenty of dodgy characters to supply the party travellers that go from beach town to beach town doing nothing but sleep all day and party all night (plenty of these wasters here if you want to hang out with them).

So today was the big day, Sloth Sanctuary Day!!! Apparently the only sloth sanctuary in the world and founded over 20 years ago when a starving baby sloth was brought to someone’s door who was determined to beat the odds and raise the sloth back to health. That sloth was Buttercup and is now the main attraction at the sanctuary along with 130 or so more baby, juvenile and adult sloths that now occupy the large reserve.

Buttercup, her rescue is where the sanctuary all started

Ironically on the bus ride to see our first sloths ever we saw about 4 wild sloths asleep up trees along the highway. A joking suggestion to Sarah that we didn’t need to go to the sanctuary anymore was met with a stare I can’t describe but we were going alright, no matter what! The tour was $25 each, pricey, but well worth it to get up close with this isolated animal that hides all day in the trees. You are given a tour of the adult sloths that are hilarious looking, my favourite being the big fat lazy one scratching his belly all day while Sarah was smitten by the juvenile sloths that later she was given the chance to feed.

Sloths - lazy by nature but this one takes the cake(well he would take the cake if he wasn't so lazy) my personal favourite

Orange sloth (he's dyed to protect him from a disease) - Sarahs favourite, must be the orange she loves!

You can see several of the juvenile sloths that are probably the most active and attention seeking. Towards the end you get a tour of the lake by boat and you get a chance to see some non-sloth animals such as large iguanas and bats but this was a day for sloths so at the end you can hang out with buttercup, the most attention seeking of all of them that plays up to you and poses for every photo. As Sarahs sloth t-shirt suggests : ) we had a great day and you learn a lot about the sloth and their funny habits that always keep people amused, definitely kept us amused for the day.

Sarah feeding a sloth

This was the end of our Costa Rican adventure and it was another border day. After a two hour bus we sped through Costa Rican immigration to be met with a 3 hour waiting line on the Panama side after crossing the dodgiest looking vehicle bridge ever on foot.

Looking back towards Costa Rica from the Panama side, glad we don't have to cross that bridge again

With one immigration window open, one slow witted official and a bus load of lost 18 year olds it was slow going. There must have been a shift change half way through as suddenly each person was now taking 1 minute to check through instead of the previous 5 to 10 minutes.

The queue at the Panamanian border, messing with the photo is the only way to make it a better memory

Crafty Sarah had read about the need for an onward or return ticket to Costa Rica so we slightly amended a flight itinerary from Expedia and printed it off as evidence of an onward flight. This helped us avoid paying $14 each for a useless bus ticket back to San Jose, a joke of a scam that has been on-going a while between the immigration officials and the bus stand beside them. How they can’t see that 99% of people crossing the border are travelling through Central and South America and will never return to Costa Rica is beyond me. And why a $14 bus ticket ensures people don’t stay in Panama is also a joke, how many people say to themselves “I better leave Panama as I have a $14 bus ticket to somewhere I have been I don’t want to waste”. It’s all corrupt bullshit.

And on that lovely note I end this post : ) We enjoyed Costa Rica for the small amount of time we were here (just 10 days), necessary due to the cost constraints but I can’t see why you would spend much more time here even if you had the money to do so. American retirees are messing the place up with their crazy prices and I still can’t comprehend how the locals can afford to live there unless they live in completely different places than we visited which is highly likely as we saw far too few locals and far too many Americans. I’m sure other nationalities are to blame to but I can only comment on what I saw. Next up is Panama, our final Central American country. We have some islands to visit, the Panama Canal to gawk at and the crazy looking Diablo Rojo (Red Devil) buses to ride.