When Terry and I started looking at the guidebook, we were quickly overwhelmed. For such a small country, Costa Rica is loaded with interesting places to go and things to see and do. We skimmed the guidebook, focusing on just the highlights, and made a short list of things we wanted to do - and in the end, we didn't even get to everything on our list. As with nearly all of our vacations, we left with the feeling that no matter how much we did, there was so much more that we didn't have time to do. So Costa Rica has been added to our ever-growing list of places we'd like to go back to someday.
That morning, I noticed a strange bug on the living room wall, up near the ceiling. I say "bug" rather than "insect" because insects have six legs, but this critter only had four. I never did figure out if it was an insect that had lost two legs, or a spider that had lost four legs, or a strange species of creepy crawler that only had four legs to begin with. When we came back later that day, the bug was gone... which made me kind of nervous.
For the first couple of days, we focused on things close to where we were staying - although as you'll see, we ended up roaming over quite a lot of the country. Costa Rica is divided into seven provinces, and we ended up driving through six of them.
Our first stop that day was Café Britt (w), a coffee plantation that offers educational tours. Our tour guides were Luis and Tino, who had a sort of "Smothers Brothers" routine going. Luis was the smart one, and Tino was the dumb one, and whenever Tino would say something dumb, Luis would get annoyed and smack Tino with his hat. Amusing, and a little silly, but the tour was quite informative.
We began with some coffee tasting, while we waited for the tour to start:
Terry, the two fisted coffee drinker
Since I don't drink coffee, I wandered around, and took this picture of several large spiders:
At the beginning of the tour, we saw this map of the coffee producing regions of Costa Rica:
That's Luis on the left, and Tino on the right. Next to the map was this carreta (oxcart):
The carreta, with its bright orange color and multicolored decoration, is sort of a national symbol of Costa Rica. We saw several of them on our trip, and even bought a small one in a gift shop, which makes an interesting contrast when placed next to our model Amish buggy:
Later that day, I was interested to notice bridge rails painted in the same bright colors:
...but I digress - back to the tour. It covered the entire process - from growing the coffee plants, to picking the beans, processing and roasting the beans, and finally preparing your cup of coffee in your kitchen. Here are some pictures:
Young coffee plants at various stages of growth
A mature coffee plant, with ripe beans
Raw coffee beans
Joaquin (a visitor from Germany) plays the role of a coffee picker
Coffee roasting machine
In Costa Rica, they have a device for making coffee called a chorreador (w). This is similar to the drip coffee makers we use in this country, but the filter is cloth instead of paper, and is mounted on a wooden stand. We had previously seen one of these back at the house:
...but we didn't know what it was. We never did try to use it.
After the tour was over, and after buying coffee and chocolates at the factory store, we drove to the town of Grecia (w). In the last few years, Terry has become a heavy user of WhatsApp, and uses it to correspond with friends all over the world, mostly in Spanish speaking countries. One such friend, Cesar, lives in Costa Rica, and we went to have lunch with him, his wife Jenny, their daughter Naomi, and Jenny's Mom, Inez. Here we are at lunch:
Cesar and Jenny are on either side of Guillermo, and Inez is in the foreground. And here's Naomi, looking unbearably cute:
We ate at a restaurant a little way out of town, called Chirinquitos. It was there that Terry had chifrijo, and I had the unusual taco, mentioned on the first page. After I ate, while everyone else was talking (in Spanish, of course), I walked around and took pictures:
A coconut palm
A river behind the restaurant
I also took several pictures of flowers, which you've seen on the introduction page.
After lunch, we drove into town. Grecia features a rather unusual church, Iglesia de la Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes (Church of Our Lady of Mercy), which is made of steel plates:
There's a story that the church was originally supposed to be sent to Greece (Grecia in Spanish), but was sent to the town of Grecia by mistake. A cute story, but it's not true.
We spent a little time checking out the church, and relaxing in the park across the street:
And then we drove Cesar and Jenny home, and drove around for a while. We went through the town of Sarchí (w), which is famous for being a crafts center. We must have passed a hundred furniture stores... well, okay, maybe not quite that many. But a lot of them.
We then headed back to San Jose, to have dinner at an Argentinian restaurant:
...and I promise, that's the last food picture in this trip log.
Here's a map of where we went:
