After a 15 hours drive from Panama City, I arrived in San José, Costa Rica’s capital where my girlfriend would join me the following day to travel together with me in Costa Rica and Panama until the end of my trip.

San José is a pretty big city, though it doesn’t have the charm of colonial cities like Cartagena nor the modern style like Panama City, it’s a quiet place to wander around.

After a short walk in the city center and the pedestrian street filled with any kind of shops on the first day, the next day we went for a free walking tour within the city center and learnt quite a lot of things about Costa Rica’s history and politics, as well as traditions and food 🙂

One funny thing is that Costa Ricans always say “Pura Vida”, for anything! It means “Welcome”, “You’re welcome”, “Thank you”, “I love you” or “Screw you”, really anything! It comes from a time when Costa Rica was hit by a wave of Cholera, and a lot of villages where affected by the disease. Those villages were “Pura muerte” (pure death), until a doctor found a treatment and people started to say it was safe to go to these villages because they were “Pura vida” (pure life) 🙂

Another interesting fact is that San José was not always the capital, the capital used to change from city to city every four years, as people noticed that the economy grew in the capital it would be fair to allow each city to be the capital for some time. Until a president arrived and decided to ban this law and the capital would stay in San José. The people didn’t like it and started a civil war, that was repressed by the army. Having seen the death toll on the civilians made by the army, the president decided to disolve the army, and allocate its budget to health and education. Thus the white part on the flag, representing the neutrality and lack of army in the country.

But then how would Costa Rica protect itself in case of war? They have an economic partnership with the US, allowing them to freely open any kind of business in Costa Rica in exchange of their protection.

After two days in San José, we headed to Tortuguero, a small village on the north of the caribbean coast, with a national park that is called “the Costa Rican Mini-Amazon”. The only way to get there is by plane or boat. We took a small plane and landed on the coolest “airport” 🙂

It is currently the rain season in Central America, and we experienced that fully on our second day in Tortuguero, when a tropical wave (some kind of hurricane) hit the coast. It was raining like crazy! During the whole day and the whole night, it just didn’t stop! Unfortunately there wasn’t much we could do as the national park was closed, and most of the paths were flooded. Actually the level of the water in the canals raised by 1m during the night!

On the following day, thankfully the weather got a bit better and we could go in the morning on a kayak trip on one of the canal to watch some wildlife. But again due to the rain and the flood, we couldn’t see much. Still we spotted a few birds, a few monkeys and a sloth high in the trees, as well as some iguanas. So in the end it wasn’t too bad 🙂

Another particularity of this place is that during July and August, it is the nesting season for sea turtles and they come to the beach to lay their eggs. They come during the night when the rain stop, so on our third night we went for a tour to try to watch the turtles. We were lucky enough to see one while it was laying its eggs!

It’s quite impressive, based on what the guid said, they dig a 70cm deep hole to lay around 120 eggs! The turtle is 150cm big and weighs around 250kg! We spent some time on the beach during the night with only a red light as we were not allowed to have flashlight nor take pictures, but it was really cool 🙂

Eventually we left Tortuguero to go to Cahuita, a renowned national park in the South of Costa Rica, still on the caribbean coast.

Rain seemed to follow us as when we arrived it was still quite rainy… Fortunately, on the following day it got better and we could go the the Cahuita national park to try to spot more wildlife. The park is really nice, it’s a pretty big forest along the beach, there is one beach with white sand while on the rest of the area the beaches are with black sand due to volcanic stones.

This time when visiting the park we were really lucky and could see quite a lot of animals! A toucan, a sloth quite close, more birds and iguanas as well as a lot of monkeys! That was really cool!

On our third day we wanted to go to a rescue center, where they take care of injured animals, but unfortunately couldn’t enter as part of the center was flooded because of the rain. So we just walked around on the beach and in the village 🙂

On the following day we left for Panama, to Bocas del Toro, an archipelago on the caribbean sea. But unfortunately rain season is everywhere and we still have quite a lot of rain there.

But more on this in the next article 🙂