Costa Rica is nice! Relax! Importante! Novembre, 2009.

We undertook this long awaited trip together with my great brother, Andrey, and his beautiful girlfriend, Masha, in the end of October, 2009. It was on top of our list of the foreign countries to visit for a long time. We wanted to go there since April of 2004, but because of my enrolment to Columbia that year and the followed visa complications we could do it only now. And the country proved to be up and beyond our expectations!

November is the last month of the wet season in Costa Rica, which lasts from May to December, and if you check the weather forecast online, it will most probably show you constant raining every day. But, at least in our case, it could not be any further from the reality! During the day it rained only 2-3 times. The rest of the time the weather was simply perfect, with just enough clowds in the sky to protect us from otherwise fierce sun and to cool down the temperature to the perfect 25 C! But we could simply be lucky. As an extremely helpful menager in the Arco Iris Ecolodge told us, this year had been unusually dry, because of the strengthening El Nino oscillation. So, if you are planning your trip after us, take it into account. The oscillation is irregular and occurs every 2-7 years.

Costa Rica is a relatively expensive place, when compared to the surrounding Central American countries. The prices for food in supermarkets goes as high as on Manhattan, and car rental expensives are comparable to New York standard too. The main difference to New York, though, is that you can find a very cheap and no so bad place to spend nights, perhaps anywhere in the country, and it is possible to travel to almost anywhere with public transportation, which is of good quality and goes frequently, fast and far, in addition to being cheap. Because we went during the wet season the prices for hotels and rentals were 2-3 times cheaper, than they would be otherwise (judging by what the "Lonely Planel", our travel companion, was saying). At the end, the whole trip, which took us 8 days in total, including the flight tickets, horse riding, bungee jumping, a night in a 5 star hotel, and an extra night in Charlotte, which we had to spend because of the F..ing US Airways incompetence, costed about $1200/person. I think - not bad at all!

I expected a lot from Costa Rica, but what I thought had to be terrible were the roads. Every guide and almost every web review said that they are from bad to impassible. And granted that our trip fell on the wet season, we were prepared to cross rivers and to be getting stuck in the mud. Well... Maybe it's because we didn't go off-road a lot, maybe because we are used to Russian roads, but we had no problems going anywhere, except for our failure to get to the the famous surfers' place - Witch's Rock in Santa Rosa National Park - to get to which we indeed had to cross an overflowed river, which proved to be too deep. Otherwise, the quality of Interamericana as well as the branching roads was up to the USA standards and we had no problems driving it at night - the thing we were a bit warried about before the trip. There was even no need for SUV. Just at some unpaved roads we had to drive carefully. Oh yes - one thing to notice - there were no cars to rent with auto transmission, when we went there. It wasn't a problem for us, but take this into account, if you go there - they are probably in high demand among americans.

Map of the trip