We wake to the British World Service and a leisurely breakfast with a stereotypical Texan woman. Brilliant. I feel I could come for a holiday here and spend it just laughing with everyone I met about my accent and peculiar English habits. Just having been to Cambridge alone ought to be enough to sustain at least a week of interest and amusement on their part not to mention getting them to do just about anything for you. Everyone we have met has been genuinely eager to help us out and this gives me an insight into Americans I have rarely seen.

By the time we reach Houston it is three hours after our proposed Gatwick flight left for England and we are delayed in the true Planes, Trains and Automobiles sense: the next flight to England is not until tomorrow. We collectively laugh at our bad luck – just about everyone on the plane has missed a connection to somewhere and Houston is trying desperately to cope with the backlog.
After an hour of queuing for assistance with Brenda, a Canadian girl also trying to get home, we finally get to speak to a woman from Continental. It is 10pm local time and it’s been a long day for both her and us but to her credit she is extremely helpful. We are put on a flight to Cleveland tomorrow with a continuing flight from there to Gatwick later in the day. Our bags, which are in limbo somewhere, will follow us by some other route and arrive shortly after us. They put us up in a local hotel for the night with no quibbles which I guess is their duty but we are glad it took no pressure from us.
We wait outside the airport for a shuttle bus to our hotel. Eventually, after another hour waiting with Brenda and Sarah, a British girl who has been visiting her photographer brother working in Costa Rica and is similarly delayed, a bus turns up and we all pile in. There must be fifteen of us and we all have Continental in common. There is a party of ageing Americans, an old lady in a wheelchair, a chap from Cambodia who is delayed for a second night running and a few Costa Ricans.
The hotel is a good drive away through Houston’s huge streets. The place is so obviously “American” – like one huge out-of-town shopping centre. We’re stuffed in the back of the bus on the floor. If only the chief executive of Continental could see us now. But actually I am quite impressed with the way they have handled it – especially since the weather is not really their fault. The “Lexington Suites” is a big motel but the rooms are great – definitely the nicest we’ve had five weeks and with air conditioning too. We’ve been given emergency packs including a toothbrush, shaving kit and deodorant which are vital since I feel like a tramp and we haven’t had our bags back. We’re also given a calling card to call home. Very impressive.
By the time we arrive it is 11:30pm but we get back on the bus to go to a restaurant, a 24 hour Texan diner which turns out to be a lot of fun. There is a meal allowance of $15 each for a menu where even the most expensive main course comes to $7. Coupled with Texan portions, country music in the background and a waitress with a thick Southern drawl, this place is just like the movies. When the waitress takes our order she can’t help but burst into fits of giggles at our British accents and says “I just love the way you guys speak. You’re so neat!”. Before long we are all in fits of giggles and can’t say anything without being laughed at. It is very funny and gives us a certain superiority.
I enjoy the finest fajitas all holiday. Fate has pushed Brenda, Sarah, Al and I together and it is fun just chatting about the Costa Rica and America we are all experiencing for the first time. We have a lot fun. At 1am the shuttle comes to take us home.
We watch TV to see the storm reports for tomorrow and then make some phonecalls. My “5-minute calling card” gives me 15 minutes talking to Mum and Dad and still seven minutes left to call Lizzie’s mobile. Amazing value. I enjoy a great talk to them all for the first time in five weeks.
I’m out like a light after a shower and shave. Have to get up in five hours time.

Main street in Fortuna

I can’t sleep – thinking about all sorts of stuff. The alarm goes off far too early but we are ready. The bus turns out to be an excellent journey. Aside from the views of amazingly rugged forested mountains (a continuation of Monteverde), it takes us directly to San Jose airport without hassle by 10:30am giving us plenty of time to catch our flight.
Inside we hand over just about all of our remaining cash to pay the departure tax We have $40 US left between us and the departure tax comes conveniently to $37 US, leaving us a few dollars to buy a coffee. The time goes slowly. Eventually as we near Houston the captain announces that a storm there has complete shutdown the airport and since he is low on fuel he doesn’t have time to wait in the air. We are forced to head back south to McAllen, a tiny airport on the Mexican border. This, we quickly realise is the end of our smoothly-running schedule and the beginning of an extra North American leg to our trip courtesy of Continental.
At McAllen (airport of the year 1996, but not used to dealing with large influxes of passengers) the plane is refuelled. Unfortunately, regulations specify that all passengers and hold baggage must be taken off the plane first and, to satisfy US Customs, pass immigration fully. Since we have been in transit in America only, we have never needed to go through US Customs till now. The planned half an hour stopover becomes an epic two hour struggle.
The US Customs are notoriously strict and seeing Al and I at the back of the queue with our beards, sweaty clothes and dirty rucksacks they must think Christmas has come (from Costa Rica too). They open and completely empty our bags, check all our duty free bottles, deoderant and toiletries, tablets and pills, including, in the process, Al’s dirty underwear bag and all the presents we have carefully bought and wrapped. Eventually when they begin to suspect we have nothing to hide, we have a joke about never coming back to Texas and then they tell us we have only minutes to get back on the plane. There is no one else around.
The comradely atmosphere between strangers accompanying any such delay in transport is inevitably present here. I also notice that considering the high numbers of Americans present, there is surprisingly little annoyance or whinging at the delay. Perhaps they already appreciate the likely devastation such a storm is wreaking in Houston. Later we see why the airport was closed. A tropical storm with 60 mph winds struck Houston badly and caused a lot of damage: trees on cars, a hotel construction site ruined and electricity off.

Big tree

A lazy day. The loss of momentum as we reach the end of this holiday is noticeable and inevitable. We have sort of run out of things to do but more so, the energy to do them. Our bus and flight leave for home tomorrow. I buy another book, this time about adventurers up Everest. I am quite content but Al is bored so we head off to the actual Monteverde cloud forests, so at least we can say we saw it. Another walk in the woods? Yes, but more impressive woods they are. We still come no closer to seeing the elusive “resplendent Quetzal” nor any other form of mammal or bird. However, we discover later that the Quetzal migrate from June to September – so we were hardly likely to spot one anyway. Nevertheless, the walk and the views are impressive. I have to spend a lot of time looking at my feet – one problem with an irregular path – so there is not too much time to study the forest.
On the bus on the way home there are two 16 year-old American girls who look strangely out of place but seem to live here and go to school. The fact that Al and I oggle at them tells me it must be time to go home. Al and I dine out on pizza as a celebratory last nosh up.
We’ve had a great time in Central America. Somehow I think the travelling bug inside me is satiated for now; which is a good thing really given my pending career. We discuss future travel destinations and none spring rapidly to mind.

Looking for wildlife…

We make up some lunch and head off into the sunny morning to the “children’s rainforest” which claims to offer the chance to walk in the forest and see all the wildlife closeup. I guess we go there with too high expectations and we are mostly disappointed.
As we arrive we are semi-greeted by a fat and apparently mad American woman wearing a sweaty yellow T-shirt. She turns out to be the warden and has clearly gone mad for living here with no one to talk to. She talks to herself as much as to us. We pay our entrance fee, collect a little map with interesting places marked and head off.
As Alan remarks what we proceed to do is nothing special, it is just a walk in the woods. It doesn’t even feel much like a cloud forest or tropical reserve. It is just fairly ordinary looking plants, trees and mushy leaves underfoot. I let the cynic in me come out and we laugh about the place. The concept of the project – a non-profit making way to save valuable cloud forest and keep it for endless generations to see, is an enviable one. But I can’t help feeling the cloud forest is an ecosystem best left protected and unseen. It is not a major tourist attraction in itself. All the animals and birds clearly know where the paths are and avoid them no matter how quiet we are.
So, disillusioned, we tramp back out and move on. The experience of Sky Trek was more spectacular, if only because you could become immersed in the forest itself. On our way back we stop at the “Butterfly Garden” which is definitely worth a visit. Having never really paid these creatures much attention, I am pleasantly surprised how their huge number of species so well demonstrate Darwinian principles. It is very interesting and informative to see.

Cloud Forest, yep, it’s in cloud

This morning we have a dilemma. Lonely Planet says the bus to Monteverde, our cloud-forest destination leaves (via Tileran) at 7am. Our guide last night told us it leaves at 8.30am. We are tired so we decided last night to go with him and get up at 7.45am. At 8:10am, I speak to Elsie who says the bus leaves at 8am. We must be the luckiest boys around because, grabbing all our kit and stuffing it in our bags and running to the corner, we just catch the bus (the single daily bus) as it makes its way out of town. Unbelievable.
We enjoy a fairly comfortable journey through forest alongside a huge lake and enjoying the luxury of two seats each until Tileran where we arrive and change at 11:30am. We have a simple lunch and then catch the daily Monteverde bus. This takes three hours along roads which might have difficulty getting “bridal path” status back home. It is a very bumpy ride and as we discover, cloud forest mean there is lots of heavy cloud. Pretty obvious really.
Santa Elena is nice but very small. We find a very friendly and English spoken place to stay which seems to have French owners. We settle in, wash our clothes and go for a meal. Tomorrow we plan to go on “Sky Trek”, a series of zip-lines, ropes and platforms strung together in the cloud forest canopy. This is a chance to see lots of the cloud forest plant and birdlife.
We are up early (again) after our first ever cold night. I had weird dreams. The shower is not appetising even as a wake-up call since it is freezing. We head out to a bakery for breakfast and jump in a jeep headed for Sky Trek, packed in with a bunch of other tourists. After a much appreciated free coffee and meeting our guide, Marcos, we get into harnesses and get going. The sun is shining and the cloud forest looks beautiful. Cloud forest is very rare because it requires very specific climatic conditions, provided here by the mountain range dividing Costa Rica into its two halves: the Caribbean and the Pacific. Traditional rainforest exists below 1000 metres but here, above 1300 metres, the high humidity and low cloud base makes a different sort of forest possible. The moisture level in a cloud forest makes for very exuberant, dense growth. Hence competition among plants is for light rather than moisture. This leads to the rather interesting concept of small plants free-loading on trees in order to get to the light. A typical large tree in a cloud forest may be home to up to 5000 individual other plants. The bark of the tree is covered with wet moss which provides the basis on which the plants can grow. How do they get their seeds up into the trees? Ingeniously, they produce seeds which once eaten by birds, become incredibly sticky. To get rid of the seeds which are then stuck to the birds’ bottoms, they have to rub themselves vigorously against the tree bark. Magic.
Sometimes the weight of the additional parasites damages the tree but otherwise, it is a most remarkable arrangement. So we go up a trail and over some cable bridges in the canopy. Sky Trek is a recent idea and one which helps visitors to get closer to the forest – moving and flying through the canopy like the birds which live there. There is a danger that the tourists concentrate on the bridges and zip-lines more than on the forest itself but still by paying to be here and appreciating the sights and sounds everyone is helping to protect this precious ecosystem. There are 3000 plant species in the small region of Monteverde alone, more than in all of North America and Canada combined. The unique conditions here stimulate intense competition and hence great diversity. There are nine zip-lines in total and some are 214 metres long and 60 metres off the ground. It is a great feeling to be rushing through the forest. We try to take lots of pictures but it is very difficult to capture.
Alan says the zip-lines were too tame really. It is an interesting point. However the Sky Trek is not there to be a theme park, to shock or thrill, it is there to provide a different perspective on the natural cloud forest and to get visitors to support it by doing so. There is a fine line between promoting the ride itself and the forest. Providing the habitat is never damaged, there is nothing wrong with either. We later discover that a competitor “The Canopy Tour”, although having only three platforms, allows you to pull yourself across the lines with ropes and abseil down the platforms. Maybe this would have had the attraction Al needed. At least you could stop mid-flight and have a good look down.
At one point we climb an observation tower 20 metres above the canopy, which is great. Unfortunately, the cloud prevents a stunning view but it does enable us to see the plants which are part of the canopy, clinging precariously to tree branches. The only real wildlife we see are very tiny humming birds clustering around a feeder designed to look like a flower.
Later, we make our own lunch from the bakery then, after a torrential rainstorm, walk two kilometres up the road to cafe Monteverde, the local coffee roasters. We buy a few bags of delicious coffee (and taste it) as souvenirs and presents and then head back. We have a new cheaper room (with bunk-beds this time) and will probably stay another three nights until it is time to go home for good.
For dinner, Santa Elena is surprisingly poorly equipped. We find a tiny but empty (but aren’t they all), comedor or “soda” as the Costa Ricans call it and enjoy a very tasty Casada – plate meal. A few beers bump up the price and wash it down well. We finish the evening playing draughts in the hotel.

We have a lazy morning with a nice fruit and omelette breakfast in the sun. Our trip to the volcano is this evening with a local guide who speaks excellent English (learned from tourists) but who turns out to have broken his leg in a soccer match three days ago. Never mind, his brother will take us.
Fancying some exercise before the trip, we set off on a hike along the road to Lake Arenal, skirting the volcano, which supposedly takes us to a swimming lake 3km away. By the time we leave (with plenty of bakery goodies) it is mid-day and very hot. Typical. So we walk and get rapidly sweaty in the heat. The view of Arenal is always striking, but we find no lakes. After about an hour we find “Los Lagos” (the Lakes) a kind of elaborate resort hotel which claims to have lakes and pools. Desperate by now for a swim to cool off, we go in and see if we can negotiate a go on their flume tubes. It turns out they are for under tens only but they will drive us in a 4WD jeep up to the lake for £12 each. Hmm. We steal a paper map and wander innocently through the gates hoping to walk to the lakes for free. This turns out to be possible except that it involves a very steep track.
By the time we reach the top, we’re knackered. But there is an impressive observatory platform where you can see the volcano side and frequently see hot rocks come tumbling down from the crater. Below us is a beautiful green-blue lake and we can’t resist a swim even if it is raining. It must be the low-season because our only company is two labourers at the lake. We check with them if we can swim and then dive in. It’s a spectacular location: the sound of large rocks falling all the time leaving tracks of smoke dotted down the volcano. We have to head back for our 5pm rendezvous, so wearily we set off for Fortuna. On the way we see a tiny snake about 12 inches long but very thin with black and red hoops. We observe it carefully and later find out it is a coral snake, one of the most poisonous in Costa Rica and which normally grow to be much larger. We also pass a tree with young green bananas that aren’t nice and an orange tree with paradoxically green oranges,. The “greens” are lovely and tasty so we take some. Our saviour comes a few kilometres from Fortuna in the form of a blue pick-up truck who gives us a lift on the back into town for free. So we get half an hour to change out of our wet clothes (it’s rained a lot) and get a coffee before meeting our guide.
Unfortunately, the guide’s brother is a rather poor substitute as he cannot speak any English so we are destined for a silent tour. Things are even more disappointing when he drives us through pouring rain all the way back to Los Lagos where we’ve just come from, pays to get in where we walked free today and takes us all the way back to the lake. Al and I just laugh. Here we park and walk up the side of the forested volcano. It is absolutely pissing it down but this seems to be a recurring theme for volcano tours, particularly reminiscent of Pacaya. It even begins to thunder. We scramble up lava rocks until we reach a cordoned-off “danger area” where we can see right up the active side of the volcano. Although it is misty we can see the glowing crater and frequently large firework displays of twinkling red lights as rocks drop off the top. Sometimes there are so many fragments that the red light appears to flow down the side. It is cool. We can’t stay long in the wet but I take some fairly hopeful photos and head down.
Great views on the way. Next stop are the hot springs which are a great end to the evening. There are four pools with water supplied directly out of the ground. The top pool is a scalding 63 degrees and the others are progressively cooler, leading down to a bar area. It reminds me a lot of Centre Parcs with a fog rising off the water in the cold air. It is luxurious and relaxing and the view is somewhat more impressive than Centre Parcs. As it gets darker the sky clears and a full Moon comes out. We are treated to an amazing view of the hot rocks falling down Arenal and you can hear the clatter echoing across the valley. It is captivating and magical, demonstrating the raw power of nature. Arenal was inactive (a mountain) until 1968 when the top blew off and wiped out many villages nearby. Now the crater is “open” – meaning the pressure is reduced and there’s little chance of another big eruption. What makes Arenal special, and one of the most active and studied volcanoes in the world, is that it’s “open” phase has lasted 31 years so far whereas most volcanoes stay open only one or two years before closing and allowing the pressure to build again. Until three years ago there was a regular and powerful eruption here every 30 minutes. Nowadays they occur only a few times each day. The power of it is still amazing. So we enjoy a few beers and soak in the hot water while we watch the live display. Bliss.