Costa Rica is like this huge, amazing garden, filled with flowers, and birds and butterflies. Just everywhere. And here are just a few of the flowers.
And I didn't even bother to take photos of the regular stuff like agapanthus and impatiens and cosmos and hydrangeas and such. The whole country is a carpet of flowers.
Ray and I usually travel on our own. We'd never gone on a "tour" with a group of strangers, and frankly, never thought we would. We heard from friends about good experiences with Road Scholar, a non-profit educational travel company and decided to check into it. We first planned to travel on the Road Scholar Nicaragua trip, with our friend, Muriel, then saw that they offered a Costa Rica trip the week before. We signed up for both, back to back. What had we gotten ourselves into?! We soon found out.
We were traveling in Costa Rica as part of a group of 19, plus a guide and a driver of the small bus we traveled in. The group turned out to be a compatible mix of couples and singles, mostly in our age group. Ray and I were the only Westerners on the trip, oddly, but we had lots in common with many of our fellow travelers. Our guide, Roger, was terrific—organized, patient, kind and, most of all, knowledgeable. We loved him.
We soon fell into easy companionship with the group, and what might have been awkward became quite comfortable. Ray discovered other retired computer people, I learned that the retired psychologist is also an artist who had her sketchbook along. There were teachers, retired and still teaching, scientists, a lawyer, a city planner and a pair of medical doctors.
Really—what nice people!
From San Jose, we settled into our first bus trip to the Selva Verde Rain Forest Lodge, a beautiful place that was a total immersion into the birds, animals, flowers and ecology of the Costa Rican Rain Forest. Like Girl Scout camp in Paradise!
From the upper porch of the lodge one can look out into the forest, or the nearby feeding area and see wondrous birds and animals. We could hike out on beautiful trails for even more and come back to the lodge for a cold drink or a meal with our new friends.
The birds were truly amazing. Several in our group were serious bird-watchers, with impressive scopes and cameras and life-lists and much more knowledge than I. And Roger, our guide, could tell you anything you wanted to know about each bird. For me, I was simply captivated by their beauty and variety.
One afternoon we had a little Latin dance lesson on the patio, and one evening a presentation about Biological Corridors and how the animals and birds migrate through the area. At night we fell asleep listening to the chorus of tree frogs and were awakened in the early, misty mornings by birdsong. And the flowers!—well, hold that thought for another day...
Beauty all around.
Well, my efforts to be able to blog from the road on our trip to Central America were a dismal failure! When I was able to post a couple times, it was quick and brief and when I got home I discovered that all the photos had dropped out, so I deleted those posts. So much for that experiment. Now that I'm home I plan to share some of the highlights and especially favorite images. I'll try not to bore you with too much detail, but, this being my own personal journal, I'll be recording those things I want most to remember.
Our journey began in San Jose, Costa Rica. After our first day of arrivals and introductions and orientation to the program, on the second day we walked down a busy pedestrian street to visit the pre-Colombian Gold Museum. The museum itself is underground beneath a busy square in the center of San Jose.
There we learned that when Columbus arrived in this area in 1502, he was met by native people wearing beautiful gold ornaments and he called it Costa Rica or "The Rich Coast".
Of course Columbus was happy to send as much of this gold back to Spain as possible, so the Museum's collection represents the small amount of this legacy remaining in Costa Rica. Perhaps the positive side of this story is that when Columbus found that the supply of gold and other resources in Costa Rica was so limited, he and his men moved on to more lucrative exploits and left Costa Rica to develop on its own as one of the most peaceful and stable nations of Central America.
I could have spent many more hours in this tiny museum. Every piece was an exquisite little work of skill and imagination.
So began our adventure—surrounded by gold!
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