January 7, 2017

Costa Rica

We recently returned from a 3 week getaway to Costa Rica, a small country in Central America. While there, we had a 14-day eco-tour in the countryside, followed by 4 nights in the capital San Jose. There was also an extra day on either side in Phoenix, Arizona to allow for flight timing. Around the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica offers a wide range of ecosystems and environments since it has 2 coastal areas separated by a series of volcanic mountains.
 We traveled with Wild Planet Adventures, and the map below was lifted from their website to give you an idea of the route we took and the wide range of places we visited. While we chose to do the entire tour, there were shorter options available and some of our group only going as far as Carara or Manuel Antonio and only Kathryn and I went all the way to Corcovado.
Costa Rica is a very friendly and safe place to travel with a predominantly Spanish-speaking Catholic populace. They boast a 95% literacy rate, disbanded their military in the 1960s, are proud of their country and democracy, and are rated as one of the happiest countries on Earth. However, no nation is perfect and Costa Rica has problems with regional poverty, urban congestion, inequality for its indigenous peoples, and a very high reliance on trucking for all materials transportation after the railways were shut down by a former President (who happened to own a trucking company).
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves there, and would highly recommend Costa Rica to fellow travelers who want to experience a new part of the world :)

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