(San José, Costa Rica)

My trip to Costa Rica involved an early morning flight from Toronto, so I decided to stay at an airport hotel the night before. Good thing I did – for the second time this year, my transportation from Kingston to Toronto was stopped. Last time, my train couldn’t proceed beyond Belleville because of an accident on the tracks. This time, my bus broke down and limped as far as Colborne. We waited at the “Big Apple” complex in Colborne for about 2 hours before we were rescued by another bus. While my plans ultimately weren’t impacted, some other people on the bus were really scrambling to get to Toronto. Some of them hired a cab to drive all the way there…about a 2 hour journey.

Fortunately, my trip to Costa Rica was nowhere near as eventful.  I was a little concerned that I only had 67 minutes between flights in Panama City, but the flight from Toronto arrived quite early and I was even able to catch up on some e-mail between flights.

One thing is clear:  both Panama and Costa Rica are considerably warmer than Canada.  It was quite cool when I left Toronto but it is definitely t-shirt/shorts weather now.

I have once again joined a tour group for this trip.  As travel planning fatigue was beginning to set in when I was scheduling my October travel, I was ready to let somebody else take control for this one.  I met my group Saturday evening and it looks like I’ve been fortunate again.  There are only 7 of us in the group and, though we are from 4 different countries, we seem to get along well and have a number of shared interests/perspectives.

For dinner, we went to a typical “soda” (see photo of our group at the top of this post).  A soda is simply a local restaurant featuring Costa Rican food and is usually very reasonably priced.  I had arroz con pollo (rice with chicken) along with a fresh carrot-orange juice.   Including tax and tip, it was about US$8.00.   I also really liked the chilero sauce…it was a perfect combination of heat and flavour.  A bottle of this wondrous condiment apparently shows up on the table of almost every Costa Rican restaurant, so I will be able to do a brief and intense survey of the various brands while I’m here!

As much as I enjoyed dinner in San José, the real trip (and the real photography) begins tomorrow.  Most tourists, myself included, are here for the natural beauty of Costa Rica…so tomorrow we head out for La Fortuna and the Arenal Volcano.  We’ll be there for a couple of days, although at this point I don’t think I’ll be able to take part in some of the more “adrenalized” activities.  I recently aggravated a shoulder injury and I’ll have to be careful with it.  That’s OK – even if I can’t zipline this time, there are still plenty of great things to see on foot.