Tárcoles, Costa Rica

It has taken me a while to work up the motivation to write about my trip to Costa Rica. It does not help that two days after I returned home, we had to leave for Lake Placid so that Douglas could compete in his ninth Ironman competition. All of the travel has me wiped out and not in the mood to write.

Besides that I am afraid that I will not be able to accurately convey how wonderful this trip was. It seemed to get better every day, and in the end I did not want to leave. However, I do want to share my experience with you, so I will endeavor to describe it all. Please, forgive the dearth of pictures in this post. It seems that I did not take that many on our first day.

Before I start telling you about this trip in particular, I want to give you some background about the program. The purpose of this expedition was to give our more advanced Spanish students practical experience with the language. The idea was for them to be as fully immersed as possible. Therefore, the fifteen students that we took had all completed Spanish II and were accompanied by three Spanish teachers – myself included. To protect the identity of my under-age students, I will not include any pictures where they are recognizable.

The program that we travel with is called Live the Osa and is run by Eric, his wife Yessenia and her many relatives in Costa Rica. This was our second experience with them, and it is one that we would like to repeat in 2017. You can read more about our first trip here and here. You will see that I am going to write about our trip in a lot more detail this time around. There will be some places that you might recognize from the first visit, but others are new.

This year’s journey began at 3:45 am on Wednesday, July 08. We met at the school – nervous and excited. To be perfectly honest I was wishing that I had not taken on this responsibility. I would have been perfectly happy to stay home with my husband and pets. It did not help that the bus was late and then took an extra long route to the airport. It is a good thing that I left plenty of time.

We arrived in San José just after noon with no problems and immediately got on a bus with Eric, Gustavo (his brother in law and one of our guides), Eric’s two daughters, his nephew and a friend of his family.

Since they no longer serve food on most flights, we were starving when we arrived. Our first stop was a restaurant just outside of the city. One of the best things about traveling in Costa Rica is that you can eat the roadside food and drink from the tap without worrying about getting sick. Here is my meal of meat grilled with onions and peppers and served on a leaf with rice, a tortilla and a fried plantain. I chose cas juice, which is a slightly sour fruit that I have only found in Costa Rica. I love it.

Everyone enjoyed the meal, and then the boys took some time to burn off some steam on the swing set. They may be juniors and seniors in high school, but they can still act like little kids.

Our second stop was in Tárcoles to get some snacks and pipas. Pipas are coconuts that are not fully ripened. They are good for the coconut milk, but you can also eat the meat. The second picture shows a large mound of them and a man chopping off the tops for us to drink.

Tárcoles is famous for its crocodiles. A large number of them can always be seen from the that crosses the Tárcoles River.

They were pretty sluggish that afternoon, but I still do not think that it would have been a good idea to go swimming.

Eric threw some meat to them to see if they would move more for us. They woke up a little but did not seem extremely hungry.

We spent that night in Parrita at the Hotel Wilson. It seems that the only pictures I took at the hotel were of some decor pieces that caught my eye.

I was certain that I would sleep well that night because I had slept less than two hours the night before. However, I work up at 3:00 am and was up worrying until about 5:30. I was nervous about the trip and overwhelmed at the responsibility of making sure that fifteen kids survived the journey safely.

Thus began our Costa Rican adventure of 2015. Don’t worry – it gets better! I will continue the saga next Monday.

Happy Travels!