Costa Rica part 2
After a while we get 'holiday twitchy' and need to set-off again in search of new places or new species, often both. We'd visited Costa Rica relatively recently (2013) and enjoyed our trip a lot, that and the country was only half-done so we decided to head back there for a longer trip and to try and cover the habitat and territory we didn't get to on the first go.
We did a lot of planning and pre-booking. Some places we wanted to visit just wouldn't respond at all (La Amistad for example). Others couldn't have been more helpful. It's worth saying now that we had a number of issues caused by booking directly (people expecting vouchers when we had pre-paid, forgetting we were coming, failing to advise the end provider, etc.) which are making us think about using an bigger intermediary again in remoter places, to avoid these problems going forward.
We also learned a really big lesson. Don't sort out your hire car after a long day of travel, they will gouge you and they will do what they can to make as much money as possible. We ended-up settling for a non 4x4 which in turn meant there were a number of spots we couldn't visit. Thank you Dollar Rental Costa Rica, we'll never use you again!
Anyway enough of the bad experiences, we did indeed wake-up one morning in Cornwall, after a grey January, with a holiday ahead in Costa Rica. The first day then involved getting up to London and getting settled-in for the coming trans-Atlantic flight!
I was more nervous ahead of this trip as we'd been told by a local photographer of his trip when he'd been held up by police twice for bribes and had his tyres slashed and all his camera kit stolen. We double checked with insurance but also resolved to be super careful throughout our trip to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.
Having transited via Miami we arrived in San Jose after dark, and after being thoroughly shaken down by said rental company we headed on to our hotel, chosen after our previous trip as being one that sounded really good, Hotel Bougainvillea...
We did a lot of planning and pre-booking. Some places we wanted to visit just wouldn't respond at all (La Amistad for example). Others couldn't have been more helpful. It's worth saying now that we had a number of issues caused by booking directly (people expecting vouchers when we had pre-paid, forgetting we were coming, failing to advise the end provider, etc.) which are making us think about using an bigger intermediary again in remoter places, to avoid these problems going forward.
We also learned a really big lesson. Don't sort out your hire car after a long day of travel, they will gouge you and they will do what they can to make as much money as possible. We ended-up settling for a non 4x4 which in turn meant there were a number of spots we couldn't visit. Thank you Dollar Rental Costa Rica, we'll never use you again!
Anyway enough of the bad experiences, we did indeed wake-up one morning in Cornwall, after a grey January, with a holiday ahead in Costa Rica. The first day then involved getting up to London and getting settled-in for the coming trans-Atlantic flight!
I was more nervous ahead of this trip as we'd been told by a local photographer of his trip when he'd been held up by police twice for bribes and had his tyres slashed and all his camera kit stolen. We double checked with insurance but also resolved to be super careful throughout our trip to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.
Having transited via Miami we arrived in San Jose after dark, and after being thoroughly shaken down by said rental company we headed on to our hotel, chosen after our previous trip as being one that sounded really good, Hotel Bougainvillea...
posted by Michael at 9:14 am
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