Hey guys,

Hope everyone is doing okay!.. We are having more than a blast in Costa Rica. We've been here for more than a week now.. but first I will start by explaining our experience from Granada to Monteverde, Costa Rica.

Driving from Granada to the border was not so bad at all, only 4hr drive and we were in a new country. The bus dropped us off and we had to walk like 2 miles to get to the actual border. Once we were in the other side we drove about 1 hr more to get to Monteverde on a very bumpy road. This town is up in the mountains so literally there is not a nice road to get there, oh and not to mention it looks like it is always late afternoon here because Monteverde is the only place in Central America where cloud forest exists..basically the forest is in the clouds nearly every day.. People here don´t see the sun a lot weird eh!.

Anyhow we arrived to our hotel which was not bad at all... and obviously I inspected the bed and there were no bugs finally! :).. We had a short briefing on what activities are here to do, and let me tell you LOTS!..

There were several things it caught our attention: 1) Coffee and Chocolate tour :) 2) Night tour in the forest ;) and 3) Canopy with a bungee jump at the end ( mmh not so excited about that).. Anyhow we decided to make the most out of this town in one day and try to do as much as possible but in our first night Mexico was playing against Costa Rica to qualify for the world cup... and you all know how much I loveeee to cheer for Mexico soo we planned a night out at the only bar in the town "Amigos"..

And the fun begins!... THEEE only mexican at that bar and the rest Costa Rican or from different parts of the world.. I tried to persuade eveyone from our group to cheer for Mex but they all decided not to ( I guess it was the smart way.. lucky me I have a bf that loves Mexico too so now we were two!).... so for the frist 30 min nothing and then suddenly Mexico scores and I start screaming "goooooooooolllll yayyyyyy mexicooooo" and the bar was silent but me and in the background phil lol... then second goal, it got more loud and I noticed there were some other Mexicans at the bar so I decided to joined them and do the mexican porra (cheer)..hahahha and we had a blast.. ps. Phil's Spanish got better that night! :) hahahha. Everyone survived and Mexico won!!! :)

For the next day we planned to do the Canopy and the Coffee and Chocolate tour. The canopy tour was basically ziplining. Me and Phil were both familiar with this because we did it in Cancun last New Year with my parents. The most interesting thing at this one was that the canopy had a 'Superman' zip line where you are attached by your back and you fly like superman. It was optional ofcourse but I got persuaded to do it by Phil. It was so scary I had my eyes shut the whole time lol and was the longest minute of my life...i wanted something to hold onto but there was nothing and let me tell you that wire was sooo high and long! Anyhow it was fun and Phil came across after me of course in the superman pose. Lol BUT just after that when I thought we were done, there's one last thing that everybody did called the Tarzan Jump! Let me tell you it was a frickin BUNGEE!!! .I was having lots of fun until I got to that Tarzan swing holy guacamole it was scary but I just kept thinking if everyone is doing then it must be safe right :/.. anyhow they call it the Tarzan Swing because you literally swing for seconds oor minutes not sure.. Everyone was doing it and you could only hear: ahhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhh uhhhhhh.. never yayy! so I was freaking out. I told myself I would never in my life do a bungee jump at all well.. so I obviously refused to do it. I tried but I couldn´t I was even on the edge ready to jump but nop not doing it.. So I tell Phil I was not ready and he should go first.. He gets ready and jumps.. the first scream was ahhhhhh.. then turned into yayyyyy... I was a little confused.. But then I decided I should try and just do it.. Without looking at the ground... So I did it!.. My first bungee jump in Costa Rica!. Phil was a very proud bf for the rest of the day lol and I was shaking but it felt awesome! But guess what....never again!

La Fortuna

From Monteverde to La Fortuna you have to go again on bumpy roads and half way you can feel the change of temperature... It gets a lot warmer(its lower)... And the bus dropped us off by la Fortuna lake and we had to get to La Fortuna across this huuge lake by the slowest boat ever.. It takes 45 min when really should be like 10 with a good engine. The good thing is that you get to enjoy the volcano and all the amazing scenery of Costa Rica...

We decided to do an Atv(quad bike) tour of the area n the morning which was alright... Bumpy roads and we visited few rivers and a waterfall lookout... We both had one each and the highlight was probably at the end when we stopped for Phil to do a ropeswing into the river. I didnt want to do the ropeswing so i just jump form a rock that was like 5m up! nothing too crazy! And it was soo frickin cold! We had a nice traditional Costa Rican breakfast afterwards though and I got to play with the cutest dog called Roco.

In the afternoon we decided to try water rafting in apparently the best place to do it!.. Phil got super excited and wanted to do the class 4 river but I was not mentally prepare for that so we decided to go for the class 2 and 3... The only problem was that it's being raining so the rivers are actually a little tougher than normal... In our raft we had 3 Londoners including Phil and a couple from Uruguay and myself so we decided to divided the raft into teams.. Team London and team Latinos... The bet was to try to keep your team in the raft... First 5 min Phil fell down.. Poor Phil... And then slowly each Londoner fell down so obviously team Latinos were happy!...

San Jose

This is the capital of Costa Rica so basically there are lots of museums and all that.. But we decided to say goodbye to our tour and to stay in a nicer hotel for the night before joining the other tour!... And honestly we were very happy to have room service lol and to do our laundry... For the next day we tried to run some errands and try to mail some stuff.. But mmmm that didn't happen the post office didn't have boxes or envelopes for sale so we spent the whole afternoon looking for a shop and we finally gave up and we just visited the national theatre which was ok....not that impressive for a national theatre but we did have a nice lunch at the posh hotel opposite which Phil thought was very colonial and we had our very own pianist while we watched the world go by. We were both not too impressed with San Jose as it was a big dirty city and we came from beautiful countryside.

And that was it my friends(I'm getting used to that phrase lol)!... First half of the Costa Rica!

I'll update with the second half tomorrow

Yvette and Phil