It's used in response for anything- how's work? how's the food? how did the drink taste? how is the music? did you like it?
While I love a free trip, and I love to relax and read books, I love even more to explore the culture, people, food, drinks, locations, and minutiae of a place. What is it that makes this place what it is? What motivates the people here? What do they like to eat and drink? What does the money look like? How do they spend their time? What would it be like to live here? You just don't get that sitting on a resort, where everyone speaks English and accepts US dollars for tips. Good thing for me, Bean loves to really travel too.
We hoped to leave the resort for a minimum of two nights and see more than one place in the mountains but the timing didn't work out with the cocktail hours and business meeting, plus the Mega Combo tour. No problem. Pura Vida. We still left for over 24 hours and stayed overnight.
Another breakfast including delicious watermelon juice and a little pink donut with sprinkles, and then we were ready for adventure. We rented a little car with 4-wheel drive that had to be standard because they were out of automatics. Good thing Bean knows how to drive standard! Too bad he still had a badly sprained wrist.
We typed in the name of the town we were headed to: Monteverde, and something popped up that said 'Monteverde Tree House Hotel'. That sounded fun, so we hit the road with our music playing. A few minutes after we pulled out of the gate of the resort, I looked over and felt the urge. I felt freedom.
"Pura Vida! This is it! I get it!!"
Bean looked at me curiously, wondering where it had come from. But he agreed that it was awesome to be in charge of our own day and our own time and not be at a cocktail hour talking about work or at a business meeting or on a tour bus with other people who want to talk about work. We were free!
And now, for your viewing pleasure, a few of the shots we took while driving up to Monteverde. It's about 65 miles away from the resort where we stayed but took almost 4 hours to get there.
Pay attention to this one: look at the GPS pink line. It was squiggly like that most of the time! This was a one car width bridge. So awesome.
Woohoo! Real life roller coaster! The roads were either smooth with lots of traffic, or full of potholes, or rocks, or rocks and potholes combined. We felt very adventurous and the 4x4 was definitely necessary.
So we put the Tree House Hotel into the GPS, thinking maybe we would get a room there that night. It ended up putting us right in front of the Tree House Restaurant, which was one of the places on my bucket list and one of the two reasons to go to Monteverde (as opposed to any other place).
I needed to take a leak and had been holding it for over an hour on the bumpy, rocky, winding, beautiful roads because there was nowhere to stop, and believe me- I thought about pulling over on the side of the road, but there were cows and it was people's farmland, so I decided against it. Luckily for us, the Tree House Restaurant is right in the middle of town and across the street (where we were standing to take this picture) was a visitor's center.
We needed a hotel room anyway, so we went inside. There was a bathroom!! I rushed over to it, and noticed a sign indicating it cost 200 colones. We didn't have any cash yet. When we finally talked to the lady (she was helping someone when we came in), we asked where we could get some cash. She sent us around the block to the bank.
Bean tried to go in to talk to a teller, but there were double glass doors that held you in a little cage while they scanned you for metal, then told you loudly- in Spanish of course!- to remove your metal items and put them in the lockers in the waiting area. Bean doesn't speak Spanish, so I translated while he looked really confused and the tellers were probably laughing at us. We decided to just use the ATM since I had had zero chance to brush up on my Spanish anyway- when we were in Peru, after a couple of days I picked it up and was able to hold a simple conversation. This trip, we were surrounded by English. I desperately wanted someone to just look at me and not understand English to force me to speak Spanish!
So we are standing there at the ATM, and we have no clue what the exchange rate is. But we told the machine to speak English so it's easy. Then it asks us how much money we want. We need more than 200 colones so I can use the restroom, and something tells me we need a lot more than that. So I type in 50,000. Bean starts saying, 'Don't do that! What if it takes all of our money?' I'm thinking we should just go for it, so I push enter. It quickly spits it out. The way we found out the exchange rate is kind of funny too.
We went back to the tourist center, I finally get to go pee! and the lady helps us book a hotel room for about $140. We weren't exactly hungry yet so we decided to go put our backpack down in the hotel and figure out what we wanted to do next. She booked us a junior suite at La Heliconia Hotel.
The picture is of the main lobby, but our room was up in the mountain behind this, in a row of maybe 10 rooms on the top level. Brace yourself for this- the orange hotel room that is also the largest normal hotel room I've ever been in. Those are two king beds with plenty of space all around them.
And plenty of wood to admire!
Even in the orange and red bathroom!
Since we had a nice balcony with chairs and a little table, I made Bean model it for us. Also we loved how this hotel had real keys, metal ones, not the key cards. On our trip to California, we stayed in a hotel recommended by my parents that had real keys and that one stands out in our minds too.
How about the view from our balcony area?
And here's what 50,000 colones looks like in person. I love the sloth! This could be $20 or $1000- we have no idea.
By this point, we have already worked through the uncomfortable tasks of re-learning how to drive a standard (with a sprained wrist), navigating a new town, getting money and a hotel room, and we realized we were maybe a little hungry. It was probably about 2pm at this point. After finally getting into our room, we felt so much more comfortable and at least knew what roads to take to get to and from our hotel to town.
We decided to head back to town and set up the activities we wanted to do that afternoon and the next morning before we went home. We originally planned to eat at the Tree House Restaurant for dinner, but after we decided to do a night hike that started at 5:30pm, and a morning walk on the hanging bridges in the cloud forest, we thought it would be best to just eat and relax then. A late lunch/dinner, if you will. Ha.
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