La Fortuna - Volcán Arenal

Today we went to La Fortuna. That's a small town on the foothill of the volcano Arenal. You are supposed to have a very good view from town to the volcano and at night with a bit of luck you could even see smoke and lava coming out of the crater... well that is the theory. During our stay there were clouds over the volcano all the time. We could hardly see the lower half of it =). However we still had a very nice stay there.

Central square in La Fortuna:

We visited the nearby waterfalls:

On our way back I spotted this toucan in a tree next to the road! I couldn't belief it! After all these months of hoping to see one, I finally saw a real, wild toucan. And a very beautiful one, too.

Lake of Arenal:

The next day we made a tour with a guide through the Arenal Observatory Reserve. There we saw another toucan, but I'm still proud that I spotted my first toucan by myself. I really like these birds!

In La Fortuna there are also different hot springs where you can take a nice hot bath a river that is heated up by the volcano. Normally the entrance fees for these luxury thermal baths are very high, but a nice taxi driver told us where the locals go... they go just into the hot springs on the other side of the road from one of the most expensive thermal baths. Of course we went there, too, and had a very nice bath for free =)
You can see a lot of vapor over the water, because it is so nice and warm.

This is a ginger plant (Ingwer). The part that you can eat are the roots.

Relieve de barro

The semester here is nearly over now. All my courses are finishing this or next week. After this come two weeks of exams and then holidays! I can't belief how fast this semester passed.
Besides some classes that are actually connected with my study course in Germany, I also participated in a pottery class just for fun. We had to make big relieves out of clay.


I really like the tropical plant they have in this country so I decided to form some of them.

San José

By now I already live five months in San José and still haven't written anything about it on this blog, so I think it's time to change that.
San José is the capital of Costa Rica. With 340,000 habitats it's the biggest city in the country. It's located in the Central Valley between two mountain chains at 1,170 m above sea level. Every guidebook will tell you that the city is not very beautiful and in parts I must agree with that... You have to search a bit to find the nice places =)

The national theater is one of these nice places:

Especially in the higher class neighbourhoods the houses appear a bit like jails. All the houses are surrounded by high fences and barbed wire (Stacheldraht). Also all the windows are barred. These houses are still fairly "unsafe":

Above the streets swing tones of electricity cables, but if you look behind them the view can be really
stunning! San José is surrounded by beautiful mountains.

The streets are a bit adventurous and the strongest has all the rights... so as a pedestrian (Fußgänger) better watch out and double check before crossing the street ;-)  Oh but don't trust the direction indicators (Blinker), because they are forgotten regularly. The drivers here communicate by beeping the horn. After a while I got used to all of this and started enjoying the chaos with fruit stands on every corner and a mixture of big, new 4x4 wheel drives and rusted, old jalopies (Klapperkisten).
On the streets of San José you can see easily that Costa Rica is a developing country with some parts already very developed and others still very little developed. On the one hand the price level is nearly as high as in Europe, they have a very good health care and educational system, but on the other hand the salaries are very low and poverty is still a very big problem.

Guayabana

Guayabana is a fruit. On the outside it is green, on the inside it is white, fibred and with black seeds. You can eat it directly, but even better is it in form of a milkshake.
This one is a very big Guayabana:

Parque Nacional Tapantí

Today we decided to visit the National park of Tapantí. It's a park near San José in the region with the highest probability of rain in this country. So we equipped ourselves with umbrellas and rain coats and off we went. We knew before that there is no bus that goes right to the park entrance. The bus driver told us we had to walk the last 4 km.... but after about 3 km we reached a little town where they told us that the entrance is still 4 km away! Anyway finally we reached the park and it was really nice. We even had luck and the rain stopped for a while.

No worries the snake was dead...

These are nests of birds. The male birds spend about four weeks building these homes and then the female birds come and decide if they like it or not. If they don't like it the males have to build a new house ;-)

After we had walked through the whole park (another 7 km) we were not very keen to walk back the felt thousand kilometers to the nearest bus stop... and we were very lucky! One of the park guides had pity on this group of soaked exchanges students and asked he boss if he could leave early today. Because he lived in San José he drove us all the way home in his car. He was our hero that day!

Café

Coffee is something very important here not only because they produce and export it all over the world, but also because all the ticos (= Costa Rican) enjoy to drink it. It doesn't matter what time of the day it is, it's always the right time to drink a cafecito (= small coffee) with some friends.

And this is how they prepare the coffee here. You can ask any tico and he will tell you that the coffee from a churreador is way better than the coffee from the latest coffee machine.

Playas del Coco

This weekend I headed to the north of Costa Rica to a beach on the Pacific. We stayed there with some locals which made it a lot easier to get around and see less turistic places.

The north-west of Costa Rica, the region of Guanacaste, has the most distict rainy and dry seasons in the country. Here they experience nealy six months of drought. During this time the landscape turns compleatly yellow-brownish with many cactus. However during the rainy season everything is very green. We were there just at the beginn of the dry season so everything was still very green.

This little beach only the locals know. We were there all by ourselves. The beach ist called "Playa del calzón de los pobres" with means something like "underpants of the poor"... however noone could tell us why.

Playa de Ocotal with black sand

Sunset at Playa del Coco

Our little campfire at the beach

The next day they took us to one of the big condominiums here. Condominiums are very posh housings with private pools and everything. Most of the flats are owned by rich North Americans who only spend there holidays here. Luckily some of frinds of the people we stayed with own a flat here and so we could enter with them and spend a nice day at the luxury pools.