Brett's Costa Rica Trip

Normally, Lisa writes these, but since this entry was for a trip I went on by myself, I figured I better do the writing... In May I had the chance to go back down to Costa Rica for a couple weeks for work. I wished Lisa could've come as it is such a beautiful place, but airfare for her and the kids makes it quite expensive. Costa Rica is a beautfiul country. Only a 5 hour flight from Phoenix and in the Central Time Zone, it feels much more closer to home than going to Asia or Europe. Intel has a pretty large site there in San Jose. The nice thing about the area is that San Jose sits higher in elevation up in the mountains so the climate is beautiful there. It's typically in the 70's year round and humidity is not so bad due to the higher elevation. I had to take some of these pictures with the 3MP camera on my phone so the quality on some of them is not as good as normal, but it works...

We used the middle weekend of my trip to go out and do some site-seeing and adventurous activities. We went to the La Paz Waterfall gardens which had numerous waterfalls, an aviary (giant cage with various birds), and a butterfly area. The whole place was surrounded by dense jungle.

Butterfly Garden-

Aviary with pictures of some Macaws and Toucans-

A short hike down a trail took you past several beautiful waterfalls-

On Saturday we took a trip up into the mountains to a place called MonteVerde (which means Green Mountain). They call the area a "cloud forest". In Costa Rica they have a unique activity with cables attached between trees hanging over large sections of jungle. We had done this when I was in Costa Rica last time but I didn't have any pictures to show from that trip. So this time you can see what I'm talking about.

Notice the cable in the middle of the picture below. It's actually hundreds of feet up in the air.

Picture of Jose, Jael and myself all geared up for the adventure.

You strap yourself into a tight harness and use a pulley to glide down the cable and some thick leather gloves to squeeze the cable for brakes.

My favorite place to stay down there is at the Marriott Costa Rica, which is an old plantation house overlooking a golf course. Here's some pictures of the Marriott Costa Rica-

The rear of the hotel overlooks a large driving range and mountains in the background-

The hotel itself is all open air due to the beautiful climate year-round. So it has a giant central courtyard.

On Sunday we went out for a drive around the countryside outside of San Jose.

There's a lot of beautiful places just a short drive from the city.

This was a small river along the side of the road during our drive.