DAY ONE

Today was pretty much a full travel day. Our flights went well, rough rides but we made it. Getting through immigration in Costa Rica took just over an hour and a half . Then we got through customs really quickly. We took a shuttle to the car rental place to pick up our rental car for the two weeks. We got our little jimmy rental 4x4 and it took us about 3 hours to drive to our air BNB in Quepos which is near where Manuel Antonio National Park is. The main roads from San Jose that take you west and south towards Quepos were decent. Not a ton of potholes but there were definitely some that we didn’t see. The other thing we ran into a lot were speed bumps (more in the small towns) that are no longer painted and easily missed, especially in the dark. We hit many of those :). We arrived at our hostel that we booked through Air BNB. Got a tour of our shared spaces from our awesome host and we hit the sheets early.

DAY TWO

Today we took off early in the morning for a kayak and snorkel tour with Iguana Tours here in Quepos. It was worth every penny. Our guide, Alex, was great. We kayaked across the ocean to a spot for snorkeling. We then jumped in and snorkeled for a while and saw lots of bright colored fish, some sea urchins. We had hoped for a turtle but we didn’t see any. We then hopped back on our kayaks and kayaked to a small secluded beach close by where Alex cut up a pineapple for all of us to enjoy. It was delicious - pineapple here is so much better than what we get back home. We saw a sloth sleeping in a tree here at this beach. She had a small baby with her. It was a two-toed sloth so she didn’t move at all while we were there. After spending some time here at this nice secluded beach, we kayaked back to where we started the whole tour. The bus took us into town for lunch. We enjoyed a delicious typical Costa Rican meal of seafood, beans, rice, plantains, potatoes and salad. They also had delicious iced tea. This was all included in our excursion so that was awesome! We headed back to our place and showered and re-applied sunscreen (because the sun is sooooo stinkin hot here!) and spent the afternoon on Manuel Antonio beach for sunset which you can see below. The sunsets here are AMAZING! Cooking dinner in tonight. Looking forward to tomorrow.

DAY THREE

Today we started on what we didn’t realize would be one of the coolest things we had ever done on vacation. We booked an overnight waterfall tour where we slept in a cave - this was booked through Pacific Journeys. We booked the overnight tour with the waterfall repelling included. To get to the meeting spot, you do take a really rocky dirt road down to their office. We met our guides for the night who would take us up into the cloud forest to sleep in the cave behind the waterfall. Sounds crazy, right? It seemed crazy until we got up there. We were supposed to have 6 other people coming with us but they didn’t show up for the tour. So we got special treatment being just us two and our two guides, Diego + Priscilla. When we drove up to the trailhead, we got out of our cars and started with a 2 mile hike that was quite steep up the mountain to the cave where we will sleep for the night. The organic garden they have at the halfway point was really beautiful. It is filled with fruits, vegetables, herbs and so many different flowers. We picked some produce from the garden that we would later use for our meals in the cave (lunch, dinner + breakfast the next morning). The guides made us vegetarian tacos for lunch that were made with beans, palm hearts, salsa, and a type of slaw mix. It was SO good! We also had fresh mandarin juice with every meal. After lunch, we played some card games and then hiked up further into the cloud forest to cliff jump and swim in one of the natural pools up there. After swimming for a while, we hiked back to the cave and rested for a bit. Just before sunset, we hiked down the mountain to an overlook that was at the top of one of the diamante falls. The sunset was unreal! We hiked back to the cave in the dark with lights and saw lots of giant spiders, many cool frogs, little snakes, cockroaches (ewwww), a gecko and lots of other bugs. We then settled in for dinner and had pasta! Kind of nice after a long hike day. We slept in the cave in a “VIP” spot because the other guests decided they didn’t want to come on the trip which we didn’t mind. I didn’t hardly sleep at all which was fine cause in the middle of the night, the stars were absolutely amazing and SO bright!

DAY FOUR

We awoke in the morning to the bright light of the sun and enjoyed a breakfast of beans, rice, eggs, cheese, and papaya. The coffee has been amazing here as well! Our last activity of the overnight cave trip was repelling the big waterfall that flowed in front of the cave. So we hiked up to the top of the waterfall and strapped up for repelling. That was freaky getting yourself to lean back so your rope was tight the whole time during the repel. This tour was definitely worth the money! We would totally do it again! A couple things we wish we had known before the tour and what to pack. The cave has bathrooms, cold showers, thick sleeping pads, and they provide a sleeping bag + pillow for each guest. Honestly, it was quite nice for being a cave and we didn’t expect that. Things we recommend bringing would be: A flashlight, a water bottle, a towel, bug spray, swim suit, an extra pair of clothes, a sweat shirt, and water shoes if you have them for swimming in the pools as they are super rocky.

After we left Diamanté Falls, we drove to Nauyaca Falls and swam in the pools there. The pools were amazing and less cold than the first pool we swam in at Diamanté. Definitely recommend going here. You can pay to have them drive you down to the falls and then they will come and pick you back up when you’re ready. The hike down is VERY steep and definitely worth paying for the ride. On our way back out, we hiked one of the small trails that took us through some forest where we saw some toucans and howler monkeys with their babies! On our way back to our Air BNB, we stopped at a local soda called soda la Peña and enjoyed some authentic, fresh Costa Rican cuisine. Highly recommend going here for a meal if you are out that way! Our day ended with a nice warm shower and we hit the sheets early.

DAY FIVE

We went to Manuel Antonio National park for the day and saw lots of wildlife. The monkeys tried to steal things out of peoples bags on the beach. The beaches there were absolutely beautiful - 1,000% worth visiting! They are so secluded and natural. We stayed at the park for most of the day. We then went to the Manuel Antonio public beach up the road from our air BNB and Jordan rented a surf board and tried surfing for the first time. He did pretty good! The sun was so incredibly hot this day that we had to be under the umbrella most of the time. So after we felt like we had enough sun, we went out for dinner at Emilio’s Cafe in Quepos. We went when it was dark out but were told the ocean views are amazing here during the day if you come for lunch. We Ordered: poke tuna for app, Passion fruit mojitos, Caribbean jumbo shrimp in spicy coconut sauce, and Grouper in caper sauce. The poke tuna and passion fruit mojitos were our absolute favorite. The entrees we had were delicious, too, but the tuna was top notch. We then cozied up for the night in our Air BNB and watched a movie and fell asleep quite early.

DAY SIX

We traveled from Manuel Antonio north to Jaco. Jaco is another tourist town in Costa Rica. We stopped and ate lunch at Tacos Locos in town - the food was quite good but it was over priced. From there, we went straight to our hotel - Hotel Jaco which we had booked through Air BNB. This hotel was very boutique like. It had a small pool and an outdoor restaurant + bar that served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The restaurant actually opened up right to the beach front. After we got settled in, Jordan went surfing again. The waves were SO much bigger here than at Manuel Antonio. This made it harder for him to get up on his board because you really needed to paddle past all the waves and that was tough. We stayed out there until sunset. Every sunset here was simply breathtaking. We definitely preferred Manual Antonio’s beaches over Jaco’s. Jaco beach was very rocky and full of shells whereas Manuel Antonio was much more sandy and consistent. After sunset, we walked into town to the local grocery store and grabbed some food to make dinner and settled in for the night.

DAY SEVEN

This morning, we set out early for a hidden waterfall tour with some locals. We booked this through Air BNB as well. This tour consisted of hiking up a hillside tucked back in the forest behind the city. We would be passing 10 waterfalls, three of which we could swim in and cliff jump at. The last three waterfalls at the top of the hike were the largest and had the largest pools for swimming + jumping. Our guides were awesome and made us feel like locals ourselves. After our tour, they took us to a restaurant that was owned by a mother of the guide. The food was SO GOOD! We just had a typical Costa Rican meal - choice of chicken or fish, rice, beans, plantains, salad, + iced tea. After our tour was over, we walked through Jaco and visited a couple of the small shops and then headed back to our hotel. We hung by the pool for a few hours and soaked up the last of our beach days for the trip. At sunset, we drove up to a point that one of our guides recommended called El Miro. It’s a little spot in Jaco that’s an abandoned resort hotel that had an AMAZING view of the sunset over the ocean. It was a cool spot to visit but bring a headlamp or flashlight for your walk down because our phone lights didn’t cut it and the trail up there is very bumpy and you can easily trip. After watching the sunset, we both really wanted empanadas so we found a small Soda a couple miles south of this lookout point and drove there. They had amazing empanadas and quite a few different flavors to choose from. We got extra so we could have leftovers. After returning to our hotel, we took a night swim in the pool and relaxed the rest of the night.

DAY EIGHT

We had a nice slow morning sitting by the pool and then taking our last walk on the beach before traveling to our next destination. The last week of our trip was going to be spent inland in the rainforest, cloud forest and by the volcanos on the central/eastern side of Costa Rica. We took off for MonteVerde in the early afternoon. We ate lunch at a small local diner on the way. It was yummy of course - just like every other meal we have had here. Our Air BNB was really cool here. It was super modern but had the “Costa Rican” accents to it with wooden décor and some bright colors. We had planned on doing a night tour here but because the temperature was much cooler here than beachside due to elevation + wind, we decided to just stay in and hit the hay early instead since we had a big day planned for tomorrow.

DAY NINE

We woke up to a flat tire this morning :( So that made us miss our 8AM reservation for the Monte Verde Sky Adventure Park but they let us move it to 10AM. We took the tire to a nearby gas station (almost every gas station has tire repair here since the roads are so rough) and the service guy helped us try to find a hole and we found absolutely nothing which was kind of frustrating. But the spare was actually leaking air so we blew the tire back up and put it back on the car and hoped it would make it the rest of the trip. At 10AM we headed up to the sky adventure park. Here we did a wildlife walk through the cloud forest with our guide Roy. He was nice and very knowledgeable about the plans and wildlife in the forest. We crossed 5 hanging bridges - those were really cool. We were mostly in the clouds the whole time in the park so we couldn’t see very far. We saw some of the tarantulas that had orange legs. ickkk! We also saw micro orchids - they were tiny little orchid flowers blooming off a leaf of a tree. I don’t even know how these guides could find them! Crazy! After the small hanging bridges walk, we headed out for zip lining. This was really cool - you would disappear into the clouds on the zip line which was kind of scary cause you couldn’t see in front of you until you were starting to approach the next landing. A couple of the long zip lines we had to ride together for more weight otherwise we wouldn’t have made it all the way. After zip lining 7 different lines, we had the choice to take the stairs down, be repelled, or bungee jump. We both chose bungee jump and I have never felt so terrified in my life. The initial free fall made me scream so loud people probably thought I was dying but it was sooo worth it! After this, we went tree climbing with the same guide, Roy. This was much more difficult than it looked. Although you are strapped in, the cord is not taut. It’s loose until you fall and then it slowly will repel you back down the tree - we both thought was mechanism was pretty cool. So that made it really feel like you were free climbing and it was a cool experience. Roy recommended us to go for dinner at a restaurant called Sabor Tico so that’s where we went. It was delicious - I got patacones con frijoles negros which has been one of my favorite Costa Rican meals and Jordan got a chicken dish which was also amazing. We then went back to our Air BNB and relaxed for the remainder of the night because when the sun went down, it was COLD with how windy it was up there.

DAY TEN

Today we had booked a coffee tour in Monteverde through Air BNB. This was located at the Sanctuario Ecologico located just south of town. The tour took place on a family farm that had over 115 acres of organic farm. Chris, the guide, was extremely knowledgeable and knew anything and everything there was to know about coffee and organic/sustainable farming. He does sell his coffee and his Instagram page is linked here. I found the farming part the most interesting because it’s quite amazing to be able to do that in a world that throws so much away and buys everything in bulk. He gave me some inspiration to live more consciously about wasting. The coffee part was mind blowing. We never knew that coffee is so Americanized and processed in the US. What we thought was “coffee” really isn’t the true fresh coffee that comes from a coffee plant. The coffee bean is actually inside a type of “cherry”. You break open the cherry and there is either one, two or three coffee beans inside. When the beans are drying, it actually smells like cherries. Kinda crazy! And natural coffee is meant to have fruity notes to it which I have rarely experienced in my years of drinking coffee. Real coffee is actually very similar to tea - fruity, light and almost crisp. Chris told us that a good coffee doesn’t need sugar and cream and boy was he right. This was a really cool experience and we would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a unique tour.

Right after the coffee tour, we had to get on the road to La Fortuna where we had a cooking class scheduled for that afternoon (which again was booked through Air BNB). Both holding our breath hoping the tire would hold up the whole drive. We made it to our air bnb to drop off our stuff before heading to the cooking class. We couldn’t quite tell the view since it was dark alreadyb but we knew the Arenal Volcano was in sight from our pool and we were excited for that. The cooking class hosts were Lidiana and Eddie. They owned a small organic farm that they are progressively working to live off of as much as they can which I thought was really cool - also inspiring. They taught us how to make a traditional Costa Rican meal accompanied by fresh juices and a delicious sweet banana desert most of which came from their own plantation. Their beautiful garden was full of wildlife. We got very close to a sloth that has lived in their garden for the past 2 years which was amazing. She also was pregnant which was very exciting for this family. I don’t think we will ever come that close to a sloth again. We also saw some macaws flying in the distance as well. Those birds are AMAZING! Their colors are just astounding! They walked us through how to cook this meal from scratch - everything organic. After our meal, it was dark so Eddie took us into the garden to see the red eyed tree frogs which were so cool. I also saw the largest bull frog I have ever seen in my life. These people were very nice and welcoming and we would love to learn from them again! We highly recommend doing this class with them - plus it’s very affordable. We then went back to our Airbnb and enjoyed some time in the hot tub before winding down for bed.

DAY ELEVEN

This morning we drove to the Arenal Volcano National Park to do some small hikes and see the volcano. It reminded me of Mt Rainer but more volcano-like obviously. We did the 3 mile hike loop around the park and drove to a few lookout points. We actually picked up a couple from Sweden who needed a ride to the other part of the park. They were planning on being here for a month! Crazy! It was a really nice day so we decided to get day passes to The Springs Resort and Spa to visit the hot springs. The passes were quite affordable considering the cost of staying at the resort. After Arenal National Park, we went into town to La Casa for Pizza for lunch because we were craving some American food. After pizza, we headed up to the Springs Resort and Spa to take advantage of our day pass. This place was amazing. Sort of Bougie for us but the hot springs were really cool and the atmosphere was just phenomenal. You’re in a Mexico-like resort but in a jungle-like setting. Such a cool experience and we couldn’t wait to go back tomorrow to try the lower lazy river hot springs and other things at the lower part of the resort. Before leaving the resort for the night, we enjoyed some sushi for dinner at their sushi bar and it was worth every penny. Food and drinks are quite overpriced here but we felt the sushi prices were decent.

DAY TWELVE

We spent most of today at the The Springs Resort + Spa Hot Springs. It was such a beautiful day and the hot springs were not that busy so it was really nice. We ordered a club sandwich to share and ate lunch by the pools and enjoyed the warm sunshine. In the early afternoon, we left the hot springs and drove to the La Fortuna Waterfall. That thing was massive! Jordan swam but I didn’t - the water was freezing and it started to become an overcast day so I wasn’t warm enough to swim. There were tons of stairs we had to climb to get down and back up from the waterfall viewing point. Definitely not for those who can’t handle 500+ steps but worth the trek if you can make it. This waterfall wasn’t free either - it was $18 a person which honestly surprised us! After the waterfall, we returned to our place and got some dinner at a local soda called Soda Al Turnito right in La Fortuna. The food was phenomenal as always and your portions were so big you were full and still took a whole plate of food home as leftovers. We then went back to the hot springs for a night swim to make the best use of our day passes.

DAY THIRTEEN

Today was a travel + covid test day. We had a slow morning and packed up our stuff to travel to our last Air BNB close to the airport. On our way, we stopped at La Paz Waterfall Gardens. This place was cool. Very jungle-like. But it was sort of like a zoo with cool waterfalls in it. We saw many of the animals that we saw in the wild in Costa Rica but were also able to see some that we didn’t get the chance to. All the animals in this animal sanctuary were rescued - mostly from people who tried to illegally hold them as pets so they were unable to return to their natural habitat safely. There was a nice waterfall “hike” that you saw the very large waterfall in all its portions and then a shuttle takes you back up to the lodge where you park. After that, we continued to drive to our air bnb to check in before we had our scheduled covid tests at 3PM so we could fly back to the USA. We mostly hung out at our air bnb for the night and took a swim in their pool. We had a relaxing night because we knew tomorrow was going to be an exhausting travel day.

DAY FOURTEEN

We go home :( Although we are really sad to leave this place, we are excited to see our dog and return to normalcy again. There are things about home that you just always want to come back to. Your usual food, normal routine, your own bed, your dog, your normal currency, etc. Our travel experience didn’t go as we hoped but we still made it home (barely). The customs line was VERY long when we showed up but it ended up moving really fast. We had a two hour layover so we weren’t super concerned. After getting through customs, we only had about 45 minutes to get to our plane before they started boarding. At this point, we started running to TSA because we had a sinking feeling we weren’t going to make it. And boy were we right. The TSA line was MILES long. There was no way we were getting through in less than 45 minutes. Thankfully, we were able to move WAY up in line and made it through TSA in 35-40 minutes. And then we ran. We needed to get to gate 55 and we were currently at gate 11. We ran so fast we were dripping sweat when we got onto the plane and I couldn’t stop coughing from the dry air. They shut the door behind us. We were so thankful to make the flight because it was the last on out to Grand Rapids for the night and Jordan would have missed his flight the next morning if we didn’t make it.

RECAP

This trip was amazing but as always, we think of things we wish we had brought, wish we could have changed, or maybe wished we just didn’t do on our trips. So we have highlighted some of those things in separate posts linked below:

Things We Wish We Knew Before Traveling To Costa Rica (including the things we wish we had packed but didn’t)

Two Week Road Trip in Costa Rica

Things We Wish We Knew Before Traveling To Costa Rica

How We Travel For Cheap