Orosi

Buenos dias from the Orosi valley!
It is really beautiful here, not quite as picturesque as the Rough Guide says, but the views are just stunning. To give an idea: it´s like being in a bowl, surrounded on every side by verdant, lush landscapes and dark mountain tops with clouds sitting just on top. It´s incredible fertile here and easy to see why, when you experience the weather for one day - it is warm and humid, with occasional heavy rain. There are coffee plantations all around, sadly it´s not picking season yet so we couldn´t go for a tour but luckily we can drink a lot of it!
True to what we´ve been promised, the Ticos are really friendly - they seem to place a lot of stock on pleasantries, but as long as you start a conversation with ´¿buenos dias, como estas?´then they are so lovely and really helpful - and they have infinite patience with our poor level of Spanish, which isn´t a problem when asking questions, but then they reply with a string of ´(%/)?&(·%¿¿)´which takes us about half an hour to understand, and usually ends up looking like a game of Charades or Win Lose or Draw, and tends to involve puppets. We´ve also spoken to the other people staying at Montaña Linda, including two women from NYC (more on them later) and a lovely guy called Adrian who is Tico but speaks very good English and seems to live there, but we can´t quite work out what he does or why he lives there. Oh and also some Argentinians who have no English, and we can´t understand any of their Spanish (the dialect is probably equivalent to someone who´d learnt Queen´s English trying to understand a Glaswegian), so the language is indeed quite a barrier.. but they seem nice anyway. One of them is painting spoons and selling them for $5.
There is a supermarket just around the corner, and the hostel has an outdoor kitchen, so we´ve been self-catering which works out very cheap (we bought what amounts to nearly 2 chickens for a pound) and is quite fun, especially since the products are, as ever, called strange things. My favourites are ´Bimbo´bread, and ´Terror´cleaning products.. presumably the latter contains anthrax? Will take photos.
There are lots of things to do here - yesterday we went on a 5-hour trek around the mountains, which we thought we could do in about 3, since the directions seemed to wildly overestimate the times.. however, by about 3 hours in we were clearly nowhere near Orosi and the directions didn´t make sense. A couple of times we had to decide whether to turn back and retrace our steps, or carry on and potentially get very very lost. Also, it gets dark here at about 5.30pm, and this was 1pm. And we hadn´t had lunch yet. And our 500ml water had run out about 1 hour in. So not the best trek ever, although it was quite an adventure.. in hindsight, of course. The trek says at the bottom that if anyone has any suggestions or amendments to make, to make it easier for subsequent trekkers, that we should add them in. This is what I´m adding: ´don´t worry if you reach a sign saying ´Private Property´, this is fine and you probably won´t be shot by an angry farmer. We saw a guy and he just said ´hola´. Don´t worry if, about 3 hours into the trail, the directions no longer square with anything you can see around you. You will probably finish the trail with blind, desperate optimism that this must be the way back, right? This is normal too, so that´s fine. Just relax and enjoy the scenery. There are a couple of VERY steep hills, the directions say nothing about them, but it´s fine, and don´t forget to go down them very slowly, preferably sideways, as if you break your ankle here it´s a LONG way for your partner to piggy-back you down. Oh and don´t worry about the two houses you´ll walk past where half a dozen crazy-looking dogs run at you barking and baring their teeth, they are just being friendly, even if you are scared to death. The owners won´t be in a hurry to call them off, either. Enjoy!´
So, yes. It turned out to be around 10 miles, raining a lot of the time (cheap kagouls from Primark keep the rain out but emphatically are not breathable) and almost always going steeply up or down hill, and quite rocky ground too. My legs ache :( Ben wants to do the harder one.

Although they were very nice and gave me their email addresses as they left this morning with a promise of "if you´re ever in New York, look me up", we´re incredibly glad the women from NYC have now gone. They were staying in the room next to us, and the walls are so paper-thin that we could hear every noise they made and word they spoke, as if they were in the room with us. They didn´t really say anything, either .. their conversations went along the lines of: "that rooster sure does crow a lot", "uh-huh, that´s what they do", "it´s their job", "oh yeah" .. ad infinitum. So we´ve been using iPods to drown them out and help us fall asleep - they´ve woken us up a few times though. They were perfect examples of Gringos, and we´ve been feeling better about ourselves in comparison, since, even if we don´t speak the language and are tourists, at least we´re not as bad as THEM.
Not too many mosquito bites so far, mostly thanks to our fantastic net and the fact that we´re generally beneath it between the hours they bite, ie. dawn til dusk. It´s light from 5am til about 5.30pm here, so our waking hours are similar.
Today we´re going to the waterfall about 30mins away (which is run by an eccentric guy called ´Nano´, who will apparently give us a tour of his coffee and banana plantation, and if you get lost on the way to his house you can ask "practically anyone" for directions. Very sweet!), then back for lunch, and then out to the thermal baths. Tomorrow we´re off to the beach town of Mal Pais, for ´chilling´and surfing, and then to Liberia which is about 3 hours from the Nicaraguan border.. we´re probably going to pop across for a day or two, since everything is apparently much cheaper there. After that I´m not exactly sure .. probably somewhere on the Caribbean coast, as long as Hurricane Gustav stays away.
Hope you are all well - we´re missing you :)

Lots of love,
Louise and Ben xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Yes we do know the way to San Jose, thanks for asking.

Buenos something! (haven´t learnt the word for morning in Spanish yet..)
We´re still here in San Jose, but are leaving for Orosi (via Cartago) soonish - it´s not too far away but we want to get there as early as possible before the rain starts. Yesterday we learnt the hard way that it´s best to carry an umbrella and wear waterproofs in this part of Costa Rica - we got SOAKED!! It was beautiful and sunny until about 1pm, then there were light showers which wasn´t a problem, but then we left to come back to the hostel, and in the process got absolutely drenched, even though we tried to shelter as much as possible. This is the second day in a row that we´ve woken up naturally at 5.30am, having gone to bed at 9, so probably what we´ll do is shift our waking hours so that we can do lots of things in the morning, and then stay indoors or do less during the afternoon. But hey, it might not rain every day!
San Jose is actually really nice - nothing like the awful, busy, stressful city described in the guide book. It´s quite bustling but very nice to walk around - we didn´t do anything in particular, but went through a couple of parks, and into the Mercado Central, which is a big undercover market selling all kinds of things, from raw meat to fruit to bags. We were going to eat at a Soda, sort of like a greasy spoon cafe or diner, where all the Ticos (Costa Rican people) eat, but in the end we admitted to each other that we actually wanted MacDonalds. We also bought a passionfruit, some lychee-type things and grapes from the market and had those in the afternoon. Oh yes, and we´ve found Central America´s answer to Trafalgar Square, absolutely teeming with pigeons and people feeding them (maybe Trafalgar Square pre-Ken Livingstone..).
Orosi sounds really lovely, apparently it´s a pretty village with hot springs etc., and lots of nice walks you can do. There´s also the possibility of taking a few days´of Spanish lessons, which we might take if it´s affordable, so we can converse a bit more with the locals.
Anyway, we´re off to lie in the hammocks again! I could get used to this...
Lots of love,
xxxx Lou (Ben is working on his website - now that´s a work ethic)

San Jose

¡Hola!
Just a quick update to say we´ve arrived safely (eventually) and are in San Jose, the capital city. It´s 10am here and the weather is gorgeous - there´s a bit of a breeze but it´s warm and sunny. We´ve just had breakfast (a bargain at 3500 colones, or about three pounds fifty, for coffee on tap, juice, then pancakes and maple syrup for Ben and tropical fruit salad with banana yoghurt and oaty cereal for Lou) and are going to hang around at the hostel for a while, before venturing into the capital. The room is quite basic although clean with hot water, the communal areas of the hostel are really good, though - there´s a swimming pool, free internet, hammocks etc and there are lots of other young travellers around, so there´s a nice atmosphere. Too soon to say what it´s like here, but on first impressions it is very green, sunny and friendly.
The journey yesterday was okay, in that nothing went wrong, but it was just incredibly long and with the time changes, by the time we got to sleep it was 5am in our heads, but only 10pm in Costa Rica, so we had 12 hours of flights plus hanging around at Miami (where we had the biggest but most disgusting diet coke ever), and effectively a 27 hour day on about 2 hours sleep. Not an experience we´re keen to repeat!! The Virgin Atlantic tv on demand thing is excellent though (Family Guy, Simpsons, Blackadder and films, top 40 albums and audio books) (although annoying that they suddenly turn it off without warning when you´re about to descend) but by complete contrast, Costa Rican tv looks awful - when we were having breakfast this morning there was a music video on.. it was actually more naff than French rap, which certainly didn´t seem possible before today. The stereo was playing Red Hot Chili Peppers but has now moved on to a delightful medley of Eiffel 65 - Europop halfway across the world!
We haven´t found any English people yet, but there are some gringos (Americans), and lots of Dutch people, inexplicably..

Anyway, this was going to be a quick one, so we´ll sign off now.
Hope you are all well and that England has a tiny bit of sun (we will try to send some over, but in return can you keep the rain over there please?).
Lots of love,

Louise and Ben xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Bienvenidos!

Hi and welcome to our blog, which is (hopefully) going to be updated often, to let you know what we're up to, where we are, etc.
We're leaving England very early on Weds, 27th August and are due to arrive after about 14 hours (including a connection in Miami) in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. No plans in particular after that, apart from a return flight on 25th September.
Check back soon - more details to follow! And don't forget to leave comments :)

Lou (with Ben, who is busy working on his website)

xxx