Costa Rica: 2016

After the funeral for John's mom, we needed to find somewhere to live for the month of November. Costa Rica seemed to fit the bill - warm, interesting and inexpensive. Here's John hanging out with a dancing girl at the Teatro Nacional, San Jose's most beautiful building.

Bank of Roxanne. We travelled out to Uvita, a little town on the Pacific coast. Every day we walked down the beach Playa Uvita to start our day. The first day we found dozens of sand dollars.

At our hostel this chicken would steal the cat's food. The cat didn't seem to mind.

A great recycling bin..

There's a gorgeous jungle waterfall a short walk from Uvita, with pools under the main waterfall and on down the stream where we went swimming (briefly: it's cold!). Along the way there were huge convoys of ants carrying leaves. These guys in this video came out of the jungle and walked along the sidewalk for about 10 meters, then headed back into the jungle.

Pizza puppy! This little stray came into the pizza place when we were ordering. We gave him some bacon.

Cloud ponies! We went up to Poas Volcano in the centre of Costa Rica for a few days. This area is all cloud forest - very damp most of the time. The weather cleared up for two days while we were there. Here's the view from our little cottage and some of our neighbours.

Clear night in the cloud forest.

Main crater - Volcán Poás. "The main crater at Poás continues to be active to varying degrees. ..the park was briefly closed in May 1989 after a minor eruption sent volcanic ash spouting more than 1 km into the air..."

Volcano warning.

Why it's called a cloud forest - watch the right side of this video to see the heavy drizzle.

Sloth scratching his head, possibly because he's wondering where he is - they hardly ever come out of the forest and rarely hang out on the electric wires along the road...

Costa Rica grows wonderful coffee on the sides and valleys of the mountains and volcanoes.

Hurricane Otto cut across the top of the country, so we waited until it was well out in the Pacific and then followed it out to the Pacific coast. We ended up in a laid-back little town called Samara.

Breakfast in Samara.

The Costa Rican motto, slogan and even greeting is 'pura vida', which translate something like 'pure life', good life', or 'being well and happy'.

Tropical Christmas. This is the sports bar where we watched the Grey Cup 2016.