#RafalRica Begins

In April, we (Jason, me, Emilie, Ally, Marc, and Anne) went on a trip to Costa Rica to celebrate Anne’s 65th birthday. None of us had been to Costa Rica before, and with the help of a local travel company, we had planned a week full of typical Costa Rican activities.

We all arrived in San Jose on Saturday evening and stayed at Hotel Grano de Oro, which is a Victorian house in the city that was transformed into a boutique hotel in the early 1990s. The hotel is amazing - there are many open-air courtyards throughout, and the halls are lined with old wallpaper, mirrors, paintings, clocks, and other art. There was a great sense of not knowing whether I was inside or outside as I walked from the lobby to our room, and we even had a personal fountain outside our window. The restaurant is also very good. Overall, would highly recommend.

A hotel hallway (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A hotel courtyard (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The nighttime view from the roof deck (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A traditional tico breakfast (Photo/Jason Rafal)

On Sunday, our driver and guide, Tommy, picked us up in the morning and we started the long drive to La Fortuna, where we would spend the first part of our trip. Along the way, he told us fun facts about Costa Rica and generally got us excited about being in the country. One of the first things we learned was the phrase Pura Vida, which is a catch-all phrase used across the country to express pleasantries. Our guide said that the phrase was a marketing campaign used by a president in the 80s that was wildly successful and spread throughout Costa Rica culture. It appears to have originated from a 1950s Mexican movie, but Costa Rica adopted the phrase as its own.

Similarly to many other countries I’ve been to, traffic laws in Costa Rica are used more like loose guidelines, and people tend to just make the driving choices that make the most sense to them at the time. Our driver used his hazards like blinkers to show when he was slowing down for a stopped car. They also use horns similarly to how they did in Vietnam - one longer blast to scold, a couple of light taps to tell someone you were passing them. Most of the bridges were one lane, so the person who got there first would go and the people coming the other way would have to wait.

Passing on mountain roads (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We were driving on Easter, which was also Election Day, and there were flags everywhere - on houses, tied to cars, being carried around - to show candidate loyalty. We passed many voting stations by the side of the road.

Voting registration stations (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We had a few stops on our way to the hotel in La Fortuna; the first was Doka Estate for a coffee tour. At Doka, we combined with other groups and followed a young woman around the farm as she walked us through how the coffee beans are harvested, sorted, de-skinned, dried, and stored. The Rafals know a fair bit about coffee, but I was struck by the sheer amount of labor that goes into coffee preparation. A lot of it is still done by hand at Doka. Similarly to picking grapes in France, laborers are invited to the farm and given food and board every year to work picking the coffee fruits. Doka roasts and also sells green beans.

Lovely tropical scenary at Doka (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Our guide shows us different states of coffee beans (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Machinery that de-skins coffee (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Costa Rica has an interesting coffee culture. Until recently, they exported all of their good coffee and kept the low-quality beans to sell domestically. In the past few years there has been a movement to keep some of Costa Rica’s good quality coffee in the country. The coffee we were served at resorts, which was primarily Britt, was pretty good.

Bags of resting coffee beans (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Dried green coffee beans (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Ally helps Doka rotate the drying coffee beans (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After finishing the tour and sampling some different coffees and chocolates, we loaded back into our van and headed to La Paz Waterfall Garden. This time, Tommy stayed with us and gave us the tour. La Paz is an amazing park with several large waterfalls, butterfly and hummingbird gardens, and a sort of zoo of rescued birds and wild animals. Tommy walked us through the butterfly garden; a rescued bird area, where we met a very patient toucan who was posing for pictures; an area with capuchin monkeys, spider monkeys, and sloths; and a hummingbird garden, where a descriptive sign advertised the 20 or so types of hummingbirds and we struggled to identify two or three.

A posing parakeet (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A gorgeously colored rainbow-billed toucan (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A butterfly rests on a flower (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We enjoyed a buffet lunch in an open, indoor-outdoor cafeteria before visiting some wild cats (ocelots, jaguars, and an adorable margay) and looking around a traditional Costa Rican farmhouse and yard, where we also sampled traditional sugar cane tea (which tastes like…sugar cane), cornbread that had a pudding-like consistency, and the cheese that we would find to be most prevalent in Costa Rica, which is firm and squeaky and doesn’t melt easily.

A margay, which, at about the size of a domestic cat, is more wild cat than big cat (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After that, we started climbing down the hill and viewing the large waterfalls on the property. The maintenance of the trails was really impressive - it was mostly concrete steps, ramps, and railings that had been molded to look like tree branches. The trails were often steep, but well managed. The waterfalls were stunning, and each had at least a couple of vantage points from which to view them.

The whole group (despite the perspective, I am not the tallest) (Photo/Tommy)

A large jungle waterfall (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Three waterfalls from one vantage point (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The entire property is meant to be toured from the top of the hill down, and then a shuttle returns you to the top to exit. As we waited for the shuttle next to a narrow, twisty mountain road, we watched the cars and trucks making the alarming turn and they went up and down the road. At one point, a pickup truck towing a car with a rope came by, with one person in the driver’s seat and another one running up the hill behind them so he wouldn’t weigh down the car. They held up the cars in both directions for a couple minutes while trying to negotiate the turn.

The car towing having some effect on traffic (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After the waterfall garden, we drove through the forest on twisty mountain roads with hairpin turns before the landscape flattened out into rich farmland. In the afternoon, we arrived at our resort, which had beautiful views of arenal volcano from every room. We didn’t hear until later that a minority of people visiting the area actually get to see the volcano clearly; we were lucky enough to get three at least partially clear days.

The view of Arenal from our resort (Photo/Jason Rafal)