Costa Rica testimonials

Hola Mauricio.

We are slowly settling back into the routine here in Nova Scotia. So here is our feedback which you can feel free to use on your website if you wish.

Car rental:
we were very happy with the service from the Adobe car rental agency. It was helpful to have the car delivered and picked up at our hotel. We were pleased that they waived the extra driver fee because we had a longterm rental and they also included a cell phone for the duration at no cost. Our vehicle, a Daihatsu Bego was perfect for the different road conditions we encoutered, from the new highway to very steep and rough roads. It performed beautifully, was very good on gas mileage and we would recommend it to anyone wanting a rental car in Costa Rica.

Hotels.

Selva Verde Lodge. We enjoyed this hotel very much and our regular room was fine. We would recommend to anyone booking this hotel NOT to pay extra for the cabins away from the main hotel as they are not as nice as the regular rooms and there is not really any more privacy as the several cabins are quite close together and right by a large muddy puddle which encourages mosquitoes! Thanks Mauricio for helping us sort out that situation. We were very happy that the hotel gave us complimentary dinners as a compensation for moving to regular rooms. The food at the hotel was delicious. Theirs was the best breakfast "Gallo pinto" we had in CR!. Their italian restaurant La Terraza was terrific! Lots of great bird and monkey watching!

Escape Caribeno, Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean side. A nice little bungalow set among about a dozen others. Good breakfast, attentive staff. One minute from the beach and a few minutes walk from the town. If your clients are afraid of dogs, the owners here have two enormous mastiff dogs in the main building!

Ciudad Perdida, Cahuita. This was a beautiful bungalow, set in a nice garden. Very friendly and helpful owner. Highly recommended. It is only minutes walking from the Cahuita National Park, but away from the main town road. Thanks for suggesting this Mauricio. Tell all your clients about it; they will not be disappointed!

Espino Blanco Lodge, North of Turrialba. OK Mauricio: when we arrived, the friendly greeter said with a smile: "Did your travel agent mention that there is no electricity in the rooms?"....."But we do have hot water!"...If we had known that, we may have decided not to go there. But we are very glad that we did! This was the most remote place we stayed at and it was a good experience for one night. They are well organized and we didn''t miss the electricity at all. The cabins are set apart from each other and have battery-powered lanterns, small battery-powered lights (with extra batteries!) and water heated with gas. No problem! The road to get there was quite bad and we would never drive it at night (definitely 4-wheel drive vehicle). Their restaurant (which does have power) was very good and they have a coati mascot! They have several hiking trails.

Orosi Lodge, Orosi Valley. Nice room; second floor with good view. Definitely best view from this floor. Small inn on a road at the edge of town with everything within walking distance. We had really good coffee here and the best bread in CR! Delicious breakfast! Friendly and helpful owners who directed us to a very interesting tour of a nearby organic coffee plantation ( where we got lots to bring home!). Close to Lankaster Botanical Gardens also well worth a visit.

Hotel Savegre de Montana. A very beautiful place but the road to get there is the worst we drove in CR! The guide book says it is a very steep 7km road down to the hotel and they mean it! Our faithful car''s brakes started to smoke halfway down and we had to take a ten minute break to let them cool down...The rooms are in bungalows spread throughout nice gardens right by the river. Very pretty. They apparently often have bus tours (those bus drivers should all get a medal...) and there were a couple of bird-watching groups on the night we were there. This means buffet-style dining which was fine but is not our favourite. The hiking trail map is very confusing...Some of the trails begin AFTER you climb a "multi-purpose trail" (namely a small road) of about 800 meters high. I loved the trail to the waterfall where I saw a resplendent quetzal!

Pura Vida hotel.
Too bad they don''t deal with travel agencies as we would highly recommend this hotel. The owners are very helpful and knowledgeable. It is very convenient to the airport; their bungalows and gardens are beautiful, and the breakfasts delicious. The dinner we had there was one of the best we had in CR!

Tours and attractions.

Poas Volcano. Our first day and we felt the altitude a bit, but not enough to stop us from walking to the crater lake which is very beautiful. The main crater is almost always clouded over as it was when we visited, but that is nature!

La Paz Waterfalls. We saw only two of the falls because of the damage from last year''s earthquake had blocked the trails to the other ones. The walk in the rain and the falls were great! The butterfly garden was nice. We didn''t really like the other parts of the place because they reminded us too much of a zoo: we didn''t go to see the jungle cats. I hated to see the monkeys in captivity, as there are so many places in CR where you can see them in the wild. I was glad we didn''t stay at the "Peace Lodge" hotel, as, although it seemed to have all the facilities and more, it wasn''t our type of place...it felt a little "hokey" to us.

Trimbina Forest Reserve Chocolate Tour. This was terrific and there were only the two of us with the very knowledgeable and friendly guide. It was our first CR guided walk and made an excellent impression. We were shown the whole process of harvesting cocoa and making it into chocolate, in the old indigenous way. There is a hotel on site and the bungalows looked nice; we would stay there. We brought home lots of chocolate which we bought at the airport because it would have all melted in the hot sun during the rest of our trip. Highly recommended.

Selva Biological Station. A three-hour guided forest walk. Excellent and extremely knowledgeable guide. Highly recommended. Saw lots of wildlife, including mating spider monkeys...

Cahuita National Park. All sea level walking. Beautiful trail of about 7-8kms from one end of the park to the other. We did the walk on our own and saw lots of wildlife. Highly recommended.

Guayabo National Monument. Very interesting and not crowded, probably because it is off the usual tourist route. When we arrived there were no more available guides, which was fine. We enjoyed the site on our own. People should not expect ruins like in Mexico, but well worth visiting. A beautiful, peaceful walk.

Lankaster Botanical Gardens. Beautiful; worth a visit.

Finca Cristina Organic coffee plantation, Paraiso. This was very interesting because it is a small scale plantation where they use different growing techniques from the usual large scale ones. Their coffee is all shade-grown under the canopy of other trees. Tours by reservation only. Highly recommended.

Manuel Antonio National Park, guided walk. We felt that a guided walk was the only way to see the abundance of widlife here and were not disappointed! The park guide we had was terrific and there were only four of us in our group. The beaches are beautiful. We wanted to snorkel and went out only once because the reef is mostly dead and the visibility poor.

This park is very crowded and the parking guys that stop traffic 5oo meters ahead of the entrance so that you will give them money (when there is parking available closer) are a pain.

As you know Mauricio, we spent the second half of our three-week trip at two houses that we had rented independently. One was in Uvita (also at the top of a bad, steep road...) and the other in Manuel Antonio. Both were very nice and, after all the sightseeing and travelling, a perfect way to spend the rest of our time in CR. 　

So Mauricio, thank you again for all your help and suggestions. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in your beautiful country!

Pura Vida,
Mimi and Dave