Adventures in MonteVerde

After a great week and a half on the Pacific beaches of Costa Rica, Lyds and I decided to mix it up and head inland to the lush green mountainous region of Santa Elena/Monteverde. From the coast it took a few hours to get up there with the last 30kms of the journey taking a long, slow 2 hours along a spectacular yet bumpy and gut wrenching dirt track that went up and up and up.

Monteverde is a great little mountain town that prides itself as the Adventure Capital of the Country. There are a tonne of activites to do from Ziptrekking, ATV tours, Cloud Forest Hikes, Night forest tours, Suspension bridge walks, & Horseback riding to name a few. There is even a Reptile ´World´, Insect´World´ and Frog Park. We stayed in a great and cheap hostel called...Sleepers Sleep Cheaper (see below). Owner Ronny was fantastic in giving us some great unbias advice in the area and steering us into the best tours.

We settled on doing some Ziptrekking. The World´s first ziptrek company actually started here in MonteVerde many years ago and of course now it has continued to expand. We had at least 6 companies to choose from. Ronny recommended the group we finally settled with called ´Extremo Canopy tours´. They are the newest company and as such had the nenefit of seeing how it is done and distiguishing themselves out by building the longest and biggest lines. They were also the cheapest...Perfect for us, and with ´EXTREMO´ in their name, how could anything compare?

It didn´t dissapoint. The rainforest location was beautiful, the guides were a great bunch of guys and we got lucky by only having 4 of us in our group. The tour not only included 14 lines but a huge Tarzan swing and some rappeling down one of the massive rainforest trees.

Here´s a great vid of Lyd´s doing the Tarzan swing (you just have to tilt your head to the right)...


The final line was a massive 2,400 feet over a huge valley. Due to the small group size, the guides let Lyds and I do the last line together so we managed to take this awesome little vid. Actually its not that little and goes for over a minute because it really was a HUGE line...


Here´s some pics from our time in MonteVerde, Costa Rica...


We left Monteverde the next day bound for the nearby town of La Fortuna at the base of Arenal Volcano. We could of just caught a long boring bus there but decided to continue the adventures. Over the last few months we´ve been to a lot of places that have been offering horseback riding so we decided that seeing as neither of us had done it for a long time, now was as good a time as any.

From MonteVerde we took another long slow shuttle down the mountain to the valley where our guide Rodrigo was waiting for us. We were soon on our mounts - Admonte (for me) and Lyds saddled up on a horse that was suprisingly called ´Canadien´. For the next 2.5 hours we strolled along a quiet little dirt track through the local lush hillside with regular views of Volcano Arenal, and surrounding countryside. We even trekked through quite a few little mountain streams.

Of course throughout the trip Lyds and I probably would have spent a lot of time jockeying for front position or the best line through the mud and rocks, but wouldn´t you know it....our horses were more competitive than us and did it all themselves !!
Good times, good times.

After the ride we enjoyed a leisurely 30 minute boat cruise across Lago Arenal before another short shuttle ride into the small town of La Fortuna to rest our weary backsides. A great day had that´s for sure !!

Here´s some pics from our trip to La Fortuna...


Hostel Reviews...
Our Hostel in MonteVerde... Sleepers Sleep Cheaper Hostel

In Monteverde we stayed at a great little hostel called.Sleepers Sleep Cheaper Hostel, and you know what, we did Sleep cheaper. This was actually one of the nicest hostels we´ve stayed in and at $12 per night with free breakfast, internet, private room it was an amazing deal consaidering so far in Costa Rica we´d never paid less than $20 a night (for a lot less). What made the hostel too was owner Ronny and his wife and kids who were fantastic, and Ronny was a world of local information regarding tours, buses, places to eat etc. etc. If only all our hostels were this good.

Our Hostel in La Fortuna... Gringo Pete´s (Too) Hostel

We´ll we´ve quickly found out that hostel´s in the interior of Costa Rica are CHEAP. This one was only $10 a night..but no brekkie. We had it recommended by some people we met in Monteverde and it was worth it. They offer super cheap tours but we´d done what we wanted in Monteverde so we really just used this as a moving through hostel.