Costa Rica - We made it!

New destination time! It’s the 20th July and last night after the quickest 2 international flights of our lives, we arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica. We hadn’t heard brilliant reviews of this city, but as it was the destination we flew into we booked 2 nights and were looking forward to exploring the city for ourselves.

San Jose has been described as a bustling city nestled inside a tropical paradise as it sits in the centre of the country and is surrounded by gorgeous untouched cloud forests. From the Airport we hopped in a taxi which cost us 16000Colon ($40NZD) as we have been well warned that Uber is illegal from the Airport…whether this is true or not we didn’t care as we just wanted to get to our accommodation.
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We booked ‘Hotel Otoya 1907’ through Air B n B for $25NZD per night and I can tell you right now, it is worth it. This artsy hotel is situated in a cool neighbourhood, on top of a great café serving wonderful coffee, beer and food and the rooms are amazing! 

This morning we had no plans, which is perfect as we had the entire day to explore the city, walk and eat – 3 of my favourite things.  As we are heading to Puerto Veijo tomorrow, we wanted to go grab our tickets for the bus which cost us $15NZD pp and can be bought from the MEPE transport station. The bus runs every 2 hours and we opted for the 10am one as it takes 4.5 hours. From there we made our way to the Central Mercado, a busy, central market filled with everything and anything and really awesome food stalls.
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I wanted to take a bunch of photos, but we heard that recently there have been a few pick pockets scoping the market so I just mental imaged the full experience and would highly recommend it.

​So far, we are loving this city, IT IS EXPENSIVE AF mind you, but it is clean and feels safer than our last few cities. Everything is really easily accessible by foot, so we walked and walked AND walked some more, checking out the main attractions, including the Theatre, National Museum and the various lush green parks scattered around the CBD. San Jose also has some amazing street art so these vibrant streets are bound to keep anyone entertained!

I had read on Air B n B that one of the experiences you can do here is a guided walk of the University Gardens as there are a heap of sloths that you can see there. The gardens are free but the experience costs $36USD pp which is like $55NZD and completely out of our budget so we decided to do a DIY walk of the gardens in search for sloths… and guess what??? WE FOUND ONE! (albeit a little far away so the photo is a little blurry)
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After 13km’s of walking in the beautiful heat which is much cooler than Colombia, we made it back to our accomo to relax, re pack (one of my least fav things) and get ready to leave early tomorrow for Puerto Viejo!