After catching up with Dani, Rich, and Crystal, we started to make a plan. It was the 24th of January, and my brother had a flight home on the 28th, Crystal and Rich had a flight home on the 30th, and Dani and I were headed home on the 2nd. So we had to make sure we all made our flights.

We decided for the most flexibility we would rent a car. Car rentals in Costa Rica are super expensive. Online they only appear to be around $30 per day, but once you get to the airport they force you to get rental insurance. We tried to use our credit cards (most come with free rental car insurance) but they refused to take it. I guess the government here makes everyone purchase their insurance.

The rental car companies also usually charge a deposit of around $1500 (sometimes less) per day in case there are any damages.

We found a guy recommended by our hostel that would charge us $65 per day inclusive of the mandatory insurance, and would not make us give him a deposit. Our car was a POS, window would not go down and the AC didn’t work. It was a tiny 1.6L shitbox SUV, but it got us around.

We headed out of San Jose. Luckily Richards iPhone’s GPS worked even without a data signal.

We drove 2 hours to Puntarenas, which is on the West coast of Costa Rica.

Montezuma is located at the bottom of a peninsula, so rather than driving up and around (which I guess is about a 5 hour drive), we were able to catch a ferry from Puntarenas across the bay to Montezuma. We drove our car over and they gave us a little slip of paper reserving us a spot on the ferry. We then had to leave the driver in the car and take the slip over to pay for the car and each passenger.

It was a very nice ferry ride lasting a little over an hour.

Once on the other side, we drove another 40 minutes into Montezuma.

Montezuma was a tiny little town, very relaxed and beautiful. There was a beach right at the end of the road.

That night we drank fairly heavily and hungout on the beach.

We woke up and had a leisurely breakfast.

We wanted to hike to the waterfalls that were in town, Cascadas de Montezuma (Montezuma Water Falls)

The head to the trail was only a 5 minute walk from town. We drove anyway and had to pay 1 mil for parking. The parking attendant tried to double charge me until I called him out on it.

The hike was easy, about 15 minutes with little pools along the way.

We reached the waterfall, probably right around 10 feet high.

It was very hot out and the water was super refreshing. There were a good 30 or so people hanging out here. I was surprised there was very little litter considering the amount of people. Someone must have cared about this place and been keeping it clean.

Some people (including my brother) were jumping from super high- we figured about 60-65 feet after scaling some rock.

There was a path up to another set of waterfalls with a rope swing, so we hiked another 15 mins on a somewhat sketchy trail to the next waterfall.

The rope swing was fun

And there were more places to jump up here.

That night, we took some drinks and headed to a beach on the opposite side of town.

This beach was much bigger and equally beautiful. Once the night came, we started to notice there were luminescents in the water. We went swimming the the water would glow. We started a fire and hung out on the beach for hours, watching the waves crash a brilliant blue green. Amazing. The photos wouldn’t come out since there wasn’t enough light, I guess some things are just too beautiful to be recorded.

Our next destination was San Jose.

To get from Bahia Drake on the Osa Peninsula back to the city, San Jose, we had to first catch a boat to Sierpe. This was a beautiful hour and a half boat ride that first brought us through open lakes

Before bring us through narrow channels in Rio Sierpe.

Stunning boat ride. Finally we reached the end of the jungle maze and docked in Sierpe.

Here, there were plenty of taxis waiting for us. Our hotel had arranged our trip to San Jose. This meant we had a bus reservation, and what we didn’t realize was we also had a taxi reservation.

The taxi driver had our bus tickets already. So we paid the taxi driver around 6 mil that covered the short taxi ride fare to the Palmar Norte bus terminal.

We jumped on our bus to San Jose. The busses here were much nicer than Panama, they were coach busses, some with AC.

We arrived in the San Jose bus terminal and caught a cab to the airport to pick up my girlfriend Dani and a couple of friends I met traveling last year, Richard and Crystal.

The cab was about a half an hour and ran us around $20. We met up with Dani easily and waited a while for Rich and Crystal who were supposed to meet us there. Given it was already 3 hours after we were supposed to meet them, we assumed they were already at the hotel so grabbed a short $6 cab to our hotel in Alajuela near the airport.

We were all successfully united and excited for our adventures!