Come to Vancouver – we have the best weather!

               Ahh, summer in Vancouver.   Perfect days with a rare cloud punctuating the pure blue sky, a gentle breeze coming in off the ocean, the majestic mountains surrounding us in a comforting hug, and the sun glinting off the glass skyscrapers of the downtown core.  Damn, right it’s the best place on earth.  And you should all drop what you’re doing and come now.  Immediately.  Vancouver wants you.  We have perfect weather, so take advantage of it before stock runs out! 

                Summer finally arrived at the end of June, after the longest winter on record.  Well, technically winter was exactly the same length as every year, but this year it felt like we skipped spring entirely.  But once summer dawned, it hasn’t let up one bit.  We’ve now had nearly a month straight of “coat?  I don’t even need socks in this weather” weather, and I’m loving every second of it.  Life should operate at this temperature every day.  I guess it does in LA, but here we don’t need to deal with nearly as much traffic, garbage, smog, noise…  you get the point.  As much as I appreciate (and boy do I appreciate) the chance to finally thaw, this weather also shows off Vancouver at its best, and everyone needs to take full advantage of it. 

               Right now we’re in the midst of the Symphony of Fire fireworks competition for four consecutive Wednesday and Saturday nights, which floods the shores of false creek with thousands of “ooooh”ers and “aaaah”ers.  Soon we’ll have the Dragon Boat festival, too.  We actually don’t have a deep pool of festivals and events, but the attractions we have year-round are pretty damn spectacular, and when you see them in this fantabulous weather, they’re even better.  You can immerse yourself in the native culture of the pacific coast at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and then get your nekked on at Wreck Beach; shop Robson Street’s trendiness and then finish off the day at a waterfront cafe on False Creek; bike Stanley Park’s seawall, feed the squirrels and enormous raccoons, then visit one of the best Aquariums around to splash with the belugas and dolphins.  A few weeks ago I did the bike thing for the first time since I was like 6 and it was great.  It’s a really smooth, relaxing ride, and a 2 hour bike rental from Spokes on Denman only cost CAD$10.00!    And regardless of what you do, remember to snag a funky twist on lunch at the world-famous Japadog gourmet Japanese hot dog cart.  Trust me, it’s worth the wait.

          But honestly, I’m here in the best place on earth, and I cannot recommend strongly enough that you should be too.  What are you waiting for, people?  We have sun!!!!

Tags: aquarium, best, bikes, BlogSherpa, Canada, fantastic, fireworks, fun, Japadog, Stanley Park, sun, vancouver, weather

I want to go to Vietnam for the food.

               Yeah, I know, I’m thinking with my stomach again.  But blogging about food has so many fewer calories than actually eating it, so it’s worth it.  Plus, this keeps me on my Jillian Michaels meal plan (that I’m following loosely, with emphasis on the “loose”, but that’s another blog altogether).  So anyway, back to the topic at hand: I have a craving for Vietnamese Pho, and I’m tired of settling for the yummy westernized stuff they serve in Vancouver.  I want real Vietnamese food, and the only way I can get it is to actually go to Vietnam.  There it’s just called food.  Alas, I am still in saving mode after the last trip, and am already paying off the next (California in September – stay tuned!), so my Pho craving will have to wait until next year, at least.  Big pout.  In the meantime, lets all take a moment and fantasize about that cuisine you love and can’t wait to try the authentic version of, or that plate of steaming awesomeness you once had and wish you were back there again. 

                   One of my clients told me, which is probably why this is on my mind in the first place, that he was once in Texas and had a steak so good he actually cried.  I, of course, told him he was a lunatic.  Kidding.  I just thought it.  He had a point though, global cuisine can transform a vacation into an experience.  The local delights are as much of a cultural experience as a dance performance or a museum, but they can be much easier to find and, depending on your tastes,  either way cheaper or waaaaayyy more expensive. 

                Some of the best food in much of southeast Asia can be found at street carts for next to nothing, but it’ll keep you coming back for more.  When I was in Bangkok there was this cart on the corner near my hotel that was little more than a single burner run by jumper cables hooked to a car battery, and there was this real and very dead rooster head hanging from the side, but every morning the line up was practically around the block for a container of their stir fry.  I never tried it, the combination of the line length, the rooster head, and my weenie Canadian palette made me chicken out, but I still think about it, and vow that if I’m ever back there I’m totally eating from the rooster guy’s cart.  If the locals like it, it has to be good.

                  What’s the deal with Korean Kimchi, anyway?  It’s just fermented cabbage buried in a vat underground for like six months, but every time I’ve been out for Korean food, they use it on everything.  I have not acquired the taste for it.  To me it’s like sour… something nasty… but I can’t help but wonder if the stuff you’ll get on your plate of braised short ribs in Seoul would be so much better.  Does the shipping process make it nastier?  Is it less pungent straight from the ground?

            Mmmmm… chicken tikka masala…. another of my faves.  Admittedly, the BF does cook one hell of a home version, but it blows my mind thinking of the layers of rich flavour that can only come from a spice mix hand-ground daily by the women of the village.  Yum.  Just wait until I find myself in India one day and all the spices are ground by your standard coffee grinder, but in the interim I will happily allow my mind to wander to the romantic fantasy I have created.  Besides, I’d go to Vietnam before India, the flight is shorter

              So tell me, what foods would you love to try fresh from the source?

Tags: eat, Food, interesting, kimchi, rooster, stomach, Texas, Thailand, travel, Vietnam, weird

Motivating your motivation

I’m just curious – what makes you want to get up and travel?  What is the kryptonite to your contentment that hits you upside the head and makes you check your available vacation days at work?

For me, it’s my miniscule attention span.  Well, now it’s my job (God knows, talking about all these incredible places all day every day has me in a perpetual state of “where next?” -ing), but even before I was in the industry I had an outbreak of “get me the hell outta here!” at pretty regular six-month intervals.    I just reach my quota of home and need a change of scenery to maintain my mental stability. 

Ooh, and television.  Gets me every time.  Yep, I’m the dork who finds herself in Paris trying to find the same flag on the Arc de Triumph from the 2nd level of the Eiffel Tower that they searched for on the Amazing Race.  Or went to Rainmakers adventure forest in Quepos, Costa Rica, just because the family edition ran through there. 

So what spurs you into action?

Tags: action, Arc de Triumph, Costa Rica, Eiffel Tower, motivation, Paris, travel

ATVs are the new black – Costa Rica, days 8 & 9 – the finale.

So, I’ve discovered I like going fast and I drive like a madwoman.   Plus, I’m capable of doing them both at the same time.  On roads that are little more than goat paths and have ever expanding water features as the rivers roll over them.  All the while giggling like a mental patient and hoping my thighs don’t stick to the seat.  I’m totally okay with all of the above.

Got up bright and early and were picked up by Chino, our super sweet guide (who tried to broker a deal to have me as his fourth wife.  I passed, but I did promise to hang out with him next time I’m in Quepos, although something tells me I’m going to “forget” this) and driven out to London, Costa Rica, population, like, 80.  It was tiny, but cute, with chickens and dogs wandering the street more than people.  We pulled into someone’s driveway (this seemed a little weird until we saw the fifteen ATVs parked there) and, after a quick training course in the fine art of not killing yourself on an ATV, we were off.

It was fantastic.  The path was steep and rocky and wet in places, but that just let you really enjoy what an ATV could do.  This was supposed to be off-roading, and it satisfied. I thought it had been purpose-built for the psycho tourists like us, but after the fact we learned that this actually was the public road in the area.  Fourteen families had no other way in or out of their little isolated village.  Wow.  We had also brought a change of clothes in case we got muddy and messy as the website had warned, but I discovered quickly that if you went faster (and cheered, that was an important part) then teh water sprayed outwards and kept me all dry.

Midway through we stopped and had an hour walk through a beautiful forest and across a suspension bridge that was nothing more than a bunch of metal ladders trussed together a hundred feet up in the air to a waterfall.  This is a perfect place to play and swim, but as it was just the two of us, we opted to just take lots of pictures and dip our feet instead of making the poor guide stand around awkwardly as we splashed in the falls.  Then it was back onto the ATVs and retracing our route back to the start.  On the way back he knew we were capable drivers, so the speeds were much higher, topping out about 50mph.  Sweet.  Only once, when I was trying to avoid some horseback tourists, did I confuse the break and the gas and nearly go shooting off into the jungle.  Leave it to me to only make a mistake when there’s a crowd of people to see it!

Did not want to give that ATV back.  I tried to just drive off, but it just would have taken me too long to drive it all the way back home, and it’s hard to find a good parking space for your ATV in downtown Vancouver, so I left it.

Spent the rest of the day hanging out at the hotel to escape the heat and avoid the torrential downpour that left me epically soaked even under my umbrella when I walked down to the local bodega for supplies.  After that, we deserved a nice dinner, so we cabbed it to El Avion and we got to watch the lightning illuminate the sky from our table under  a plane.

The last full day in Quepos started early, as we had a 6am pickup for our mangrove tour.  They have to start super early to hit the tides at the right times.  Luckily, since the sun rises and sets at 5:00 here, your body clock gets you up early anyway to greet the sun and puts you to sleep early, so that wake up call was not too bad.  The tour group was us and a French family that spoke almost no English, and on our two and a half hour boat tour we saw a few monkeys, some vultures and a couple of skinny raccoons, but that was pretty much it.  Three years ago I had taken the same tour and seen so many animals it was incredible, but today everyone was playing hide and seek from us and they won.  It honestly felt like a colossal waste of time.  And it finished at 9am, so we still had the whole day to fill.

Like every woman, we went shopping.  We got a great deal on a taxi and headed right down to Playa Manuel Antonio, the beach paradise.  I’m far too pale to be a beach bunny, and the sun here fries skin in the blink of an eye (half the people walking around are a painful red colour, and that had already happened to me once this trip, so there was no way I was going through that again), but there’s a few cute souvenir shops and a street market where you can get some good tacky tourist shit (I love this stuff!) as long as you barter for it.  We got a great carved vase for half the price we would have paid in the stores in Quepos.  Of course, today had to be the day it decided not to rain in the afternoon and we tried not to melt as we shopped, took the incredibly cheap public bus back to Quepos, shopped more, and then got all packed up and ready to depart the next morning.

The drive to San Jose was kind of anticlimactic compared to all our other Interbus transfers, as the roads were, well, actual roads the whole way, including an extended stint on a brand new highway.    Our driver took advantage of this by driving super fast, which actually didn’t scare me as much as it should have, I loved the speed.  Clearly the ATV ride has broken my common sense when it came to speeding in this country.  Soon we were back at the Casa Conde, where we discovered our pickup time the next morning for our 10am flight was 515am.  Great.  So we dropped our bags, had some dinner, watched a tiny bit of TV and went to bed early to prep for our 430am wake up call.

Our airport transfer the next day was even early.  He showed up at 5.  Luckily, we were ready anyway, but that got us to the airport at 545.   Cranky and tired and hungry we checked in for our flight, cleared security and hit the food court for a giant cinnabon breakfast.  Normally I wouldn’t  eat 1500 calories of sugary goodness for breakfast, but it just seemed to be a fitting send off for our time in Costa Rica.  It had been a hot, sweet and sticky(with both sweat and rain) trip, and was thoroughly enjoyable.

Pura Vida!

Tags: ATV, beach, BlogSherpa, Costa Rica, crazy speed, hot, mangrove tour, Manuel Antonio, Quepos, sunny

I totally just ate under a plane! – Costa Rica days 6 & 7

I totally just ate under a plane.  I know I said that in the title, but that doesn’t take away from the awesomeness of it.   El Avion, a plane turned restaurant in Quepos/Manuel Antonio, is quite possibly my favorite place to eat on the planet, right up there with the seafood restaurant in the middle of Temple Street night market in Hong Kong.  What can I say, I’m a sucker for ambiance.  And this place has it in spades, because IT HAS A FRIGGIN PLANE in it! 

The plane itself is perched on the cliffside so that your table along the railing looks out over nothing but lush trees far below and the uninterrupted Pacific ocean.  We were even lucky enough to have a pair of Spider monkeys dine parallel to us on a tall tree limb, but that’s just de rigeur in Costa Rica   The building (if you can call it that, it has no walls, so it’s technically more of a roof) is constructed over the fuselage itself, complete with a little bump up for the tail fin, and you eat at tables around the engines and cargo hold.  Inside you’ll find the bar (I can just imagine the conversations that occur when people wake up the next morning: ”Dude, I was so wasted last night I thought I was drinking in a plane in the jungle” – “You were drinking in a plane in the jungle, Steve” – “Woah”), and the kitchen is downstairs.  In what I think is an ingenious space-saving technique, the kitchen is downstairs, and all the orders are lifted to dining level in a giant dumbwaiter constructed from parts of old, much smaller private planes.  Now you’re getting why I love this place, right?  The food is good, and not any more expensive than your standard meal at Applebees, but I’m honestly not paying any attention to the food when I’m here.  And I have a sneaking suspicion I may be back here again to eat before leaving Quepos.

Were picked up by Interbus for another life-altering drive down the “holy crap I’m going to die” roads from Monteverde to… well, pretty much everywhere from there, but we ended up in Quepos.  This is our longest stay of the trip, 4 nights instead of the 2 in the other cities.  It’s also the largest city we’re spending any amount of time in, although when we drove in I found myself thinking, “this is it?  Isn’t it supposed to be bigger than this?”  The other cities had grown up so much in the past three years, but Quepos really hadn’t.  It, as I discovered later, had grown out, so that the suburbs were larger and more developed, but the city center was the same two-hundred-foot square of shops and services as before. 

Our hotel, the adorable and friendly Hotel California, is nestled up in the trees, and, since it was low season and there was tons of space available, we got upgraded to an oceanview room.  That was pretty damn sweet.  I may be a travel agent, but I’m still too cheap to pay for something as trivial as a view, although getting one free rocks.   

OMG, it’s hot here.  After the chill and dampness of Monteverde, this heat is oppressive.  Came back into our room this afternoon and it felt freezing – we thought we’d left the AC on too cold until we checked it and discovered it was a chilly 27 celsius in our room!  It had to be at least 40-45 outside for 27 to feel that cold.

Spent the first afternoon wandering town, shopping and trying to get aclimated to this heat again.  This morning it was a very early wake up call for our Manuel Antonio National Park walk.  When in Manuel Antonio, this is a must - it’s called the most-photographed place in Costa Rica for good reason, it’s stunning.  Plus, there are so many animals that no two hikes are the same, and you never know what’s going to pop up.  The guides carry a big-ass telescope, and when they spot something (god knows how they do it, some of the frogs and lizards are so small you can barely see them after you’ve stepped on them, but the guides can do it at a hundred feet) they focus in and get you a great view.  Plus, digital cameras take pretty sweet pics through the telescope lens, so  you can get your pics home and tell everyone you really were that close to a sloth, eventhough it was sleeping forty feet over your heads!

Immediately following the tour and a quick lunch, it was on to tour number 2 – the Villa Vanilla spice plantation.  Cannot recommend this place highly enough (www.rainforestspices.com) the guide explained to us all about vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, chillies, turmeric, oregano, and whatever I’m forgetting – holy crap these things are super labour intensive to produce.  It’s no wonder they’re so expensive.  And who would have thought that the second layer of bark on a tree would taste so good (cinnamon)?  Did they just decide one day to start gnawing logs?  After walking through the fields we were taken to a hut with another great view and given samples of all sorts of decadent desserts prepared with their spices by their own pastry chef.  Heaven.  I then proceeded to spend USD$40.00 in their gift shop and it was so totally worth it! 

Tonight we’re going to recover from all the walking today, because tomorrow we’re ATV-ing!!  I’m the girl who gets in trouble for her driving on Disneyland’s Autopia, so this is going to be interesting.  And awesome!

Tags: awesome, BlogSherpa, El Avion, Food, Manuel Antonio, national park, Quepos, Villa Vanilla

The land of the weed-whacker: Costa Rica Days 3, 4, 5

Because of the terrain here being so vertical and rocky, conventional lawn mowers aren’t even sold in stores.  But everywhere you turn there’s a guy with a giant weed-whacker showing all that rapid-growing grass who’s boss.  With that little hand mower, if you will, the Ticos will tackle any area, no matter how big.  We were 2km from pretty much anything on the way to La Fortuna and there were two guys on the side of the road just weed-whacking away.  They were doing the entire shoulder of the whole road by hand.  Damn, that’s a long job.

So today we ziplined.  One of my favorite things to do, the incredible feeling of flying without the fear of falling, as your harness really holds you securely up there.  Costa Rica is probably the best place on the planet to do this, and the company I recommend more than any other I’ve experienced is Sky Adventures.  Conveniently they have a great setup in La Fortuna,  with incredible views of the (still clear and erupting) Arenal  Volcano and Arenal Lake.  We were picked up early and driven up into the hills at the base of the Volcano, where they harnessed us up (there is nothing more glamourous than a climbing harness and a helmet, really) and loaded us onto the Sky Tram.  They have such a beautiful set up here, so clean, so professional and the platforms, guides and equipment are all top notch.  You never feel like you’re in danger or could fall off the flimsy platforms like some other operators, so if anyone’s at all nervous, this is a good place to start.

The tram takes you 20 minutes up above the dense forests (monkey-eye level) and deposits you at the first platform.  There’s always a great rush of adrenaline looking out at that first line, 200ft up in the air, and from the platform all you can see is the cable going off into infinity.  All the while you’re thinking, “I’m going there?!!!”  Love it.  There are eight lines total here, with the longest being 3/4 of a mile long, and they are high.  I don’t particularly like heights (I know, I know, but I love ziplining, get over it) so I focused on looking out over the unparalleled views of Costa Rica and Arenal more than looking down as I flew past at a top speed of  75kph.  There were a handful of very scared people in our group, with one girl getting off one line in tears, but once you cross that first line, there actually is no other way back to the entrance except to keep zipping.  The guides were really good with them, crossing with them if they needed the support, but we all tried not to get too over-excited to freak them out more.

Back at the hotel after the zipping we discovered I was sun burned.  Like, crispy critter burned.  I hadn’t been wearing sunscreen because all the platforms are completely in the shade, so the only time you’re exposed to the sun is while you’re zipping across, for a grand total of about 4 minutes in the whole 2 hours, but it was all it took.  I don’t get it, I go to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore where it’s equally (if not more) hot and humid, never were sunscreen once and I don’t even get a tan.  But here, all it takes is 4 minutes and I’m stick-a-fork-in-me-done.  Couldn’t wear my purse on my shoulder for the next three days. All boils down to the positioning of the sun I guess.  Needless to say, I didn’t step out of the shade without a thick coating for the rest of the trip.

After a relaxing afternoon and night in La Fortuna, Interbus came the next morning and collected us to head up to Santa Elena and the Monteverde cloud forest.  This is where you really notice the biodiversity of Costa Rica, as you leave the tropical, semi-arid farming plains to enter the dense, steamy and dramatically cooler jungle.  The roads to get up here are mainly paved for the first half, and, despite being incredibly winding, don’t have you gripping the edge of your seat.  This changes after the mandatory bathroom and souvenirs break in Tillaran.  From there you’re essentially on what we would here call cattle paths, insanely bumpy, unpaved dirt tracks scaling nearly vertical hills with blind turns that leave you practically hanging over 400-foot cliffs.  They call it a Costa Rican massage, going over the bumps like that for two hours.  By the time you get out you’re vibrating.  And thankful you’re not dead.

Santa Elena is dramatically larger than last time I was here three years ago.  The downtown (if you can call it that) is still the same size, with like ten shops, restaurants, a grocery store, a church, a giant cement armadillo and a good ice cream parlour, but this time it’s paved, which was a pleasant surprise.  The biggest difference though is the number of hotels, which has at least tripled.  For such a small, remote place, Monteverde has a wealth of activities, from hiking, rappelling, sky bridges, butterfly gardens, bat forests, bird watching, to ATVs, horseback riding and whitewater rafting.  Our hotel was one of the new ones, the El Sapo Dorado (Golden Toad), and each room was it’s own private cabin set back amongst it’s own personal patch of garden that glows with thousands of fireflies at night.  I had never seen real fireflies before, only the fake ones in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, so that was super cool.  The rooms are really nice, though they don’t have a lot of the amenities you normally expect from a hotel, like any electronic devices and heat.  Yep, I said heat.  You get a fireplace and a box full of wood and the rest is up to you.

We spent the day exploring Santa Elena (we saw it all and had to go back to some places twice to fill the time) and had a cool dinner in the treehouse restaurant, which, as the name implies, has a giant tree growing through it.  You eat on the second level amongst the branches, and your tables and chairs are all random-shaped logs fashioned into dining furniture. I’m a sucker for cheesy ambiance, so naturally I loved this.  Took lots of pictures.

About now I was freezing.  I’m a really cold person on a regular day, and it rains every afternoon here, so after the tropics of La Fortuna, my system was not liking this.  You can see the weather coming in here, it moves in fast and just takes over, the clouds literally rolling down the main streets and in minutes you’re lost in the fog.  On the upside, I love fireplaces, though, and can sit and poke at one for hours, so you can guess how I spent my evening.  Had a slight problem with the smoke and kinda filled the room – my clothes are going to smell like fireplace for the rest of the trip – but the warmth was totally worth it.  Actually, all night it wasn’t as cold as I expected it to be and I woke up with warm toes.

Day 5 brought us more ziplining.  Skytrek has a course that I missed out on doing last time I was here, and, as the lines are supposed to be some of the highest out there, straddling the continental divide, it was actually the whole reason for trekking up here at all.  The setup is even more impressive then La Fortuna’s, and although the tram system is much the same, the view is dramatically different up here.  You’re very exposed, up on the spine of the mountain that, on a clear day, would allow us to see both the Caribbean and Pacific oceans at the same time.  We weren’t so lucky, as the grey clouds blocked out the water, but stayed high enough for us to still have an insane view of the jungle as we flew over it.  This was the only time I felt the altitude, as there were a lot of tall towers to climb to reach the ziplines, and by the time I reached the top my heart was hammering in my chest.  The zipping itself was great, although because of really high winds we had to go across in tandem for all the longer cables, just to have enough combined weight to make it to the other side.  This was a new experience for me, but it did allow me to get some pretty sweet video as my co-zipper did the breaking while I played videographer.

We could see the ominous clouds bearing down on us as we finished up, but miraculously we made it back into the van before the skies opened up.  And did they ever.  As soon as the rain started, it became pretty obvious that this was not a small passing shower and that our plans to visit a local orchid garden were going down the drain.  So instead we picked up dinner fixings at the supermercado and tucked into our cabin for the day, where we could at least stay dry.  Normally spending nine hours in a small room with no TV and radio in the middle of nowhere would be my definition of hell, but here it isn’t so bad.  I’m enjoying a couple of Spanish magazines, and have discovered that poking at a fireplace really can keep me occupied for hours on end.

Tomorrow it’s onwards to the sea again, and it’s going to be hot, hot, hot!

Tags: adrenaline, altitude, Arenal, BlogSherpa, Costa Rica, fireplace, Interbus, La Fortuna, rain, Sky Trek

Finding Pura Vida in Costa Rica – Days 1&2

I’m here!  The land of verdant forests, howler-monkey wake up calls and one sweet active volcano in my back yard.  Costa Rica is such a great destination, about the same price as a quick beach vacation in Hawaii, but the diversity of climates, wildlife and crazy adventure activities is so much better.  All you have to do is deal with the eight hour flight time from Vancouver, but it’ s so worth it.

Flew into the Rich Coast with a three hour connection in Dallas on the way.  The Dallas airport is really nice, super modern and clean with some nice artwork (nothing compares to Vancouver international, BTW, but this was pleasant). You can find a hundred different things to eat, but there is pitiful shopping.  Only a small hand full of stores, and they’re mainly convenience stores, so I had to make do with only an armadillo floaty pen and a cow-wearing-a-stetson fridge magnet.  Total shopping fail.

By the time we arrived in San Jose it was late, and we crashed at the Casa Conde Aparthotel and Suites just long enough to wash the flight off, begin adjusting to the crazy humidity and watch some food network subtitled in Spanish.  This property really impressed me, it’s a beautiful Spanish hacienda with attractive stained glass and murals and the condos were fully equipped – I had my own bedroom!  The only downside was that it’s in the middle of nowhere.  You couldn’t just walk down the road, you’d find nothing but small houses, and it wasn’t  particularly the best part of town, either.

For us, it didn’t matter, though, as we were picked up by the ever-prompt and comfortable Interbus for our four-hour transfer to La Fortuna.  This is the only way to travel in Costa Rica, as everything is approximately four hours from the next major center, the roads are hilly, winding, sometimes unpaved, sometimes balanced delicately on the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff and sometimes completely washed out and consisting of nothing but a couple planks of wood and some caution tape.  I’ve been here twice now and wouldn’t drive here if you paid me.  Interbus is cheap, easy, professional and the person behind the wheel actually knows what they’re doing at all times.  You just have to put up with the sales-targeted souvenir and bathroom break halfway through.  Oh, and the speeds.  Costa Rica does fast.  Carsickness-inducing, swinging from one side to the other fast.  It was awesome.

Later we were deposited at the Volcano Lodge, our haven for the next two nights. Love this property.  Each room is in it’s own little three-room casita, and all have a private veranda with two adorable rocking chairs that looks out to the impressive gardens and the active Arenal volcano.  I can’t get past the irony of my life being total hell at work for the past week with all the canceled flights due to the Iceland volcanic eruption, and here I come on personal vacation to another active volcano.  But it’s worth it, as the clouds have lifted, revealing it’s perfect smoking top, something that happens only like 9 days every year.   We lucked out.  And consequently took ten thousand photos of it to prove it.

The town of La Fortuna is small, cute, and has really good souvenir shopping.  It’s also incredibly hot here.  After the clouds and coats of Vancouver, this 99% humidity and 30-degree sunshine is a real shock to the system.  It really zaps your energy and gives you that wonderful red, damp and glowing complexion all the time.  I’m having to be super careful already, as I’m arctic white and can burn in minutes out here, but really hate the feel of sunscreen on when I’m already sweating my ass off.

So far we’ve essentially been on the road for two days straight, so it’ll be nice to be able to actually rest a bit tomorrow.  That is, after the freaking awesome ziplining!!!!!

Tags: Arenal, BlogSherpa, car sickness, Casa Conde, Costa Rica, Dallas, Interbus, San Jose, shopping, Volcano Lodge

More Travel Porn – Chefs Vs City

        So I’ve discovered a new fun armchair travel addiction, this time on the Food Network of all places:  Chefs vs City.  It’s a great way to combine two of my favorite things – The Amazing Race and the Food Network, with teams of 2 foodies racing through one city a week completing 4 different food-related challenges.  Sometimes it involves eating a large amount of something (in Las Vegas they actually had to eat one of everything from the Bellagio’s buffet), cooking/creating something (stomping grapes/decorating a 50-lb cake/making liquid-nitrogen ice cream) or stomaching something difficult (scorching chili in LA), but it’s a great way to see what culinary treasures each city has to offer.  Plus it’s exciting and competitive.  But mainly its an interesting food travelogue.  I mean, who knew there was a place in Chicago where you can eat all sorts of edible, flavoured paper?  Check this one out.

Tags: armchair travel, Chefs vs City, daydreaming, fun, travel porn, TV

Woo hoo Going to Costa Rica!

      Saturday night I’m taking off for a week of sun and fun in Costa Rica.  Of course I’ll keep you all posted as much as I can while I’m there.  It’s going to be awesome.  Ziplining and exploring in La Fortuna, near the base of the active volcano Arenal. Dancing with hummingbirds, butterfly watching and more ziplining in the Monteverde cloud forest.  Hiking, ATV-ing past waterfalls, kayaking through a mangrove forest, monkey spotting and touring a spice plantation in Manuel Antonio.  Sweet.  Mentally, I’m on my way there already.  And it’s going to be warm, too.  Tank top and shorts weather!  Just dreaming about it is warming me up, I am so over this Vancouver winter, all the cold and rain (naturally the sun is coming out as I write this – leave it to mother nature to bitchslap my complaining), but I can’t wait. 

Tropics, here I come!

Tags: Arenal, beaches, cloud forest, Costa Rica, fun, La Fortuna, Manuel Antonio, Monteverde, travel, vacation, volcano, warm weather, zipline

The Amazing Race – Travel Lovers’ Porn

        Yep, I said porn.  Because that’s essentially what the Amazing Race is – Travel Porn.  It’s exciting.   It temporarily allows you to live vicariously through someone else, doing things so out there you might not have even fantasized about them.  It teaches you new tricks to try in real life.  And it satisfies that travel craving, while leaving you wanting more.  The best part is that, instead of having to go back into the special part of the video store, you can get it for free Sunday nights on CBS.

          For you uninitiated (shame on you), the premise is simple: race around the world with no advance knowledge of where you’re going next and very limited funds, completing various tasks as fast as possible, and if you finish first you get a cool million dollars.  If you finish last at certain checkpoints (called pit stops) you’re eliminated.  That’s it.  This is proof positive that the journey is the attraction more than the final destination, as the ending is usually one of the most  anticlimactic parts of the whole race.   But on the way you got to see just how cool the world is.

            I’m insanely jealous of the challenges they’ve gotten to do over the years.  I won’t lie, I would totally blow off my job/friends/whatever to be able to do what the racers get to do.  After seeing it on the race, I tried ziplining and, as you’ve probably noticed from my past posts, I’m hooked.  Now I just want to push my boundaries farther.  Over the years they have rappelled down Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janiero, climbed the Eiffel Tower in Paris, navigated the chaotic train system in Mumbai, herded llamas in Peru, made noodles in  Macau  and shopped at street markets in South Africa.   According to the previews, next week they’re climbing the Singapore Flyer giant ferris wheel in Singapore.  It’s nuts.  The general public may  not  have access to all of the incredible things that the racers get to  do, but for the most part the places are acessable, and with a little bit of research  you too can  enact  your own Amazing Race.  They show some off the beaten path  locations/attractions that you might have missed otherwise  and  I  have to admit that occasionally at work when someone will ask  me what there  is to see in Coober Pedy, Australia (amongst other random destinations that I  don’t know anything about and have definately  never been to) I draw on what I’ve  seen on TAR and  answer that there are opal mines and houses built underground to escape the heat.   It’s helped me finalize more than one sale, let me tell you. 

             Despite the fact that it’s essentially a game show on a global stage, The Amazing Race is at it’s heart a travelogue, and, just like Globe Trekker or Rick Steve’s Europe, it gives you a glimpse at the conditions, attractions, and people of places all over the world.  India is always a good example, as so many of the racers go there expecting nothing but  poverty and crowds, but leave surprised at the resilliance of the people and the beauty of the countryside. Through their eyes we see it, too, and gain a greater appreciation.  I had never heard of Wat Po, the temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok until I saw it on Season 1, but it blew my mind and that one episode gave birth to a fascination with Thailand that I still have to this day.    You can bet your ass I made sure to go to that temple and take craploads of pictures when I finally made it  to Bangkok.   

            The  racers might be doing everything at warp speed, they’re still traveling and facing the same trials and tribulations that we all do on our vacations.  They have to fight with the same flight cancellations and lost cabbies we all do, and watching them deal with these we can learn  – both from their mistakes and  their successes.  Case in point: never be rude to an airport ticket agent. They have  your vacation in their hands, and with one  little keystroke they can  sentence you to a fifteen hour flight in the middle seat in the back that doesn’t  recline and is right beside the squirming kid.  In season 2 when everyone was jockeying for flights from Iguassu Falls, Brazil to Cape Town, South Africa, team after  irate team was told there was no space on the  earliest and most convenient  one-connection flight via Frankfurt.  That is, until Danny and Oswald, the fabulous, suave and super polite guys from Miami asked.  Suddenly seats miraculously appeared and they cruised to a happy first place, all because they were the lone rational team.

     Finding a local guide is another great tip that teams commonly use.  Granted, on the race teams, particularly Mirna and Charla, will do everything short of kidnapping locals to get their insider information.  Please don’t do this.  Ask nicely.  Leave a tip.  But this is still an awesome idea.   Locals know more about the destination than anyone, and they’re usually just as excited to learn about your hometown as you are to learn the ins and outs of theirs.  This can get you from point A to point B much faster and tip you off to new, out of the way places that you would not have otherwise ever known about. 

      During all of this, the teams are navigating all these stressful challenges with their friend/partner/relative.  I always say the test of any relationship is a vacation, because your communication skills tend to shut down when you’re stressed and fatigued.  The “villans” in each season are not usually the teams that are horrible to other teams, but the teams that are horrible to one another.  The classic example is Jonathan and Victoria in season 5, where he not only screamed at her the whole way, but actually physically shoved her in anger.   Just watching the way these teams melt down serves as a reminder  not to act  like that to your friend/family member/anyone, no matter how jetlagged you might be. 

         And my personal favorite tip the I’ve learned from TAR: “Rapido” does not mean fast in every language.  It’s not that teams haven’t tried, but when you’re in Windhoek, Namibia, the cabbies are just going to give you a “stupid tourist” laugh and continue moving along at whatever speed they want to.  That being said, it’s always a good idea to learn a few words in the local language.  I’m not suggesting taking the Berlitz course or anything, God knows the teams usually can only learn what they get from the other passengers on their inbound flight and they get around pretty well, but a simple ”yes”, “no”, “thank you”, “how much?” and “where’s the bathroom?” can get you a long way.  Particularly the bathroom one.

          I could go on, but really, you just have to watch it yourself.  Even if you don’t glean anything more from the show than some pretty destinations and a whole lot of fun, it’s worth it.

Tags: 108 coin ritual, Bangkok, fun, interesting, Jet lag, The Amazing Race, Tips, travel, travel porn, Wat Po