Cheap thrills on a family vacation in Costa Rica
BY JACK BARRY jbarry@suntimes.com
Whitewater rafting down the Class II-III rapids of Rio Balsa provides an adrenaline rush. The half-day trip from Desafio Adventure Company (desafiocostarica.com) included transportation from La Fortuna, a mid-rafting fruit break and a late lunch buffet.
TIPS FOR A BUDGET TRIP
Be flexible: We have a rough list of places we’d like to visit. If we spot cheap airfare at the right time, we pounce.
Sleep like locals: Hotels and motels might not be called what you’re used to in a foreign country. A search online for “Costa Rica hotels” returns high-end American-style places. Try words like “lodging,” “cabinas,” “eco-lodge” and “hostel.” For Europe, we search for “agritourism” or even “convent.” Two of the four places we stayed in were booked through hostelworld.com.
Eat like locals: Instead of asking for restaurant recommendations, ask locals for their favorite restaurant or meal. The best thing I ate was a chicken empanada that cost about $1.50 at a hole-in-the-wall bakery a shop clerk told me about. Two fancy touristy restaurants we ate at cost about $90 each and served up overcooked beef tenderloin and dried-out sea bass.
Go it alone: Instead of hopping on a tour bus to Arenal Volcano at $18-$50 a person, we hired a taxi to take us there at night. He brought us to a great lookout spot and waited while we watched the lava show for about 45 minutes. Price: $60, including tip. At the Monteverde Cloud Forest, we opted to explore on our own rather than spend a hefty $17 each for a guide. We wandered for more than 90 minutes without seeing another soul.
Ditch the car: Car rental rates are high right now. And public transportation or arranged rides gave us the chance to watch the countryside, not the roads.
Pack light: This is especially key now that most airlines charge for checked bags. We carry only one bag each, and my wife and daughters each carry a small daypack. As the souvenirs start to pile up, I pull out a collapsible nylon bag that’s still small enough to fit under an airline seat. If two teenage girls can spend a week without flat-irons and hair dryers, you can too.
Article Extras
Updated: September 18, 2011 6:52PM
LA FORTUNA, Costa Rica - After a horseback ride in the Costa Rican sun, I desperately needed to wash up as soon as we checked into our $50-a-night hotel room.
I made a beeline to the bathroom, trying - unsuccessfully - to ignore the velour dolphin bedspread that would look right at home under a velvet Elvis painting.
As I shut off the bathroom faucet, the doll-size sink swung away from the wall because someone hadn’t bothered to attach all the corners.
So this is what you get on a budget vacation.
The goal for my family of four had seemed simple enough: one last fling abroad before our 18-year-old headed to college and schedules got a lot more complicated. But with the economy still sputtering and college bills looming, we couldn’t afford to break the bank.
Questionable decor and faulty plumbing aside, four people can travel overseas for a week for $4,000 - including airfare - and still have a good time. But you have to be willing to work for it, travel like the locals and roll with some of the inevitable surprises no one shows you in those website photos. You might even find that taking the thrifty route affords you the opportunity to experience the country feeling a lot less like a turista.
During the planning stages, we quickly ruled out organized tours. Most were too pricey or too restrictive.
As for destinations, Europe was a no go. Even if we could have found a great airfare, the euro exchange rate at the time would have blown our budget.
That’s when Costa Rica beckoned with an advertised round-trip fare of $300 a person on AA.com.
Roughly the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica has about a dozen distinct microclimates, two oceans lapping its 800 miles of coastline, tropical rainforests and mountains running down its spine.
The Central American nation is a stable democracy that has no standing army, one of the best health-care systems in the world, an attractive exchange rate of about 500 colones to the dollar and a bounty of things to see and do.
Each of us got to pick one top activity. The 18-year-old wanted to snorkel on a reef. The 16-year-old longed to ride horses through the mountains. My wife pictured us wandering through the rainforest, and I wanted to raft down a whitewater river.
We had to come up with a formula that would keep costs down while still having a good time during our allotted seven nights - all without feeling rushed or overscheduled.
That’s how we ended up with that handyman special of a bathroom.
After airfare, our biggest chunk of money was earmarked for fun stuff, like ziplining through the rainforest canopy and learning how to surf.
To save money on lodging, we’d need to find where Costa Ricans, known as ticos, stay when they travel. American-style hotels and resorts tend to carry American-style price tags.
Our search led us to the website Hostelworld.com, which might conjure up images of 10 college kids sharing dorm-style bunks. But many hostels are mom-and-pop places offering basic rooms at a cheap price.
The Cerro Chato Eco Lodge in La Fortuna offers double beds in clean, simple rooms and a stunning location in the shadow of Arenal Volcano. The rooms don’t have phones or TVs, but they do have a great rate: the four of us occupied two rooms for only $12.50 a person.
Small buildings dot the grounds, some with private baths. Our building had two rooms that shared a separate bathroom/shower building, meaning we got a private bath without paying extra for it.
Even better than the price or the view of the volcano were the owners, Miguel and Carmen Zamora. Miguel speaks English fluently and offers enough tips, conversation and tour bookings to rival a Gold Coast concierge.
Carmen, who speaks almost no English, cooks up a typical tico breakfast of eggs, rice and beans, plantains, fruit, coffee and juice for all of $3 a person. She’ll even leave the kitchen to help you spot a howler monkey in the nearby forest.
Relaxed, friendly hospitality like that permeated all of our choices, which sometimes meant a room with dolphin velour bedspreads like we experienced in Santa Elena at the end of a jeep-ferry-horseback trip from La Fortuna.
Santa Elena sits just outside the Monteverde Cloud Forest, where clouds roller-coaster up one side of the jungle-covered Continental Divide and down the other.
The website for our Santa Elena lodging, Cabinas El Pueblo, features photos where the necks of swan-shaped towels intermingle to form a heart while sitting atop tastefully decorated double beds. But our room was much more hostel-like, with two sets of bunk beds, the swinging sink and laminated instructions for wall decorations. At first glance, the room was the kind of place that makes spouses give each other The Look, the one that means: “We’ll stay here tonight, but we’re finding somewhere else for tomorrow, even if it means we have to lose the $50 we already paid.”
But that changed when I asked where I could find a phone to change some transportation plans. The staff dialed the number and changed the pickup time for our taxi. They also arranged for our guided nighttime walk through the forest and directed us to the booking office for a zipline ride through the jungle canopy. One of the staff’s daughters wandered by with an injured cat and chatted in Spanish with our daughters for a good 20 minutes.
How could we leave a place like that-
Once we finally were ready for our next stop, the Pacific cove town of Samara Beach, we took what might seem like the most expensive option: a private taxi. The trip to Samara cost $175 for the four of us, but it allowed us to save time, keep stress levels low and even make a new buddy.
It would be generous to describe the road out of Santa Elena - and many other Costa Rican towns - as a “dirt” road. “Boulder” road seems more appropriate. The constant bouncing delivers what our driver, Minor, called a “Costa Rican massage.” The 80-mile trip from Santa Elena to Samara took nearly four hours, with our speed never topping 50 mph. Even the best highways in Costa Rica are often only two lanes, with Dramamine-required turns and few, if any, guardrails.
Websites like Costarica.com advise tourists not to drive at night. Public buses - the cheapest option - might only make one daily run through a town and can add even more time to the drive.
Private transfers - really four-wheel drive taxis - can be arranged online at Anywherecostarica.com and Monteverdeinfo.com. If you’re lucky, you get a driver like Minor. In his broken English and our broken Spanish, we shared stories about how he met his wife, his love of Saturday night dances and life on his father’s farm. When he dropped us off, it felt like we were saying goodbye to an old friend.
Our luxurious $80 a night hotel in Playa Samara was Hotel Entre Dos Aguas, where the towels really were sculptured together on the beds amid fresh flowers.
Staff offered to arrange our snorkeling trip for $35 a person, but we went with a beachside stand selling the same trip for $22.50 each.
That $50 we saved cost us a lot.
We had to wait almost an hour for a boat to show up. After we made it all the way out to the reef, the supposedly 18-year-old captain realized he didn’t have all of the snorkel equipment. We had to head back to shore to get flippers before heading back out to the reef again.
At that point, the only thing we could do was laugh. After all, when you’re trying to have fun on a budget, not everything can go swimmingly.
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