"Costa Rica" a Costa Rica Travel Page by daffodil

We went to Costa Rica with Sunquest Tours from Toronto. There were 13 of us in the group and we were headed there for our wedding. We flew Skyservice in to Liberia, and took a short trip to the Occidental Allegro Papagayo Resort. During our 1 week stay (which was too short!) we took day trips to Coco Beach, Monteverde Cloud forest, Palo Verde River cruise, and a tour of the Papagayo Gulf.
Please check my Liberia, Palo Verde and Monteverde Pages for more info.
Costa Rica was my first trip to a foreign country and I had a great time. The people are very friendly, but we weren't assaulted with people trying to sell us stuff, and the country itself is really beautiful.

There is an abundance of wildlife in Costa Rica. As a small country it still contains more than half of the different life zones in its many regions. The Pacific Northwest region, where our resort was, is a semi-arid forest. We were there at the very end of dry season so it was very brown. The good part of this though is that this is easier to find the wildlife. We saw white faced and howler monkeys, parakeets, hummingbirds, and these guys. Plus the iguanas and other lizards, which were more like squirrels in North America, than true wildlife.

Costa Rica, meaning rich coast, was colonized by Spain during the 18th century. The people of Costa Rica speak Spainish, but are very diverse in appearance and tolerant to all skin colours and ethnicity (or so was my experience).
Costa Rica really impressed me with their social structure and political ideology. The govenment decided in the late 1940s to stop funding the military (completely stop) and put the money into social programs like education and environment.
Now Costa Rica produces 100% of its electricity from renewable resorces including wind, geothermal and hydro. They can even produce surplus energy which they are able to sell to neighbouring Panama and Nicaragua. They also use water wisely. The water used to flood these rice patties twice a year has already generated energy at 3 hydroelectric dams and after flooding the patties it is passed in ditches to irrigate other fields.
On education, every child in Costa Rica goes to school from grade 1 through high school, and they have a literacy rate above 95%. As of 1995 they start teaching english in grade 1. It seemed hard to believe that this is considered a developing country, when so many things are already at or above many so called developed countries.
Now if they would only put some of that money into the road system....