Ocean to Ocean

Trip Start Jul 21, 2009

147

Trip End Apr 28, 2010

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Flag of Costa Rica Puerto Viejo, Province of Limon, Costa Rica
Monday, November 9, 2009

Sunday morning, we woke up and started our travel day by heading north for a few hours along the Pacific Ocean. We ended that same travel day by heading south for nearly an hour along the Atlantic Ocean, and connected them with a scenic drive through Costa Rica. I think for both of us, this was the first time we had seen both of these oceans in the same day, which was pretty neat.

Monday we spent in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. It�s another beach town, which we chose mostly because it was on our way to our next destination, in Panama. We did, of course, spend some time on the beach, but we also visited a local botanical garden. The garden is run by the family who lives there, and they�ve tried to incorperate lots of the jungle and crop plants of the area. We went for a nice walk through the area, where all the relevant plants and trees were labeled. At the end, they gave us fresh-squeezed key lime juice (yum!) and we did a tasting of about a dozen different fruits that were in season. There were only two on the list (kumkuats and lychee) that I had ever tried before, and for the most part, they were pretty good fruits. Just one that tasted purely rotten :) We also tried ripe but un-dried cacao, which was interesting, and they explained briefly how it gets from a fruit to chocolate. At the gardens, we were able to do a short hike through the rainforest, where we were able to spot all three local varieties of poison dart frogs. There�s the red one and the green one, and then the most dangerous, the one with yellow stripes.

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