Costa Rica

[budinbloom]

Any recommendations as to what to do & where to stay. Our flights are booked for Christmas - 15 nts and excluding the first & last nights where we intend to stay in San Jose, we intend to hire a car and DIY it so suggestions please for our itinerary.

We used a private transfer firm rather than drive (some of the mountain roads are a bit hairy at night in a thunderstorm and Costa Ricans seem to be constantly on their phones when they're driving!). We stayed in San Jose (not pretty but felt relatively safe and gave us a bit of an insight into the politics and history of CR) and went on to Arenal and then Manuel Antonio. Personally, I think we could have done more of a tour but my DH and DD only like so much travelling around! Arenal was interesting but not the smoking volcano it used to be. Swimming in thermal pools is popular there - the ones we went to were concrete with natural heated water which wasn't quite what I expected, even though it was attractive! We stayed at Tulemar in Manuel Antonio in their cheapest accomodation - it's a brilliant place and I'd highly recommend it! The national park there is worth going to and the beach is beautiful. From an American family we'd met who go to CR all the time, we were told that the Pacific side is more attractive than the Caribbean but that's only based on what we've been told. There are loads of places I wish we'd seen that we didn't (the Cloud Forest in particular) but we had a brilliant time and I'd definetely go again.