Travelogue Costa Rica — November / December 2010                               

This year we struggled with the question where to spend our winter vacation. We had a time window of almost three weeks from mid November until early December. But where should we go? One thing was for sure: Elke and myself agreed that we wanted to see something new.

So we couldn’t consider our beloved South Africa this time. Namibia definitely could have been of interest to us, but temperatures are too hot at that time of year. May be Vietnam? No, we didn’t really feel like going to Asia. Brazil was another alternative, but only in the form of an organized group tour. But we have always been individual travellers, and that's the way it should be, today and in the future!.

We were looking for a place where we could rent a car and travel around on our own. But it should be a warm and safe place. What was that again about Costa Rica? Isn’t that country also called the “Swiss of Central America?“ After checking some information and travelogues in the Internet we soon made our decission: We will fly to Costa Rica!

Now the detailed planning began. It would have been the easiest way to book a “drive & stay package“ as offered by many speacialist tour operators. But the more we learned about Costa Rica the more it became clear that this country can be as easily visited like for example South Africa. So we decided to took the organization of this trip solely into our own hands.

We selected our accomodations by trusting the comments we found on tripadvisor.com. and this was fine. Bookings were easily arranged by e-mail. In most cases a credit card number was required to guarantee our reservation. Often a deposit was charged to our credit card in advance.

The flight we booked directly with Continental Airlines via the USA. Finally we still had to arrange for a rental car.

Besides the well known international car rental companies there are a lot of local car rentals in Costa Rica. The biggest of them is Adobe Rent a Car. Because of different insurance conditions it was however quite difficult to compare prices.

We used the German meta search engine Ihrmietwagen.de (similar offers are available in other countries too) and booked a 4WD (absolutely recommendable in Costa Rica) from Adobe through German tour operator DER Tour. All important insurances were included, and in the end it was cheaper than booking with Adobe directly.

We found Costa Rica to be a very pleasant country to spend a comfortable holiday there. People were extremely friendly and we were deeply impressed by a green and blooming landscape. We had 17 days to explore Costa Rica. It was however not our intention to see as much as possible during this time, but we wanted to take a look at some of the highlights of that country. After all we wanted a stress-free journey providing some recreational value as well. What we have experienced in beautiful Costa Rica you can read in our following travelogue.