Sleeping Withthe Toucans
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100 GREAT PLACES TO STAY IN COSTA RICA Web Edition v. 2.0 February, 2009; Copyright © 2007 - 2009 HayFields Science Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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From Tilarán a good but mostly unpaved road snakes through beautiful mountain countryside to Santa Elena and a truly wretched road continues the few kilometers to Monteverde, the most visited cloud forest area of Costa Rica. American Quakers settled this area in the 1950s, after Costa Rica disbanded its army, and started a process of buying and preserving cloud forest that continues to this day. You’ll see plenty of blond, blue-eyed Costa Ricans here.
The Santa Elena – Monteverde area has plenty of lodgings for every budget and style, from backpacker hostels to fancy mountain lodges. Monteverde also boasts more than its share of excellent restaurants; we especially like Johnny’s Pizzaria (don’t be fooled; this is a white table-cloth place) and the Euro-tropical fusion at Sofia. Johnny’s is on the Santa Elena-to-Monteverde road, a little way past the Sapo Dorado; for Sofia turn right at the intersection just before the El Establo Inn.
Santa Elena and Monteverde both have eponymous cloud-forest reserves, and both are worth a visit. The Santa Elena reserve is north of Santa Elena – start back in the direction of Tilarán and turn right instead of left at the Y. Here you will find the Selvatura hanging bridges and the “Jewels of the Rainforest” Whitten Entomological Collection. You may not be a fan of insect life when you enter Jewels of the Rainforest, but you’re guaranteed at least to be impressed by our six- and eight-legged cousins when you come out. For the hanging bridges, go early to beat the crowds. We like the slow pace and quiet of the bridges far more than canopy tours, and the chance of seeing birds and critters is better too.
The Monteverde reserve is famous for quetzals, and we saw a pair of them our first morning in one of the big trees right by the parking lot. What luck! There’s a fine hummingbird garden by the entrance and a café that serves espresso and excellent pies. A little grey fox trotted out of the forest as we were having our coffee break and regarded us with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Hulking, strange-smelling interlopers! He skittered away and we finished our coffee – pretty good wildlife sighting for one cloudy morning.
Don’t miss the Monteverde organic coffee cooperative just before you reach Monteverde on the road from Santa Elena or the regional crafts co-op right next door. Some interesting local artists also show in downtown Santa Elena in the little gallery across the street from the tourist office.
After a few days in Monteverde, you’ll find yourself wondering why the roads around here are so bad, and why, since this place is so remote, they haven’t built an airport. The answer is that the locals don’t want paved roads and the hordes of tour busses that will follow them and they don’t want airplanes. In short, they don’t want to look like the slopes of Arenal. You probably don’t want them to either.
If you’re headed to Nicoya when you leave Monteverde, go back to Tilarán and follow Highway 142 down to Cañas. Do not take the turn-off toward Juntas as a shortcut to the Interamericana. Unless you’re into four-wheeling as an adrenaline sport, you’ll regret it. If you’re heading south or back to San José, go south from Santa Elena down the long ridge toward Guacimal. You have some driving ahead of you here; this road varies from not-bad to a real bone cruncher after wet weather. At the intersection just outside Guacimal, turn left and follow the signs to Sardinal; you’ll hit paved road (whew!) sooner.
Update (February, 2008): It's still quite the drive getting there, but the streets of downtown Santa Elena are now paved. It really helps keeping the dust down.
Owner-Chef Karen Nielsen is still cooking great things at Sofia, and has opened a new place, Chimera, specializing in tapas. It's just down the road from Sofia, across from E Establo. We hear that Johnny's, on the other hand, is closed this season for major remodeling.
Update (April, 2009): Karen Nielsen has another great restaurant, Trio (2645-7254), across the road and bit downhill from from the Santa Elena police station. We also like Moon Shiva (2645-6270) on the road from Santa Elena toward Monteverde. Johnny's has reopened with a huge new building, and is a major tour-bus destination.
Santa Elena
Keyword: Downtown
Photo © Claro de Luna
Contact Information:
506-2645-5269 (voice/fax)
reservations@clarodelunahotel.com
www.clarodelunahotel.com
Essentials:
9 Rooms
English, Spanish
All major credit cards accepted
Secure parking
Breakfast included, Restaurants nearby
Room Amenities: Internet available in office
How to get here:
From Central Santa Elena go south towards Sardinal passing the
bypass to Monteverde and Insect World. At the Y-intersection, turn
sharply right and backtrack on the dirt road toward Santa Elena.
Claro de Luna is on the left.
An especially handsome mot-mot joined Alison for her morning meditation, sitting not two meters from her for a good ten minutes. Pretty friendly for a mot-mot, colorful but elusive birds who like the shadows and tend to fly off whenever they see you watching them. A stiff breeze from the north was blowing the mist down the valley and the tall pines above Claro de Luna provided the best shelter around.
Friends in Tamarindo had advised us to stay at Claro de Luna as the best budget hotel in the Monteverde area. While most places up here are lodges or cabinas, Claro de Luna is a three-story house, the top two stories an open A-frame in chalet style. With its open kitchen and dining room, wall of windows looking east, and graceful central staircase, it reminded me of an old friend’s house back in Rollinsville, Colorado where a dozen or so of us would take a break from graduate school for weekends of communal meals, cross-country skiing, and occasional construction work. Claro de Luna is about three blocks south of the center of Santa Elena, a town a lot like the Colorado mountain towns of the 1970s: laid-back, lots of healthy-looking young people, a fine place for a good time but with an air of late-hippie-era, back-to-nature earnestness instead of the all-out party vibe of the beach towns.
Red impatiens petals decorated our pillows, the swan-folded towels, and even the bathmat in our room – nice touches for a budget hotel. The “deluxe” rooms downstairs are slightly larger and have pastel, sponge-painted walls, but we prefer the upstairs rooms (# 8 and 9) with their wooden walls, peaked ceilings, and high view over the valley. All the rooms have nice bathrooms with great showers and plenty of shelf space for your stuff.
Breakfast was late, a disappointment so severe we almost wrote the Claro off as a loss. Somehow the cook was locked out of the house, and couldn’t even make coffee! We commiserated in Spanish, tried our room keys in all the locks without success, then she volunteered that the little soda (snack-bar) across the street had coffee at 6 a.m. By the time we got back she’d made it inside, and her excellent breakfast of eggs and pancakes with plenty of real maple syrup made up for our distress. We traded travel notes with our Dutch neighbors Camiel and Marja, marveled at the rather disconcerting swarm of tiny brown bugs that had appeared out of nowhere overnight (a common and unpreventable cloud-forest happening, we later learned), and were on our way.
Some guests have complained that the walls here are thin, but there are no TVs around (always a blessing), and it’s hard for humans without electronics to compete in the night-time racket department with the tree frogs. Enjoy your stay!
Santa Elena
Keywords: Hiking, Birding, Kid-friendly
Photo © Monteverde Cloud Forest Lodge
Contact Information:
506-2645-5058 (voice); 506-2645-5168 (fax)
reservations@cloudforestlodge.com
www.cloudforestlodge.com
Essentials:
20 Rooms
English, Spanish
All major credit cards accepted
Secure parking
Breakfast included, Restaurant, Bar
Room Amenities: Internet available in office
How to get here:
From Central Santa Elena, go east toward Monteverde. The Cloud
Forest Lodge is up a steep driveway on the left side just before the
Sapo Dorado. There is a tiny sign; if you reach the Sapo Dorado,
backtrack one driveway.
The Santa Elena – Monteverde area has several lodges, but for a good combination of traditional “lodgy” feel and the relative privacy of cabinas try the Monteverde Cloud Forest Lodge, up the steep road above the Sapo Dorado. The main building has a classic, A-frame restaurant with a small bar, a corner with couches for watching TV, and a splendid view all the way down to the Gulf of Nicoya. Twenty rooms arranged in duplexes or four-plexes are arrayed on the hillside above the restaurant, some practically tucked into the forest, some with views above it. The rooms are nothing fancy but are comfortable and well laid-out; the “family” rooms have bunk beds for the kids and plenty of storage space. Floors are terracotta tile, walls and ceilings are wood, and there are nice, semi-private porches outside.
No one comes all the way to Monteverde to spend their time in a hotel room, and the Cloud Forest Lodge provides plenty for you to do. You’re at the bottom of a 30-hectare (about 75 acre) forest reserve, and this is cloud forest where every tree is a complex ecosystem of epiphytes and various arboreal creatures. Broad, well-maintained trails wind through the area around the lodge or, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can climb the 15 km up to the Santa Elena Cloud Forest. The Cloud Forest Lodge also claims the “original” canopy tour, with steel cables strung between platforms at mid-canopy level. The “ziplines” are fun if you’re comfortable wearing a climbing harness, but they’re too fast and too loud for much wildlife viewing. We prefer suspension bridges which allow you to go at your own pace, stop when you want to and, best of all, to be quiet and hear the forest around you. Selvatura, right at the entrance to the Santa Elena reserve, has a great suspension-bridge trail; ask at the Lodge desk to arrange transportation.
As with so much in Costa Rica, the small and nearby sights rival the large and distant ones for wonders. On a quiet morning, we took the relatively-short River Trail down from the lodge, across the creek, along the border with the Cloud Forest School, and back to the road. Late in the rainy season, this was the blue trail – blue Morpho butterflies, blue hydrangeas, tiny blue asters among the tall grasses, and four to five inch acid-blue mushrooms that just screamed, “don’t eat me”. Raucous Costa Rican brown jays squawked and jostled overhead. Last night’s rain still dripped off the trees and the creek ran clear and noisy. You don’t have to be in a cloud forest long to start feeling primeval, furry, maybe even a bit green around the edges. This is an environment where you could disappear without a trace, where the imagination needs but little coaxing. Stand here a few minutes in the cool mist and all those fairy tales about the deep dark woods, the talking animals, and the strange things that happen to the boastful and unwary start to make sense.
Santa Elena
Keyword: Downtown
Photo © Arco Iris
Contact Information:Essentials:
20 Rooms
English, Spanish, German, French
All major credit cards accepted
Secure parking
Breakfast included, Restaurants nearby
Room Amenities: In-room safes, Internet available in office
How to get here:
Central Santa Elena is a triangle of one-way streets. The driveway to
Arco Iris is on the right side of the westward-running one-way street,
which begins just down the hill from the main tourist office and ends
at the Banco Nacional.
The first time we stayed at Arco Iris, I woke up around 5:30, listened to the birds for a while, and then wandered over to the kitchen. It was at least half an hour before breakfast started, but one of the cooks smiled at my then-pretty-pitiful Spanish, and gave me not just two cups, but a tray with a pot of coffee, another of milk, spoons, and even napkins. We’ve loved it ever since.
Arco Iris sits part way up a hill about two blocks from the center of Santa Elena, but has the spacious feel of a rural property. Several big friendly dogs and who knows how many cats roam around or sleep in the sun. There are orange trees, bananas, mimosas, and all sorts of flowers. A creek runs along one side shaded by big cloud-forest trees. Susanna, the owner, grows her own herbs and greens and her chickens provide the eggs at breakfast. Horses graze here and there. There are three duplexes, a two-story four-plex, and the other rooms are free-standing. You can have a private little one-room cabin hanging over the creek (#8) or a big two-bedroom house with a full kitchen perched up on the hill (“the house”). Or try the brand-new, split-level Honeymoon cabin with its four-poster bed and private jacuzzi. There are even cabins with bunk beds for budget-conscious backpackers or big families. Whatever you choose, you’ll have a comfortable space with terracotta tile floors, blond wooden walls and ceilings, a covered porch for sitting, and plenty of nearby flowers.
Breakfast at Arco Iris is a splendid affair – a generous buffet with German-style cold cuts and cheeses as well as the usual hearty Tico fare, plenty of fruit, sweet breads, and even carrot cake. The new upstairs breakfast room – just completed in 2006 – has lots of windows for a great view and wonderful paintings by Costa Rican artist Gustavo Araya. The theme of the paintings is typically Central American – in one, a mother crocodile picks up her young in her cavernous mouth to carry them down to the water – but the style is hip and indigenous-contemporary; all the animals, moons and other natural objects are really painted collages, full of additional figures and stories.
You can arrange tours from here to the Monteverde or Santa Elena reserves. There’s lots of local alternatives. Walk down the hill to the orchid garden or up the next hill to the serpentarium. Drop by Chunches, the eclectic little store across the street, for books or a mid-morning espresso. Maybe you’ll just want to watch the bright yellow-bellied flycatchers, the hummingbirds, and the occasional toucans going about their daily business in the bushes and trees – that’s what we did.
Update (February, 2008): Susanna's new honeymoon cabin is high up above the main lodge and gardens and is truly fabulous - 3 floors, a well-equipped full kitchen, a natural stone shower-for-two as well as an indoor jacuzzi, private balcony and gardens, and a comfy 4-poster bed. Move into here and you won't want to go back home.
South of Santa Elena
Keywords: Relax/Get Away, Horseback Riding
Photo © El Sol
Contact Information:Essentials:
2 Cabins
English, Spanish, German, Swedish, Finnish
Cash only
Secure parking
Pool, Sauna
Breakfast included, Dinner can be arranged
Room Amenities: Full kitchen, Private outdoor space
How to get here:
Drive south of Santa Elena on the dirt road toward Guacimal for 15
minutes, then look for the Sun sign at El Sol’s gate, on the right side of
the road. Coming from Highway 1, El Sol is about 30 minutes above
Guacimal, on the left. Close the gate after you drive through so the
horses won’t get out.
Friends told us we had to stay at El Sol – that it was a “life changing experience” for them and everyone they knew. So we made our way up, once again, toward Monteverde, with a certain amount of trepidation. You see, we like our life. Certain kinds of changes are great fun – like moving to Costa Rica – but others we could do without. Nothing horribly drastic seemed to have happened to our friends, though, so we gave it a whirl.
El Sol certainly is a different experience, at least if you’re used to urban congestion, a 24/7 career, and the constant ringing of telephones. At El Sol, it’s just you and the mountain. Wind at night, fresh sunlight at dawn, smells of clouds, trees, oiled wood, and high grass going golden early in the dry season.
El Sol sits on the western flank of the long ridge that climbs from Guacimal up to Santa Elena, the ridge whose seemingly endless curves you’ll drive along coming up here from Highway 1, and going back down. There are just two cabins, one somewhat larger, well separated so that you neither see nor hear your fellow guests. Both cabins face northwest, looking across the tumbling ridges and valleys toward Tilarán almost 20 miles away. Judging from the absence of nighttime lights, not a soul must live in those 20 miles. You can sit on your porch and just stare into space. Or meditate. Or do your morning yoga with nothing on, secure in the knowledge that no one is looking.
Elisabeth, the owner, welcomed us with a hug and, after we’d had a chance to settle in, brought us a bountiful dinner of Spanish potato torta, fresh vegetables, homemade bread, and her own homemade sauces. She or a neighbor will prepare a dinner with advance notice, but the cabins are also very well equipped with a gas cooktop, toaster oven, refrigerator, teapot and tea, coffee maker and coffee – everything you need to prepare simple meals. You won’t want to leave once you get here, and it’s a long way from anywhere, so stop for supplies in Santa Elena if you’re coming from the north or before you leave home.
Over breakfast, we talked with Elisabeth about life in this high, empty place, with its long distances, big views, and frequently dramatic weather. She comes from Germany and spent many years in the Canary Islands; she understands independent living and an almost monastic isolation. Some guests, she says, come for the horseback riding or hiking across the pastures and around the network of little farm roads. But most just come here for the quiet, to really get away, to just be with themselves for a while. We can see why.
Did our lives change at El Sol? Who knows? Any number of things might have happened if we hadn’t come up here.
Santa Elena
Keywords: Birding, Hiking
Photo © Sapo Dorado
Contact Information:
506-2645-5010 (voice); 506-2645-5180 (fax)
reservations@sapodorado.com
www.sapodorado.com
Essentials:
30 Suites
English, Spanish
All major credit cards accepted
Secure parking
Breakfast included, Restaurant, Bar
Room Amenities: In-room safe, Internet available in office, Fireplaces
(Mountain Suites only)
How to get here:
Go east from Central Santa Elena toward Monteverde; the Sapo
Dorado is on your left.
The “Black Guan” sendero (trail) heads up into the forest just past the banana trees on the east side of El Sapo Dorado between the spreading legs of a huge, twisted fig tree. It was just after sunrise. We’d forgotten to bring our coffee maker along on this trip, and we were both feeling a bit foggy. We didn’t see any black guans – a turkey-sized arboreal bird – but this trail has some truly impressive matapalos (strangler figs). They begin life high in the crown of a cloud-forest tree as seeds deposited by bats or birds who’ve recently dined on figs. They grow downward, wrapping their host in an inescapable embrace. The big ones are meters in diameter, sometimes still surrounding the rotting hulk of their former host, often hollow, and big enough for several stories of spiral staircase to fit inside. A quick movement caught Alison’s eye, and we watched a family of pizotes – the local coatimundis – passing by, the adults crashing through the branches like oversized, clumsy squirrels and the young ones scampering along the forest floor below.
El Sapo Dorado – the golden toad – is named for one of Monteverde’s more famous amphibians, discovered in 1964 but not seen since 1996, possibly an early victim of global climate change. A guide in Monteverde Reserve once told us that he had set the last golden toad in captivity free. Who knows? We hope the little critters are still out there, singing and reproducing in some quiet hollow of these perennially-wet mountains.
The hotel offers three kinds of rooms, all in duplexes set well apart from each other in lovely gardens. The rooms have blond wood interiors, plenty of storage space, and excellent lighting. The two-bedroom “family” suites are on the hillside looking south. The “sunset” rooms have two beds, a fridge, and a view of the Gulf of Nicoya on clear mornings. Our favorites are the “mountain” rooms, also with two beds, but with a fireplace and supply of wood. A wonderful thing about Monteverde is that it’s often cool enough for a fire. Bring a knife – kindling is in short supply.
El Sapo Dorado is famous for its restaurant which offers a variety of vegan and vegetarian dishes in addition to the Costa Rican standards of beef, chicken, pork chops, and sea bass. The food here is good but pricey, and we find Sofia to be more creative and exciting. Breakfast is way overpriced at the Sapo – bring your own coffee maker, and stop by one of Santa Elena’s several bakeries for supplies the day before.
It’s perfectly quiet here at night, great for a good night’s sleep with the windows open, but be prepared for the morning chorus. At least 100 parrots were flocking in the trees on the ridgeline above the hotel on our last visit, and we listened with amusement to a vigorous shouting match between the invading parrots and the resident brown jays. The last squawk we heard, the jays had won.
Update (February, 2008): We don't know what made them do this, but the Sapo Dorado has dug up their front yard and installed a huge muddy parking lot, a chalet-style building with stained-glass windows that looks like a church but is actually a bar, and - get this - a bank. That's right, a bank, complete with armed guards and all. Yuck. You might want to be staying somewhere else ...
The Rustic Lodge is the kind of small mountain lodge you can expect to find in any small mountain town: basic design, lots of wood, a cosy dining room with the promise of pancakes for breakfast. Step inside, and you'll find furniture handmade from local wood, a great cup of Monteverde coffee, and a friendly staff waiting to show you around, organize a tour, or recommend area restaurants. There are even guest computers and a wifi link. We can see why Rustic Lodge stays full even in a down tourist season: it's comfortable and it's a bargain.
Rustic Lodge offers 13 rooms of various sizes. The four garden rooms at the back of the property are the quietest; the two family rooms above the restaurant are the largest. Room rates include a generous breakfast.
Rustic Lodge is a few minutes from downtown Santa Elena, just uphill from the soccer field. You'll want to head downtown for dinner. Santa Elena now has Italian three-wheeled urban taxis in addition to the big 4-WDs, so getting around without a car is easy.
Reviewed April 17, 2009
If some time at an operating, all-natural Costa Rican farm sounds appealing, try Cabañas Valle Campanas, a few minutes from downtown Santa Elena but a complete remove from the tourist-town bustle. Wander through the uncut cloud forest, admire the groves of bananas and plantains, sample fresh sugar-cane juice squeezed with a decades-old trapiche. Valle Campanas is named for the pajaro campana - Costa Rica's 3-wattled bellbird - and these and many other birds are regularly seen on the property.
Valle Campanas offers three two-story cabins with full kitchen facilities. They are designed for families and furnished with both single and double beds. The cabins are spaced well apart for privacy and have views over the fields or into the forest.
Valle Campanas is south of Santa Elena. Follow signs to "Sabine's Horses" or use the excellent map on their website.
Reviewed April 18, 2009
Hidden Canopy opened just three months ago and has zoomed to the top of Santa Elena's luxury charts. Owner-manager Jennifer's concept is simple: start with a lovely mountain property with a view of the Nicoya Peninsula, add a handful of unique, luxuriously- appointed accomodations, and provide an intimate B&B atmosphere with lots of personal attention. Monteverde was clearly ready for this - guests without reservations are keeping Hidden Canopy full.
Hidden Canopy offers three "treehouses" built in, not on, the cloud-forest trees. One is two-bedroom; all have walls of picture windows onto the canopy. "Neverland" and "Eden" feature visually-private balconies. There is also one room in the main house, nicely appointed but without the flair of treehouse living. Hidden Canopy serves a typical tico breakfast and afternoon tea; lunch and dinner require a trip down to Santa Elena.
Hidden Canopy B&B is on the road from Santa Elena to the Selvatura Park and the Santa Elena Reserve, about 10 minutes from downtown. A 4WD may be needed in the rainy season, but you'll need that just to get to Monteverde if it's raining.
Reviewed April 19, 2009