Costa Rica: The Warmup

December 28, 2024

We usually tell ourselves that we can bicycle in any temperature over 10°C, but in truth we will look for excuses not to cycle when the temperature is under 16°C. That means once Fall arrives on our Vancouver Island, cycling just isn't happening, though in principle it could on many a day. Given that reality, we begin to look for someplace warm to take our bikes to. Hawaii and Florida and places in between have sometimes been the answer, but in recent years we have quite enjoyed the Yucatan peninsula of eastern Mexico.

We were indeed in Yucatan, around Christmas 2023. There we "snuck" onto the grounds of "Hacienda Chichen", which is a hotel near the famous Chichen Itza Mayan ruins. The extensive hotel grounds are known for harbouring many wild birds, and we hoped to get a peek at them. In a story now much repeated, we saw almost nothing, though we did hear a lot of birds. The one exception was when Dodie suddenly spotted what turned out to be a pair of Collared Aracari, a bird in the Toucan family. Just at this point a lady wandered by. She and her husband turned out to be veteran birders. The lady was carrying what seemed then to us to be a large camera, which turned out to be the Nikon P950 super zoom point and shoot. The lady commented that they had not seen an Aracari "since Costa Rica". This famously started spinning all sorts of wheels in our little heads.

"Costa Rica" ? Could we cycle there? It turned out to be 2300 km away. That's within range for us. But there seemed to be some sort of dodgy countries in the way: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua. And the Nikon P950 - could we fit that on the bike somewhere?

These things had a year anyway to percolate in our minds. But it didn't take a year for me to decide to buy the P950. It just fit in my handlebar bag, evicting all the pastries and snacks, in what I took as a major life shake up. Snacks ended up in a back pannier, meaning I would have to bestir myself enough to get off the bike and open up back there, a very tiring prospect!

In France and Spain the P950 worked well, catching some nice birds and also proving well adapted for church interiors.

But what about cycling to or in Costa Rica? We looked for Costa Rica cycling blogs, and found a few. But these either described travel along the somewhat flat Pacific coast, or they contained rather horrific stories about traffic near San Jose, in the so called Central Valley.

Here we see some of the coastal route followed by one of the bloggers, Ken Dyckman

And here is Margaret Kavanagh on a guided group tour in October 2022, nevertheless fighting the way across a river (not so great for ebikes!).

But how about this? (From Margaret's blog)

Or then we have David Chavez, who rode more down the centre of the country in 2024, ending at San Jose in the traffic:

David ended by fleeing to this dirt path beside the road (from his 2024 blog "South".)

With these kinds of images in mind, we decided it would be better to go down to Costa Rica without the bikes, at least for the first time, until we could form a direct impression of whether biking would be a good idea for us.

Check the next page to see what we arranged for our first foray to this unknown country.

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MARIEANNE ARATAWe were in Costa Rica about 5 years ago. The roads were being repaired and were terrible anyway. We did see some interesting birds and animals.
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2 weeks ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo MARIEANNE ARATAOur take on the roads and their suitability for bicycling will be coming up in our blog entry a few days from now.
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2 weeks ago