Costa Rica continues to amaze me – beautiful, well organized, great roads, varied scenery and great people.
The morning was a little hazy so I ended up not taking the photos I said I would take of the spa – check it out on their site – pretty amazing – we stayed for about an hour or two in the several different pools – it even had a water slide which reminded me of Hotel Toriba in Campos de Jordao in Brazil 🙂
We took the scenic route to San Jose – an amazing ride through the central mountains of Costa Rica.
I am truly impressed, surprised really, by the infrastructure here… I knew that it was the most developed country of Central America but the difference is quite big… I looked up a little bit of the history of Costa Rica and found this good summary.
Sloppy little accidents today.
First I stopped to take some pictures and parked the bike on hill that turned out to be too steep… oops – it toppled over! Fortunately another biker was driving by and stopped to help me out – Marc was having a little snack further up the road.
Here are the photos of when I stopped… it looks so much better in person… the vegetation here is SO lush!!
The bike falling over was also recorded on tape!! Hehehehe
Then my jacket simply flew off the bike – when it’s hot I’ve only been wearing the body armor and tying the jacket down on the back… ooops again!
Once we got to the city we had to drive quite a bit to find the KTM dealer – I was in a bad mood when we arrived there and to top it off they were not expecting me even though I had been emailing the owner for about a week or so warning him I would arrive.
After talking to the mechanic and explaining our situation (traveling, schedule, emails) he told me to bring the bike around and that it would be done in a couple of hours!
Excellent!
Marc went to the BMW dealer to replace his starter.
I actually fell asleep at the dealer…
The bike was ready in what seemed to be no time and as soon as I packed it back up Marc arrived with the good news that his starter was also replaced in no time and for a reasonable amount of money. My service was half of what I paid for in LA.
So now I have new fluids on the bike, systems checked and new rear tires – these should last the whole way down to Brazil. In LA they only had more off-road tires (knobies) that last a lot less than “regular” tires.
As we were leaving we ran into Ivan – an Italian who races motorcycles and has a hotel near the dealer – Hotel Luisiana – perfect! He also convinced us to change our route from going to the Atlantic side of Costa Rica to staying on the Pacific side and go through the central mountains – 4000m high! On a good day you can see both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean!
So we followed him to the hotel and are now settled in and getting ready for dinner 🙂
The video for the day: