Denouement Dashboard - Costa Rica 🇨🇷
This is the place I will cover the stats of each country as we go.
As usual, follow along at:
Anyway, let's get into it:
Country: 22-26/5/23
Tracks:
Rough rules: I will count the flight (or bus) TO that country as tracks IN that country.
Planes:
- Medellin --> Bogota --> San Jose = 1,487 km
Automobiles:
- Airport transfers = 34km
- Ubers around town = probably only around 20km
Walking:
- 19.5km
Total = 1,560.5 km
Expenses:
Rough rules: I will count the flight (or bus) TO that country as an expense IN that country.
Total expense: $1,816.38 AUD
Total Days: 5 Days inclusive
Expense per day = $363.28 AUD/Day
Expenses Breakdown (mathematical, not emotional):
Food is expensive in Costa Rica...
Travel Bingo:
Not a huge number of tourists around San Jose. Just a central city of people going about their business. So not a particularly exciting Bingo Card.
It is probably also a result of us declining to do heaps of day tours out from San Jose, rather just chilled around the city.
An explanation of Travel Bingo is here.
Culinary Corner by a Non-Foodie:
- I'll mention this a few times - food is expensive in San Jose - but good.
- In the Escalante neighbourhood there are restaurants everywhere.
- The coffee is still good here.
- Ignore the 'traditional Costa Rican' coffee - it's just black coffee filtered through what looks like an old sock; go somewhere with an actual coffee machine and it is excellent.
Tips and Tricks:
- Costa Rica, or at least San Jose, is very expensive - $6 for a loaf of bread, $55 for breakfast for two, $5-6 coffee etc.
- I don't know why this is but fair warning.
Recommendations:
- Escalante is the neighbourhood we stayed in - it is very nice and safe; close to a hospital and university, it seemed to have a lot of young professionals living there.
- And we stayed in the 'URBN Escalante' building - has gym, pool (offline while we were there), function rooms, library, dog park etc - very swish.
- Stay for a couple of days then get out to jungles and beaches and mountains - something we didn't do because we were coming from jungles and mountains and heading to the beach. You probably don't need to spend the full 5 days in the city.
Summary:
- I've called this a Costa Rica summary but we were only in San Jose - so grain of salt.
- Costa Rica is well developed, stable and expensive.
- No standing army so they don't have the history of coups like everywhere else in the Americas.
- We probably stayed a bit too long, but it was a nice little chill week.
- Uber works.
- Rappi for food delivery.
- It's very expensive for some reason.
Thanks for reading along.
The next country update will come... after the next country.
Weekly updates will come...weekly.
Luke.