San José - Our start in the capital

Today is day 7 of our journey. We have now arrived on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and are enjoying the beach, tranquility, and finally the tropical weather that we imagined before the trip (in San José, contrary to our expectations, it was quite cool due to the altitude).

But more about that later. ;) First, we would like to tell you about our first 5 days in San José.

In advance, we thought 'Let's first arrive in the capital after the long flight and take a few days to recover from the flight and make initial contacts'. In fact, some friends who had already been there also advised us not to spend too much time in the capital.

In retrospect, you could say: they were somehow right about the city. ;)

We spent the first day taking a walk through the city. However, after 2-3 hours and about 20,000 steps, we were already done and had seen pretty much everything that should be seen.

Aside from a few buildings like the National Theater and a really beautiful park, the city unfortunately doesn't offer much, at least at first glance. In addition, our stay was during Easter and Holy Friday (when we did our city tour) is particularly sacred in Costa Rica. That means that almost everything was closed and we didn't really have the opportunity to find nice spots/cafés, etc.

We asked ourselves: what should we do in San José for the next 2 days?

We used Saturday to have conversations with other travelers and locals in the hostel and then found out:

The 'Poás' volcano is very close to San José. Our hostel owner offered to organize a driver for us, as getting to the volcano by public transport is quite complicated. After about 1.5 hours of driving, we arrived at the volcano on Sunday at around 10:00 am (the earlier, the more likely the weather and visibility are good). After walking the last meters of altitude, we finally had a breathtaking view of the crater of the active volcano. Hard to believe: the night before, a roommate from Berlin told us that she had been there on Saturday and due to the fog, she could only see 2 meters ahead. She didn't see the volcano at all in the end.

We were really lucky - we knock on wood! ;)