11/12/2019 Montezuma - San Jose

This night, I not only had the noise from the street, but I also heard the conversation of the American couple in the opposite room. Since the windows face the corridor and do not have glass, only a mosquito net, you can hear everything that happens in the other rooms. In the evening, everything was fine and they laughed a lot, but the next morning, the mood changed. She wanted to go to the beach and he wanted to go to the sea...
In the morning, I went for a short run and ran laps on the local soccer field. It was still quite cloudy in the morning and therefore not as warm.
Then I had breakfast and packed my things. I always have concerns whether the transportation here will work. But even this time with "Tropical Shuttle Tours", everything worked perfectly. The taxi was there shortly after 9 am, which took two other guests and me to the ferry. After the ferry, two more minibuses were waiting for us and we were divided into the two vehicles. Our drive was, to put it mildly, very sporty. The driver raced away as if we were fleeing from a horde of howler monkeys. When he raced through San Jose like that, I was a little worried about the pedestrians.
Then I arrived at my hotel, the Hotel Casa Leon. Patrick, a Swiss, is the owner of this hotel. Accordingly, the standard is also there. There is hot water, a plastic shower curtain, so that the room is not completely flooded when showering, and there are even bedside lamps and a wardrobe. In addition, the hotel is so centrally located that I can see the Jade Museum from my window. It is also nice to have a window with a view again.

I quickly eat something in the city and see that there is a big crowd at the igloo, a small building where artificial snow is made. A long line of children with parents is waiting for admission.

Since there is not much to tell today, I will list here all the things I have learned about this beautiful country in the past few days. The population of Costa Rica is 5 million. However, one million of them are from Nicaragua, because the standard of living in Costa Rica is much higher and you earn a lot more money. Therefore, residents of the poor neighboring country immigrate here.

The receptionist at the hotel in Montezuma told me that she works 6 days a week, so she only has one day off per week. She has a month of vacation, but only 14 days are paid. She has to pay for the remaining 14 days herself.

In a small information brochure, I read that a large number of howler monkeys die from electric shocks. Costa Rica has 23,000 km of power lines, and only 450 km of them are isolated, which is only 2%. The 76,000 transformers also pose a high risk. It would cost about 700 million dollars to adapt all electrical lines and transformers to general safety standards.

Estelle, the Frenchwoman, told me that you can hear the roar of a howler monkey up to 5 km away. Surprisingly, it seems that the monkeys that roar the loudest have the smallest genitalia...