Saturday - Topiary, Ox Carts, Return to San Jose

We left La Fortuna and Mountain Paradise and headed south toward the city of San Carlos. The Mountain Paradise is another 3 star hotel, showing its age but generally OK. The first hour of our trip was continuing through the valley, flat land with a variety of crops. The weather is cloudy but at least it stopped raining!

From San Carlos we headed back up the mountain, ultimately to 6000'. The hillsides are lush green and now we see holstein cows for dairy farming. At the top of the mountain we stop in the town of Zacero to see the Santiago church and the amazing topiary garden.

We continue our descent to the town of Sarchi, only now what we see out the window is vegetable farms! Who knew you could grow vegetables at 6000 feet? Here we stopped for lunch a tour of the famous Ox Cart factory. Costa Rica is known for these carts, used for generations by the coffee farmers. They are still used to this day. The exquisite painting is spectacular. And, the whole manufacturing operation is run off a water wheel! Great souvenir shop here!

Next stop is back the city of San Jose, a bustling downtown with people everywhere! They have terrible traffic, too! Our last stop of the day was to the famous National Theater. Build in the late 1800s, there's gold everywhere! Every part of the building was imported from Europe. Beautiful!!

Our day ends back at the Doubletree Hotel where we started. Tomorrow some of our group head home, some continue on the "extension" which is up the Tortuguero National Park. We have to meet our bus at 6:00 AM (We hate this part!) We are told it is VERY rustic!

Tonight wave our last dinner together a group. We say goodbye to Grievin and Manrigue. They have been great team!

Giant replica

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