Costa Rica Quest – July 16-25, 2010

Costa Rica Quest is our third trip with GAP Adventures. GAP trips get you close to the culture and people of the country. The accommodations are local rather than international chains. The people on GAP trips are really fun to be with.

Costa Rica is about seeing the rain forest, the cloud forest, and the beaches. July is winter in Costa Rica, which is their term for the rainy season. It is the time Costa Rica is greenest. We arrived in San José and spent a day seeing its Central Market and Jade Museum. Our next stop was La Fortuna at the edge of Arenal Volcano National Park. One reason to visit Costa Rica is to see wildlife. We saw enormous iguanas,

and sloths,

and caiman,

and alligators.

Here is a colony of bats resting on a tree. When they perceive a threat, even in their sleep, they vibrate in unison, which looks like leaves on the tree fluttering in the wind. The threat thinks they are just leaves and goes away.

We hoped to see red lava flowing from the volcano on a night walk, but it was cloudy and rainy. We did see the volcano blowing off ash.

Our next stop was Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. The roads are windy and very bumpy. Chuck went on a 13 line zip lining course. The last line was 1 km.

We import tropical plants, but the ones naturally in Costa Rica are 10 times bigger than ours. The annual growing season is 12 months long. Here a tree is the host to a large number of different plants.

Here a tree has been almost completely taken over by vines. You can only see a very small part of the tree trunk; the majority of it is the vine.

Our next stop was the beaches of Quespos and Manuel Antonio National Park. Here we are in the Pacific while the rain stopped for a few minutes.

The moneys at the beaches are looking for handouts. They have learned that people keep food in baggies. So a monkey grabbed a baggie out of one of our bags and it only had shoes in it! One of our tour mates ran after it and retrieved the shoes.

The beaches are beautiful for swimming and riding the waves.

Here is Jan on the way to snorkeling in the Pacific. We saw lots of colorful fish.

All good things have to come to an end. This is our GAP group’s farewell dinner in San José.

Romania Tour with Rachel & Emily

We wanted to show Chuck’s daughters Romania. We also wanted to see more of Romania before we returned to the US. The Romanian tourism industry is not well developed. There is no Rick Steves’ guide. It is not an easy country to drive in. So we hired a van for an eight day tour of UNESCO sites from http://www.visittransilvania.ro/. Dan, our driver and guide, speaks excellent English and was very patient and informative.

Our tour started with the steep wooden churches of Maramureş County. These are mainly from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Church on the Hill in Leud dates from 1364. Their interiors are decorated with frescoes.

The Merry Cemetery of Săpânţa  is unique. The many blue wooden crosses feature a carved scene and humorous verses that endeavor to capture essential elements - both the good and the imperfections - of the deceased’s life. There was one person responsible for the idea and creation of these informative head stones. He carved them all. When he died, his son and apprentice took over. The second picture shows the deceased with his red Mercedes Benz car. The picture showed he was rich. The poem on the headstone said in a humorous way that he worked hard at the peril of his family and friendships.

We were visiting the Maramureş Women’s Museum in Dragomiresti when Emily sneezed. The man in charge of the museum insisted that she and Rachel put on the traditional (and VERY warm) jacket and hat to warm them up. And if that didn’t do it, he served them Horincă, a homemade plum brandy.

Among the most picturesque treasures of Romania are the Painted Monasteries of Bucovina (in northeastern Romania). Their painted exterior walls are decorated with elaborate 15th and 16th century frescoes featuring portraits of saints and prophets, scenes from the life of Jesus, images of angels and demons, and heaven and hell.

We crossed the Carpathians Mountains several times on this tour. We hiked along rapids and waterfalls during one of our crossings.

We saw Elie Wiesel’s house in Sighet.

A nice woman walked us to the Synagogue in Piatra Neamt. The caretaker with his grass cutting sickle in hand took us to the Jewish cemetery. This is where a friend’s grandfather is buried. It is difficult for the remaining 230 mostly elderly members of the Jewish community to maintain this cemetery. It was overgrown with vegetation. The caretaker opened a shed to show us the horse drawn hearse.

Agriculture is very traditional in Romania. We saw horse drawn plows and people using hoes in the fields. Horse drawn wagons are common.

A trip to Romania would not be complete without a visit to the 14th century Bran Castle (Count Dracula, Vlad Ţepeș's castle). Even though Vlad the Impaler only visited it for a short period of time and the story of Dracula is mostly fiction, the castle was interesting because it was a working, medieval castle.

We also visited Peleşand Pelişor castles. These castles were show palaces for the Romanian kings.

In Brasov, we visited the narrowest street in Romania, the central plaza, the black church, and the synagogue.

The Prejmer Fortified Saxon Church is 500 years old. The church is at the center of the fortifications. When there were attacks, the village families came into the walls and lived in apartments that surround the church. The walls are 2 meters thick with slots to defend against attacks.

We toured the medieval town of Sighişoara, the fortified German city of Sibiu, and the capital of Burcharest. And, of course, we enjoyed Romania food and beer. The first picture includes our guide, Dan. We all got these savory filled crepe-like things that were pretty and delicious. The last picture is of Rachel’s fish soup. It came with the head of the fish sticking out, with a chili in its mouth!!

Budapest, Hungary

Budapest reminds us of Prague: beautiful old buildings, bustling with people and very clean. We stayed across the street from a McDonalds (our spot for internet), and we saw employees cleaning the sidewalks and gutters on all sides. While walking around, we saw private people and city employees cleaning the streets and sidewalks. We’ve seen the same thing in Cluj. In both cities, there are small trash cans every 50 feet or so, and they are used by the public. The pictures are of beautiful buildings in Budapest.

Chuck’s mastery of public transit systems got us to the hotel easily. We came up from the subway on the square in front of our hotel. There were about 10 police officers standing around so Jan took the opportunity to ask if any of them would trade police patches for her son, Jon. The first two looked at her like she was crazy, even though she was holding out a University of Kentucky patch to exchange. At the same time, another officer ripped his Velcro patch off with a flourish. And another officer looked disappointed because he was trying to unpin his patch. Luckily Jan had two to trade and received two different Budapest police patches. Again, it was a fun encounter with side conversations about where we were. The city has buses, trams and subways that connect all over the place. The picture is of the oldest line in Europe (originally horse drawn!!) This is the Opera stop.

For Jan’s birthday, we went to Bor La Bor (Wine Lab) a romantic, cellar with a very friendly waiter who recommended delicious food and really good wine. We began with hot camembert over a fried biscuit on a bed of yogurt tossed shredded veggies. Then we had Crispy goose leg with mashed potatoes and red cabbage (very Hungarian). Our waiter suggested a dry white wine which we shared. Jan was a bit tipsy but in food heaven. For dessert, we shared an apple dessert that was equal to the meal. It was one of the best birthday nights for Jan.

Our sightseeing included walks around the old Grand Market. We had lunch there of traditional foods and ate with the locals. We toured the Great Synagogue, the second largest synagogue next to one in New York. The synagogue was fascinating. It was built in 1859 deliberately to look like a church to prove how assimilated the Jews were. As you can see in the picture, the outside has two towers and a rose window, very similar to a Catholic church, not a synagogue. The sanctuary has “pulpits” half way in the middle on the sides. We have seen this in a lot of Catholic churches but never in a synagogue. The synagogue was recently renovated using funds that the old actor, Tony Curtis raised. (His family is from Budapest.) The last picture is of a metal tree sculpture. It has small leaves of people who died in the Holocaust.

On day 3 in Budapest, Chuck’s daughters arrived for a 2 week visit. Highlights of our time in Budapest with Emily and Rachel include—besides the luck of not being rained on—eating at the Grand Market, swimming at the Széchenyi Baths in no less than eight baths and pools filled with natural hot springs ranging from 86 to 104 degrees, eating goulash at a great little Hungarian pub, climbing the hills of Buda (Budapest is the combined cities of the flat city of Pest and the hilly city of Buda) to see the citadel and freedom monument, a class I relic of Saint Istvan’s hand (fourth picture), and the hospital in the rock (a crude but clean for the time, hospital used during WWII and during the Russian invasions). The last picture is of Rachel and Chuck in the Agricultural Museum.

A bit of explanation about why we see relics: Relics in the Catholic religion are in three classes: the first is an actual body part of a saint, the second is something belonging to a saint (unless it’s Jesus i.e. the shroud of Turin which is first class) and third class is something used by the saint. Chuck gets a kick out of relics. Jan doesn’t believe they are real. Part of what makes the person a saint is the fact that part of their body didn’t decompose as it should have. We saw the head of Saint Catherine when we were in Italy. It still had hair and skin. This hand still had nails and skin on the fingers.

The Hungarian State Opera House is an architectural treasure. We attended Puccini’s Tosca and Strauss’s Elektra. Both operas were excellent. Here are two pictures of the beautiful opera house.