Liberia: the gateway to Rincon de la Vieja

Costa Rica has been at the top of my travel list for a long long time. I am a big wildlife lover and pretty much all of my trips in the last 6 years have been wildlife focused, from hiking to see wildlife mountain gorillas in Uganda, a snorkelling expedition in Philippines, Mashpi Lodge and the Amazon in Ecuador, Safari in Kenya and Tanzania… And Costa Rica is renowned for it’s biodiversity and ecotourism centred on wildlife.

The last few days in Nicaragua I spent basically all my down time planning the last details of what we should do and where we should go to maximise our time. So my head was kind of already there since we left Ometepe…

The issue for me is balance… We’re not working and this Costs Rica trip is part of a one year trip, so budget is slimmer than it should be really, in a country famous for being very expensive to travel. So how can we still see all the birds and wildlife we want to see without blowing all our budget?!?!

The key was going to be self catering! And also to continue travelling how we always travel – DIY (aka without a tour or a guide), on public transport (no expensive shuttles for us!). I’d always prefer to do this anyway, so there’s no change there!

From San Juan in Nicaragua then, we got a bus up to the main road and the town of La Virgen, here we waited for a 2nd bus to take us to the border.

The bus was alright and took us on a road next to Lake Nicaragua, with views over Ometepe again. At the border we hopped out and started the long walk to the Nicaraguan exit. We saw all the locals on the bus heading out into a field… We didn’t know if this was a dodgy crossing?! As we were the only ones from the bus here and in the exit building!

We paid our $4 exit fee and then carried on walking, down a gridlocked road full of trucks trying to cross the border. We finally saw the Costa Rica entrance. There was an ATM here which was free! So that sorted us out with cash then we tried to enter Costa Rica… And failed!!

We needed proof of onward travel…. 🤦🏻‍♀️ We do have a flight booked from Panama to Colombia – which on every site, forum and asking ChatGPT, said would likely be enough, since we obviously have to leave Costa Rica to take this flight, but no, that wasn’t enough, we needed an actual ticket showing leaving Costa Rica… We headed outside again. Fortunately, my home SIM allows roaming in CR, so I was able to look for an alternative. I had already heard about an online service which books you a flight, but then cancels it automatically within the 24 hour grace period. The service is just £8 (£4 each) so I did that, and booked a flight from San Jose to Panama (which is now cancelled) and within 5 minutes we were back in the border office getting an approved entry! ☺️ Phew! Definitely not stressful… 👀😂

It was another short walk to the bus stop at the border, where we caught a bus to Liberia, our first stop here on CR. We planned to stay here for 2 reasons, first, it’s a convenient entry point from Nicaragua, and second, it’s very good for accessing Rincon de la Vieja national park, which looked EPIC!

The drive was so good too, and weirdly, in my head I had imagined what Costa Rica would look like – green, heavily forested, clean, rolling hills of lush jungles and volcanoes… But then I realised, no wait, it’s going to look very similar to Nicaragua at first, dry dusty forests etc., as it can’t change that dramatically just over the imaginary line of the border… But then, it actually did!  It was instantly greener and more lush! 🤯 Plus, the roads were nicer – perfect tarmac, the buses were bigger and more comfortable (like UK coaches), it was clean and there was no rubbish along the grass verges. You could see the wealth difference straight away really.

We arrived in Liberia and checked in to our apartment, it was really cute with a private kitchen, bathroom and A/C for so cheap. We walked to the supermarket straight away to get some groceries for the next few days, 3 days worth of food, like pasta, sauces, cereal, rice, some soya mince, almond milk etc cost us £20, not too bad. Where was this “super expensive” Costa Rica everyone was talking about?!

We got back to the apartment full with food…. Then ordered a burger king plant based whopper off Uber eats 🤣🤣🤣 what?! It had been a long day!!

The next morning we planned to start super early, but the national park only actually opens at 8am, so we set off at 7:15am from the apartment. We were going to get an Uber, but the guy renting us the apartment (Chris) offered to take us for $20. We bought our ticket to the park online in advance, and started on our way.

It was about 45 min from the town to the entrance, and when we got there Chris gave us the number of his friend who has a taxi company, he said message him and he can collect us, or if not, he’ll find someone else. All seemed perfect!

We entered the park, which has purified tap water (yes, you can drink tap water in CR 😵), amazing clean toilets and great sign detailing the routes and POIs… So far everything in Costa Rica is amazing! We planned to walk Los Pilas trail, a circular route around the park.

5 minutes in we saw a troop of spider monkeys swinging gracefully through the trees overhead, good start!

This park is quite unique in that it’s on the slopes of a very active volcano and has lots of visible volcanic activity, like fumeroles, bubbling mud pools, sulphuric lakes. It was a bit like Mombacho really, but the infrastructure here was much better and the trails very easy and well maintained.

However, this made it much busier, and there were groups of loud American tourists everywhere around us, we couldn’t see to escape them!

We loved the volcanic activity, Dave was in his element, and there were many birds here too, so I was in mine. We saw a ground cuckoo near the fumeroles which was super cute, a turquoise-browed motmot too, and we heard SO MANY Long-Tailed manakins (the dancing birds we saw at lake Apoyo). I’m not kidding, we could hear a lek and their ethereal singing about every 50 metres, but the forest was so dense we didn’t see any ☹️

Then I heard a Motmot… I think, I got the merlin app out to check, it was a tody Motmot apparently, unaware at how rare and special this species is, I chased after the sound, and tried the call and response trick, singing myself and playing the sound from my app. I accidentally got a group of birders mega excited and they nearly ran into me haha, oops. I stood with the other birders a while as we all tried to catch a glimpse of this holy-grail bird. We could hear it on the mountain side… Then… A flash, I saw them, 3 actually, 2 parents and a very recently fledged chick too, it was still a bit fluffy and it’s colours were muted. I saw one of the parents far away through the binoculars, but the chick was the one who moved close enough to papp. So my picture makes it look a bit brown and dull, but this Motmot is usually very pretty.

And yes, afterwards when I looked it up, I read that the Tody Motmot is a particularly unusual species – it’s the only member of the genus Hylomanes, making it genetically distinct from the other Motmots. While it’s still in the same family (Momotidae), it diverged early on and has some pretty unique features, like its small size and lack of the typical racquet-tipped tail. So it’s a bit of a holy grail species for birders – no wonder there were so many people chasing it! I feel very lucky to have seen it. That’s now 5 out of the 14 known Motmot species ticked off!☺️

We also saw a lot of iguanas, some huge ones too, and we heard some Keel-billed toucans, with their unique croaking sound, but we didn’t see any ☹️

All in all it was a great day and we loved the park, albeit we regretted how much we had to share it with loud and ‘uncultured‘ tourists 😂 “oh my gawd, what is it, is it a lizard (it was an Iguana), oh my gawd it just moved”, and overhearing everyone either talking about how much money they earn/spent on ridiculous things or complaining how difficult the “hike” was when it was so so easy haha (and that’s me saying that!). We’re going to have to get used to this! Haha

We left the park happy, but a little anxious as I had messaged the guy Chris gave me, but he’d not replied yet… I messaged Chris and he said he didn’t know how we could get back, maybe we could try an Uber… Signal was intermittent at best (mostly none). We tried to hail an Uber but we were too far from town…

We thought, let’s walk down the road and keep trying, surely we will find an Uber eventually, and the walk was all downhill back into the town.

About 45 min into the walk, in the baking sun, we still hadn’t managed to find a cab. (Although we did see lots of Motmots, a deer and some cute lapwings). We looked at the maps, we were maybe another 45 min walk from the nearest village along the road. We thought, we’ll walk there and see.

But I had a better idea and instead tried to flag down a passing car. There was only one road, the one we were on from the national park, and it joined the main road at a T-junction 10 km away, so any car could drop us there, and we could get taxis or even a bus from there for certain. It was mostly tourists returning from the park in car hires too, so it felt very safe. One eventually stopped for us, a local Tico (Costa Rican) family in a pickup truck, so we jumped in the back. They were actually going all the way into Liberia, and didn’t mind taking us all the way. We spent the journey making faces at the small child sat in the back seat haha! But we made it, back to Liberia safe and sound! Phew!

I made a tasty chilli sin carne that night for tea and we relaxed in the AC of our apartment.

The next day we decided to do a more adventurous trip, as I’d read about a waterfall walk to La Leona waterfall, where you walk through the forest and the river, swimming and wading to reach it. It sounded really good and was only $30 for a guided trip. We booked it for 9am first time, and got a Uber which got us there about 8:30am. They didn’t wait and said, let’s go straight out, but we were the only ones there, so we ended up on a private tour. Our guide, Ian was very good and low key a wildlife nerd, but cool at the same time (this seems to be a Tico thing!)

It was such a great day, walking through the forest, first seeing an owl roosting and bats, then wading through the water, climbing up ladders and rappelling down rocks, swimming, and eventually pulling ourselves up the river towards the waterfall. Since we got here early, we were the first (and only) ones there for a while, so it was finally peaceful and quiet. But as we left the waterfall, there was a huge queue forming to enter! We timed it just right!

We walked back along the river, crossing it several times with the help of ropes. We saw more Motmots and a pair of sunbitterns, which I saw and casually just said, oh wow, look at that bird, it’s wings are amazing. And Ian got so excited, and chased after them! Apparently they are ANOTHER holy-grail bird species which people go wild for, again because they are the only species in their family and have an ancient genetic lineage! I was getting so lucky with these accident sightings as a new birder!

We had a fantastic day, and after, Ian gave us some contacts for the rest of our trip which I hope we can use ☺️

We returned to the start and got changed in time to get the public bus back down to Liberia (no hitch hiking this time!!), but it was as much of an adventure, as we basically free-wheeled the whole way back as the engine kept cutting out!! Haha, the driver eventually got it started just in time for the flat terrain of the town (thankfully!).

Liberia was a great introduction to Costa Rica, and Rincon de la Vieja was such a cool national park with volcanic activity and amazing animals. We already saw 2 holy-grail bird species (by accident!) which is hopefully a fantastic indication of what is to come with the rest of our time here 😉 The waterfall hike was also a highlight, and it was even more special being the only ones there and having a private tour!