You have just arrived in Costa Rica and leave the plane totally jetlagged - all you want to do is get a good night’s sleep before travelling on to your holiday destination. Whereabouts are you going to stay? There are plenty of Costa Rica Airport Hotels within easy reach of the highway and not too far from the airport so, how do you choose?

Do you feel up to driving 7 km from the airport before you can get your head down? If you do feel okay to drive then you’re in for a treat. However, rather than lose your custom, the Hampton Inn Hotel will come to the airport and to pick you. Now that’s what I call service!

Nestled amongst the mountains at a calming height of 4,200 feet above sea level - and above any city commotions or intrusions, you get a breathtaking view of the coastline below you and a panoramic view of the countryside around you. Just enough to feel your jetlag melting away!

Other Costa Rica Airport Hotel is the Holiday Inn Express. I think this Hotel and the Hampton Inn … Suites are probably the closest at just 200 meters from the airport - yet, inside the premises you could never guess you were so close to Juan Santamaria International Airport.

The Hampton Inn … Suites is geared up to odd arrival and departure times and it provides a range of services that are specifically aimed at the international traveler. This Costa Rica Airport Hotel even has a reasonably-sized swimming pool for you to cool off in before you get your head down!

Of all the Costa Rica Airport Hotels, the Hampton Inn … Suites offers the best services: it is the closest to the airport, the hotel is near to the drop-off and pick-up zones of most of the car rental agencies, the hotel is not too far from San Jose City.

The Hampton Inn … Suites offers good quality accommodation. They offer great services and amenities, if you want to surf the web on your laptop, you can do it do for free with their complimentary high-speed internet access. Run a few miles in their fitness room, or take in some sun by the pool.

If that’s what you want you would be better off going somewhere else. For me, though, this is my kind of hotel and, if I need to travel to Costa Rica any time in the future, the Hampton Inn … Suites is where I would choose to stay.

if you want more information about Costa Rica Airport Hotels, feel free to visit their website by clicking on the following link: Costa Rica Airport Hotels

Are you planning your wedding? Where would you most likely want to go for your honeymoon? Are you dreaming of some exotic, secret hideaway perhaps - pure luxury; somewhere to be pampered?

Modern Bride Magazine has now placed Costa Rica in 6th place for dream honeymoon destinations while the Ask Men website considers a Costa Rica Honeymoon should rank in 2nd place for the honeymoon-most-wanted destination.

If you are considering a Costa Rica Honeymoon, where better to go to get it all organized than by the company known as Travelers Haven? This company customizes trips to Costa Rica - not just for those seeking a honeymoon destination but those looking for an adventure trip of a lifetime.

Travelers Haven can arrange a specialized spot for the naturist to hide away from it all; families wanting a sun-drenched beach holiday where the see is safe and the sand slopes gently into calm shallow waters - Travelers Haven is there to make all your dreams materialize.

Fulfill your Costa Rica Honeymoon dream with the expertise of Travelers Haven. In order to fit in with our customers’ schedule we fit the time-table around them - so, no set departure dates. Whether it is beaches with sugar-white sand that trickles through your toes, or fiery volcanoes, fishing or mountain biking - at Travelers Haven we have the package to suit you and, if our packages don’t quite suit - well, we will custom-make one just to fulfill your dream Costa Rica Honeymoon.

Travelers Haven is owned by Costa Ricans and we have the knowledge and expertise about our own country that we can apply to your dream Costa Rica Honeymoon. So, if there are any problems [and we make sure there won't be], we are here at hand, in Costa Rica to sort everything out for you. All you need to do is come along and enjoy yourselves.

If your idea of a Costa Rica Honeymoon is thrills and spills and plenty of white-knuckle squeals, then we have just the thing for you: horseback riding, white-water rafting and kayaking on the sea, a tree-top canopy walk and zip wire adventure should give you enough thrills to last you through until your next holiday.

The romance of a candle-lit dinner for two in the luxurious setting of one of Costa Rica’s many chic restaurants, watching the tropical sun descend below the horizon: is this not an exquisite ending to a perfect day while you are enjoying your Costa Rica Honeymoon?

if you want more information about Costa Rica Honeymoon, feel free to visit their website by clicking on the following link: Honeymoon in Costa Rica

Monteverde, Costa Rica has become a hot spot for tourists for obvious reasons. The small village is located in the mountains and every direction offers incredible views. You will find there are many tour possibilities in Monteverde.

A tour that offers many thrills and chills is zip lining over the canopy. The staff will clip you onto the cable and send you flying across 600 meters of open space, you’ll be extremely high and will be able to see the canopy from above. Now, that is a great combination.

If you are avoiding adrenaline, try the suspended bridges. You can go to Selvatura and see the canopy in another very personal way. Up at Selvatura you can also experience the hummingbird garden. It is truly incredible something to be that close.

Costa Rica is known for having a lot of bio-diversity and every area of the country is different. Be sure to hike one of the two reserves in Monteverde. If you’ve got a good eye or ear you might see and hear toucans or monkeys.

If you want to learn about the forest while hiking, you can hire a guide for a private tour. With this option you will have a better chance at seeing animals. The guides are trained to know all about the cloud forest life.

Another great thing to do in Monteverde is visiting the frog pond. You can see the Poison Dart Frog and the Red Eyed Tree Frog. Overall there are 28 species represented inside.

For those who enjoy everything outdoors, try horseback riding with the company La Estrella. You can spend an hour, an afternoon or the day riding through the forest. The trails wind along the tops of the mountains. Be sure to watch the sunset over the Gulf of Nicoya.

After you have spent the day enjoying the tours, be sure to spoil yourself at one of the fine restaurants. Don Juan and Morphos are great choices and if you are looking for the local place, go to Donde Henry. As for desert, Stellas Bakery is where its at.

And the place to lay your head is a place literally in the trees. Hidden Canopy Tree House Hotel has four tree houses available. Treat yourself to their waterfall showers and be sure to catch the sunset on the patio.

On the North West side of La Fortuna nicely situated close to the Arenal Volcano and in 191 kilometers from San Jos , the Arenal Costa Rica Hotel Kioro is surrounded by the always scenic Costa Rican land and volcanic region, and the relaxing quietness and calmness of nature, offering an exceptional experience.

With an outside appearance of a typical hotel in Arenal, this simple yet luxurious hotel is a mixture traditional and modern life. While indulging in relaxing spirit and call of nature, in one of the 42 suites, offering best panoramic volcano and mountain view, everything is handy; the Arenal Costa Rica Hotel and its surroundings have to offer more than you can simply imagine.

The Arenal Costa Rica Hotel is something more than a luxury hotel; it is an Arenal resort and hotel, a settlement that boasts a great number of attractions and facilities, bringing to the Americas the luxury that is usually found in world famous resorts.

The Arenal Costa Rica Hotel promotes the conservation and preservation of the natural habitat, without any compromise in quality. Every room boasts local artefacts and colourful elements that reflect the traditional culture of Costa Rica.The hotel features rich and generous comfort, modern Costa Rican design and architecture, authentic flavours and style of this unique country and volcanic region.

The luxury hotel in Arenal, the Arenal Hotel Kioro features eight different pools with hydromassage, benefiting from the thermal waters of the region; staying in the pool is a perfect way to annihilate stress and unwind, away from bustling cities and rhythms.

The Thermal Waters of Arenal Kioro, mineral waters for the skin, we have 8 different pools all with excellent hydro-massages to annihilate the stress and to rest to the maximum opportunity.The Arenal Hotel Kioro allows the guests to enjoy the famous Costa Rican hospitality and accommodation, while feeling pampered and much cared of at this Arenal volcano hotel.

The hotel gives the guests the chance to experience in person the wildlife of the Arenal Volcano and the indigenous cultures that lay on the region, organizing small excursions in nearby areas, and all over Costa Rica. Whether you are going on a full day excursion to Venado CAves, or you want to go on a hike tour to the volcano, or just relax by the springs and pools, your stay at the Arenal Hotel Kioro is going to be a truly memorable experience.

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The teenage olive ridley sea turtle was just 15 years old as she waited 500 yards offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific ocean off Ostional Beach in a small land that, more than 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast.”

The nearly daily afternoon tropical rains of November had slipped away as the marine turtle waited in anticipation. The moon was in its final quarter and, though she did not know why, it was having an effect on her.

As it has done for uncountable eons, the moon was gracing the earth with its timeless phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing this olive ridley turtle ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away, another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles. For more than 100,000,000 years it had been thus: vast migrations of ancient creatures, culminating when the moon was in this phase.

Life is always magical. Just a few months earlier, this turtle was foraging in the middle of the Pacific Ocean more than 2,500 miles away. And the tens of thousands now alongside her were scattered across several million square miles of ocean.

Although there was plenty of food far out in the Pacific, something had begun to stir within her. Hundreds of thousands of marine turtles felt the same timeless need to return to Costa Rica. They, and she, were all going back to where they had hatched.

Now, months later, she waited in the soft moonlight just a few hundred meters from her destination. She was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had traversed, she had encountered several different male olive ridley sea turtles in the clear tropical waters and bred with them in the deep ocean. Like her, they too were being affected by something unseen, a force nearly as old as life itself. It was something so compelling that her species had been going back to the same Costa Rica beach since the days of dinosaurs.

In the tropical night this olive ridley sea turtle was waiting. She had somehow returned to the very beach where she had hatched in 1995. We do not know how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where she started life. There are only a handful of nesting beaches on earth and they are not very big. In fact Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters long. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on earth. Incredibly, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some half a million female olive pacific sea turtles had come ashore to nest here in huge waves. These massive invasions are called “arribadas.”

For fifteen years, the mother of this hundred pound marine turtle joined massive Costa Rica arribadas annually and she would have done so again except that she drowned in an illegal shrimping net just a few weeks before. Thousands more were killed by long line commercial fishermen. Even more died needlessly by swallowing plastic bags carelessly discarded. So many have been killed, the race is endangered.

Of course, the hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore know none of this. In the tropical pale moonlight, we can see them even though they are still half a mile away. There are now so many gathered that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for at least a mile and never get a wet foot. We can only gaze in wonder and awe as they gather silently. These ancient beings will never know that they were here long before there was a dinosaur walking the earth. They cannot appreciate our capacity for destruction or efforts at preservation. They only know that this little stretch of beach is where they’ve always come.

Then, though no one knows why, it happens. As quietly as they first appeared, as silently as they gathered, their patience has been rewarded and they begin to come ashore. A single olive ridley turtle followed by a second. Then there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that—each intent on one task: bringing new life. All night they come. And all day, day after day. It is a wonder of magnificent Costa Rica and as timeless as the phases of the moon. It is the spectacular display of life called Arribada.

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I am a professional photographer in Costa Rica. The experiences on my tours are many since I never know what my group and I will happen upon. Let me tell you about one of these surprising events.

One of the destinations for my group in Costa Rica Photo Tours is the beautiful, pristine Osa Peninsula along the southern Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, a place that National Geographic says is “the most biologically diverse place” on the planet. In order to reach this location by vehicle we drive through the tiny village of Ojochal, which is very near my home.

Let me tell you about a unique way to move that some rural Costa Ricans still use. One day, when my photography group was passing through the village, we noticed a most unusual way of moving. But, to help you better appreciate what we saw, let me provide you with some background on the man who was moving.

The fellow who was moving was one of my neighbours, Senor Wilson (real Spanish name, don’t you think?), who has brought my wife and me flowering plants since we moved in. It was really funny the first day that he stood at the top of the driveway with plants in hand. He was so polite that he would not come down to the house without our invitation even though he was there to give us a present.

After a sort of “conversation”, he in Spanish and my wife and I mostly in English, I realized that he wanted to give us the plants. We were new in the community and this was a welcoming from the neighbours who live at least a hour walk up the mountain. Yep, walk. No car. Senor Wilson walked an hour just to deliver a gift. Now, that is neighborly!

With the passage of time, Senor Wilson has given me flowering plants many times. Often he stands there waiting to see where I will plant it. I would probably do the same thing if I lugged it down a mountain for an hour. However, there are so many things to do that planting this gift is never one of my priorities. Certainly, I never thought that I would be tested on my ability to choose a location and plant something when I moved to Costa Rica from Canada.

A couple of days after Senor Wilson gave me plants one time, he came to the house with still another plant and visited while his two boys swam in the river by the house. Of course, he asked me where I planted the others that he had brought the last time he came.

Unfortunately, the flowering plants were still on my terrace in aluminium kettles with drainage holes stabbed in the bottom of the pot with a machete. When good neighbor Wilson saw that his previous gift had not been planted, he politely asked in his quiet way if I would mind if he planted all of them for me. Quite a fellow, my neighbor and friend, Wilson.

Now that you have some idea about the kind of fellow my friend and neighbor Wilson is like, I want to return to my photography tour group driving along the dusty road near my house. Suddenly, we came upon a man walking alongside his horse. The animal was carrying two white bags, two huge white bags, filled with clothes and household items. Between the bags, Wilson or his wife had wedged a blue broom that extended over the animal’s head, giving us the impression that the horse was wearing a bristle blue tiara. I wonder if the horse was enjoying his royal status or quietly suffering the indignity of wearing a broom crown.

Wilson, standing by the horse, was holding a bridle in one hand and a birdcage in the other. A man, his birdcage, a horse, his crown. Quite a sight! It was moving day in Costa Rica.

I started the conversation as usual with “Hola, que tal?” “How are you?” And then I asked if he was moving (only kidding). But, sure enough, the horse was neighbor Wilson’s version of a moving van. I believe it is called a grass-eating 4 X 4.

Wilson explained that his family would be babysitting one of the Bed and Breakfasts while the owner was going back to Germany during the rainy season. This was ideal for him because it was much easier for his wife and 3 children to live in the pueblo close to the school rather than walk down about 2 miles from their mountain home every day.

I thought that it was rather interesting that he was carrying the birdcage. I would have thought that on one of the previous trips down to their new digs one of the children would have wanted to carry the cage.

Carting flowering plants and birdcages is all in Wilson’s job description. He told me and the group that the little bird was very young (parrot or parakeet, I don’t know), that it just loved to talk and knew many words. As though he understood, the bird started showing off, chattering away while we are talking about it. I would tell you what it said but my command of bird Spanish remains very poor to this day. Sorry.

You can imagine that my group was very excited about taking pictures of a crowned horse, chattering bird, and Costa Rica family walking down a mountain, worldly possessions carried by their trusty steed. Moving day in Costa Rica. One never knows what one will see or experience on my photo tour of Costa Rica.

Frank Scott lives in tropical Costa Rica where he is a professional Costa Rica Photographer offering unique photography tours. Some of his work can be seen in Costa Rica Vacations, a very popular travel guide to this unique country.

A Costa Rica scientific fin and satellite tagging project recently got underway at Cocos Island studying its green sea turtle and hawksbill visitors.

Conservation organizations and marine researchers spent about 30 hours going to the island in their pursuit for more knowledge about these ancient marine animals.

They are engaged in a kind of scientific working Costa Rica vacation that they anticipate will contribute to preserving these marvelous reptilian mariners now endangered in much of their range.

Cocos Island was described by the famous seaman, Jacque Cousteau, as the most beautiful island he had ever encountered. The small island, just nine square miles in area, lies some 340 miles off the Pacific shoreline of Costa Rica, almost halfway to the Galapagos Islands.

It was not the tropical sunsets and beaches that captured the imagination of Captain Cousteau. Its beauty is just off its shores, under water, in a place that Costa Ricans have voted as one of the Seven Wonders of Costa Rica. It is there that one finds priceless treasure: vast schools of fish, porpoises, whales and turtles.

Since the days of dinosaurs sea turtles have swum the Seven Seas of the world.

The mighty Tyrannosaurus fed on them more than 200 million years ago as they paddled ashore to lay their eggs on ancient beaches.

These ancient beings roam all the planet’s seas except the frozen Antarctic and Arctic.

Sadly , no more. Today, our indiscriminate development of beaches and plundering of their nests have put them at risk. Millions have been in South America to make expensive shoes for Europeans.

Jacque Yves Cousteau presciently remarked that: “If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.” A being visiting from another galaxy might conclude that such a result would be just.

But, conservation organizations have not given up and are working to restore at least some turtle populations. Scientists are now tagging pelagic turtles like the green sea turtle in far-away places like Cocos Island. Some turtles are fitted with flipper tags while others bear satellite transmitters to help track their movements and it has been discovered that some species roam across thousands and thousands of miles of oceans, from tropical waters to the deep waters off Canada.

We cannot undo the past but the men and women who tag sea turtles know that we do not have to be doomed to repeat it.

The writer, Victor Krumm, lives in tropical Costa Rica. Follow his fun site Costa Rica Vacations and for info about great beaches check out Costa Rica Beaches

The Alta Hotel is a small and comfortable place to stay. It is away from the hustle and bustle and yet only about 20 minutes from the airport. It is small, special, intimate, elite and fashionable Costa Rica luxury hotel. It is strategically placed on the mountainside above San Jose. Below is a brief overview of the hotel:

This location is the real reason to stay here. This Costa Rica luxury hotel provides one of the most spectacular views of the Central Valley and San Jose. From the first floor up the units have private balconies that give an amazing view. The covered terraces are a perfect place to watch the sunset. The main floor has garden patios to enjoy.

The architecture of this luxury hotel in Costa Rica also makes it stand out. The high ceilings and winding staircases provide excellent ambience. There are curves and high arches everywhere. The interior hallway winds down from the reception through the hotel. This Costa Rica Boutique Hotel has a relaxed old world but elegant atmosphere.

The rooms are well priced and comfortable to stay in. It is a fashionable but exclusive Costa Rica luxury hotel with only 23 units available. The limited number of units results in personalized quality service. The Alta hotels employees take the time to make guests feel relaxed and well cared for. The service is friendly and personal.

Sixteen of the units are deluxe rooms. They are double rooms with a queen sized bed or twin beds. They each have a luxurious bathroom. There are 6 junior suits. There is a king or queens sized bed in each one. The attached living room also has a sofa bed. There is one master suite. It has a king size bed and an additional sofa bed. The bathroom has a Jacuzzi and steam bath. The master suite is part of the penthouse. The penthouse covers the entire upper floor. It has three bedrooms. The master one with the king size bed and two with queen sized beds. There is a living area and a dinning and reception room.

There are other attractions to this five story luxury hotel in Costa Rica. There is an elliptical swimming pool, Jacuzzi, sauna and exercise room to enjoy. There is room service from 7 am until 10 pm. The hotel restaurant provides in-room or balcony dining service.

The restaurant, La Luz, is an elegant place to dine. There are hand-forged lamps and fresh followers. The floor is made of tropical hardwoods and the ceiling is hand-painted. Dinners can enjoy a breathtaking view of the valley through large glass windows. It is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Local residence will often come in to enjoy the fantastic food. A fusion of Costa Rica, continental and California cooking styles.

The Alta Hotel is a small but high end luxury hotel in Costa Rica. It is a top of the line Costa Rica boutique hotel. It is endowed with old-world luxury. It is situated to provide an unbelievable view. It is a great place to have a short stay for business or pleasure.