Studying Up on Costa Rica

For months, we have been surfing the Internet, reading guidebooks, and talking to friends and family who have traveled to Costa Rica. I have never been there. Bob did visit the country several years ago at the end of a cruise through the Panama Canal. He spent a day in Puntarenas and a day in San Jose before flying home.

We purchased a number of guidebooks, some in print form and some as eBooks.  These are listed at the end of this Blog entry. But what we hungered for was personal accounts of experiences off the beaten trail. And we found two eBooks that provided the kind of information we were craving:

Two Weeks in Costa Rica by Matthew Houde and Jennifer Turnbull.  This is a story of a young couple from Boston who went backpacking along the southern Pacific coast for two weeks.  Though we are not young, and we don't intend to backpack through Costa Rica, we are finding their story to be enlightening, informative, and entertaining.  We have been reading this book aloud to each other and extracting from it what we need to know.

Costa Rica: Beyond the Resort by Jennifer Shipp.  This is the story of a family - mother, father, and teenage daughter - who went to Costa Rica for two months with the intention of living within the culture and improving their Spanish.  One of their two months was spent in Atenas, the same small town that we had chosen for our second month. This account is full of the nitty gritty information we needed in order to develop realistic expectations of our time there.  This book was also a "read-aloud" - great entertainment for a cold winter's evening around our warming stove.

Our other resources include:

Costa Rica for Dummies by Eliot Greenspan. 4th Edition, 2012. [Print] I wish this book had been available as an eBook.  It is our most thumbed-through book. Not as fancy graphically as the others, but chock full of need-to-know information and beautifully organized.

Costa Rica by Eyewitness Travel. 2012.  A graphically gorgeous  travel guide with emphasis on wildlife. [Print]

Fodor's Costa Rica 2012 and Frommer's Costa Rica 2012.  [Both are print versions.] Two thorough and up-to-date travel guides, both containing detachable maps.  Don't know them well enough yet to express a preference for one over the other.

Costa Rica.  An eBook from Lonely Planet, one of two eBooks we have downloaded on our iPads. Navigation was designed for a Kindle, which neither of us has. Despite the challenge of getting around in this eBook, it still has a lot to offer.

Manuel Antonio Costa Rica Travel Guide: The Best of Manuel Antonio & Quepos, 2012 by Evelyn Gallardo.  A new eBook. Not yet explored. We do expect to go to Manuel Antonio at some point, and this should be a good resource.