Due Diligence: Where to Go, Where to Stay?

Planning this trip started way back in November.  The idea of visiting Costa Rica, where I've never been, appealed to me for a number of reasons:


1) Everyone I've talked with who's visited has raved about the country.
2) It's a Spanish-speaking country--gives me the chance to dust off my Peace Corps Colombia Spanish from 1974..
3) It leads the world in eco-tourism.
4) CR turned out to be on my daughter's list of places she most wanted to visit.
5) It's not that far away; less flying time than going to Los Angeles.


The first part of the trip was planning how to get there and where (specifically) I wanted to stay. I'd had good luck renting a flat in London using vrbo.com--Vacation Rental By Owner.  I was pretty sure I didn't want to stay on either coast--even though CR has beautiful beaches.  I had heard good things about the Arenal Observatory Lodge near one of the country's largest volcanoes.  I knew from research that the jumping-off point for Arenal is a town called La Fortuna.  So I searched VRBO and found a listing for a villa on a horse ranch.


Here's one of the pictures from the listing:

Hope there's another hammock on the porch to avoid a discussion about who's going to use it!

I contacted the owner through vrbo.  He screens those who want to rent the villa by talking on the phone.  We had a couple of conversations and I decided to book the villa for 2 weeks and use it as a home base to visit places of interest nearby.  It turned out that Esteban, the owner, has his own tourism company.  So it became a value-added situation because he was more than willing to share advice about where to go and what to do.  He also booked a Toyota Rav4 4-wheel drive rental vehicle for me to pick up at the San Jose airport.  He has a toll-free phone number from the US that rings his cell phone so it's been easy to call and ask questions in addition to emailing back and forth.


The biggest piece of advice he has given us is to wait until we get to the ranch before deciding exactly what we want to do.  He's got a list of general things we're interested in doing.  He'll get to know us a little then make suggestions for places to go and things to do.  No additional charge for the concierge service!  That's good enough for me.  Esteban is a native "Tico" but went to university a bit in the U.S. He speaks excellent English, too.