Costa Rica Travel Posters - Palm Trees on Playa Guiones Beach

Playa Guiones Beach, Nosara, Nicoya Peninsula, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica
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Bananas, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and honey all come out of Costa Rica, a country with no army and compulsory education. Here orchids bloom all year round and there are forests of rosewood, cedar and mahogany. Visitors can climb volcanoes and view two oceans, hunt jaguar, tapirs, ocelot and deer, go mining for gold, or fish for black marlin, tarpan, sawfish and lobster.

Country Briefing

Size: 19,883 square miles
Capital: San Jose
Population: 4,301,712
Climate: The dry season, December - May, is the best time to visit, but the climate is agreeable all year round.
Government; A republic.
Language: Spanish. English, German, French, Dutch and Italian frequently heard.
Religion: Roman Catholic, but other denominations represented.
Public Holidays: New Year's Day, 1 Jan; Feast of St Joseph, 19 Mar; Anniversary of the Battle of Rivas, 11 Apr; Easter, Labor Day, 1 May; Corpus Christi, June; St Peter and St Paul, 29 Jun; Anniversary of the Annexation of Guanacaste Province, 5 Jul; Our Lady of Angels, 2 Aug; Assumption and Mother's Day, 15 Aug; Independence Day, 15 Sep; Columbus Day, 12 Oct; Immaculate Conception, 8 Dec; Christmas Day, 25 Dec

Santa Maria International Airport is 11 miles from San Jose. Buses are frequent. Taxis plentiful. Airport departure tax, Duty free shop and hotel reservation counter.

For help in finding accommodations there is the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo, Calle Alfredo Volio, Avenidas 4 / 6, Apartado 777, San Jose. Inexpensive pensiones available.

Hotels in San Jose

Balmoral Avenida Central, Calles 7/9
Europa Calle Central, 5a Avenida
Irazu PO Box 962
President Avenida Central, Calles 7/9
Royal Dutch PO Box 4258
Crystal PO Box 5570, Autopista Wilson
Amstel Calle, 7, Avenidas 10/12
Gran Costa Rica 3a Calle, Avenidas Central / 2
Diplomat Calle 6, Avenidas Oriente / 2
Pension Canada Calle 9, Avenida 9, Casa No 779
Plaza Avenida Central, Calles 2/4

When giving directions the Costa Rican will give distances not in blocks, or yards, but in varas - a vara is some 33 inches.

Passport or Tourisst Visa Card (valid for 30 days) available from Costa Rican Consulates, plus means of identification and tickets for onward travel and a smallpox vaccination certificate. The visa is free for US and UK citizens. No currency restrictions and no customs declaration necessary for passengers carrying only personal effects. Duty free allowance; up to three liters of wine or spirits: half kilogram tobacoo in any form, and other items not exceeding USD 500 as a taxable amount.

Tahitian islands-on Bora Bora, Moorea, Raiatea, and Huahine

Palm Trees Posters - Exotic Palms Artworks by made_in_atlantis
More Tropical palm trees Posters

The ingenuity of island architecture isn't confined to the Bourbons and the Romans. In the South Pacific I have been intrigued to observe how what at first sight seemed to be a simple, almost silly architectural idea has come entirely to dominate the large and glitzy hotel industry of the islands of Tahiti.

The overwater bungalow was invented just thirty years ago by Hugh Kelley, a dropout -California -lawyer - turned - hotel-builder. His problem was that the Tahitian islands, counter to their image, have an embarrassing shortage of good natural white sand beaches (Tahiti itself has hardly any), so where could he buy land to develop into beach resorts?

Kelley's leap of imagination was to realize that if he planted his hotel accommodations on stilts out in the shallow lagoon, the shortcomings of the beach would perhaps not even be noticed. By day, each overwater bungalow would act as a swimming platform, more convenient and luxurious than any stretch of sand, and there would be other benefits too: Lagoon breezes would keep overwater bungalows ventilated and cool, and as an extra refinement, Kelley had the idea of giving each a glass floor and downwardpointing spotlights so that fish-watching could continue through the night-a popular soporific for jet-lagged clients unable to sleep. Island landowners also found the concept appealing. Overwater bungalows had the effect of greatly increasing their usable building space.

Kelley used the overwater idea to expand his own (Bali Hai) group of hotels, and soan the bigger hotel operators, realizing that they could charge anything from $100 to $150 a night more for overwater bungalows than for identical amenities on land, hastily climbed on the bandwagon.

During the 1980s dozens of overwater bungalows were built throughout the Tahitian islands-on Bora Bora, Moorea, Raiatea, and Huahine.

Bora Bora is the island with the most spectacular lagoon and, therefore, the one that has taken to overwater bungalows in the biggest way. The fashionable Moana Beach Parkroyal recently added anather ten to its collection, bringing its total to forty. The big new Bora Bora Lagoon Resart has pushed the idea even further -fifty of its eighty bungalows are overwater. And construction has now started on the biggest of them all, the Meridien-Bora Bora, with eighty-two out of a hundred units being above water.

Overwater bungalows aren't my main reason for liking Bora Bora. An excess of overwater installation scan, to be honest, make a lagoon look more like an offshore oil field than a place of recreation. But what Bora Bora has more of than anywhere I can think of is, for want of a better word, glamour. This is partly because of its physical beauty-no sea anywhere is quite so luminous, quite so intense, or quite so inviting as Bora Bora's lagoon-and partly because of the knowledge that if you stand still long enough, sooner or later every famous person in the world will walk by. A rall call is kept on painted boards outside Bloody Mary's restaurant, rather like a French war memorial. All the biggies are there: Nelson Rockefeller, Prince Rainier, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford, David Lean, Darothy Lamaur, Raquel Welch, and a hundred others. At the time of my visit, they were just getting ready to paint up the latest batch of names-Rowan Atkinson, George Michael, Dolph Lundgren, Denzel Washington, Pierce Brosnan, Stephane Grappelli, Pamela Anderson, Vanessa Williams. If these names are perhaps not quite so resonant as those that went before, that's no fault of Bloody Mary's; it's just that celebrities are no longer as celebrated as they used to be.