Yesterday Julie and Sharon left comments about the many activities that they did on their day in Rincon de la Vieja National Park, including the hike through the forest in yesterday's photo, plus a horseback ride, a hike past waterfalls, hiking past fumaroles, seeing wildlife, and more. They left out any mention of their lunch and the opportunity for mud baths.They skipped the mud baths, but they did not skip lunch. This is a photo of the restaurant where they ate at the Hacienda Guachipelin, which is a working cattle ranch that has rooms for guests to stay, as well as a restaurant and tourist activities. Its website is www.guachipelin.com. It is an ideal place for exploring Rincon de la Vieja, which is located very close to Guachipelin.
This photo reflects the excellent tourist infrastructure in Costa Rica. It makes it a much more pleasant day when tourists can hike, horseback ride, see volcanic activity and wildlife, and do all of the other activities in a spectacular ecosystem such as Rincon de la Vieja, yet tourists can still have lunch in a quality restaurant and pleasant surroundings.
In many developing countries, there would not be the hotels and restaurants to support tourists (except backpackers). In Costa Rica, eco-tourism is the country's number one industry, and there is a national priority on developing and improving the facilities for tourism. In fact, Costa Rica is about to build an entirely new airport terminal at Liberia, the international airport that brings foreign tourists directly to the northwest Pacific province of Guanacaste.
One thing stikes me as curious about today's photo of Hacienda Guachipelin restaurant, however. As you can see from the photo, it is open air, as are most of the restaurants in Costa Rica. It has large windows to look out at the jungle. It also has a stained glass window hanging in one of the window spaces, with a tropical scene displayed in stained glass. I like stained glass, but it seems funny to to me to have a stained glass jungle scene hanging in a window when you could see a real jungle scene out the same window. That is just my opinion, which of course you may not share.
Nice post. I bet the food was great there. I really enjoyed your post yesterday. That tree is something else.
ReplyDeleteI like the stained glass for it's added effect. Maybe your readers will notice how empty the restaurant is. When we returned from that very long hike, we had missed the lunch service. They were kind enough to whip up something special just for us and it's a good thing they did. We were starving.
ReplyDeleteWhat a nice place to sit and have a relaxing meal. I love the stained glass, just beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting. I had a friend here yesterday whose lady friend lives in Costa Rica and he intended retiring there and living with her. He said that Costa Rica has now got too expensive for him - mentioning some of this marvellous infrastructure you talk about, which of course has presumably increased tourism (I think he said particularly from America) - so instead they are going to live in either Panama or maybe Columbia, which is where the girlfriend comes from originally.
ReplyDeleteLeft a response for you on Monte Carlo DP.