Saturday began with a 5am wake up to uber to the uber rental car office. We had planned to rent a car and make the 3 hour drive to La Fortuna, switching off between Leticia, Sarah and I. Selina employees and people we’d met in Costa Rica all had said how beautiful the drive up to La Fortuna was so we were very excited to take this new adventure. Unfortunately for us, the company tried to charge us almost triple the price for the car when we arrived, throwing in a load of hidden fees that they hadn’t told us about. We had double checked everything on the phone with an agent the night before so no idea what all the extra fees were but at that point it cost just as much as it would to uber there so we opted to do that as it would also allow us to return later as we hadn’t wanted to drive after sunset.
After this early mishap, the day went smoothly and was one of my favourite excursions on the trip. We went to La Fortuna Waterfall which was so impressive. Definitely equal amounts of water and fall. We could swim in the basin at the base of the waterfall but the closer you got to it, the more it pushed you back. It was like a treadmill for swimming but was fun to try and see how close we could get. We also swam in the river further downstream and scrambled over some rocks and through some rapids to get there. There were lots of fish that jumped about too.
After La Fortuna, we went to Arenal National Park. I don’t think paying $16 entry to this park was worth it as we got a very similar view as we could elsewhere in Arenal. We did get to see a coati however, hiked up some lava trails and I found a sweet message in a bottle from a couple in Germany who had just got married.
After the volcano and some hiking, we finished the day at Las Termalitas hot springs. I could have spent all day there and it was well worth the entry fee. If I go again, totally would bring some food to grill as they provided grills at each covered table area and there were plenty free.
The next day was another great day. We took the early morning bus back to Jaco and spent some time at Selina Jaco, in their pool, strolling down the beach and preparing some food. Then we headed to Playa Hermosa, a nearby beach which is very popular for surfing. Its a beautiful black sand beach with huge waves and so much wildlife. We surfed, did backflips into the waves as they crashed, threw a frisbee and made sand sculptures. We stayed in a hostel that night so we could stay longer at the beach and watch the locals surf at high tide – they are super skilful and it was so impressive to watch them surf. Sarah and I got food at a local beachfront restaurant looking out to the ocean and then hung out at the pool at our hostel. That evening, we played games in the pool, played cards and celebrated for Jake’s last night before heading back down for a beach party that happens each Sunday night.
Headed to bed at 2:30 am and got up less than 2 hours later to get the 5am bus back to San Jose in time for class. Turns out this wasn’t even necessary as class got cancelled that morning and instead we only had to leave at 11am to go to Heredia where we rendezvoused with the Rice language program in Costa Rica. It was nice to see some of my friends again as I knew multiple people on the program so caught up with them and practiced left hand throws with my friend ALo who was our captain this past year.
On Tuesday, it was back to ULACIT to begin our final few days prototyping. We spent most of the day finalising two additional socks so that we could begin testing the following day, and have multiple sizes to test a wider range of students. Shoutout to Walsh who learnt to sew over the past week to help our project along.
We spent many hours the following day testing our prototype with ULACIT students who were intrigued and amused by our design. Most saw the relevance and importance of the product and everyone was happy to test it to aid us in gathering feedback about the device. On Thursday we continued testing but also spent time on our presentation for the following day.
Friday. This is it. The final day at ULACIT. Just two tasks today. A technical design review of our prototypes from the past three weeks, and a presentation of the whole engineering design process. Three weeks worth of work was condensed into just 15 minutes.
Signing off for now
– Alice
PS. Pictures to come.