Relatively Colorful Costa Rica Adventure – Return to San Jose

This is the final part of the story of our visit to Costa Rica, courtesy of Premier World Discovery in early November 2025. The first article can be found here and a narration of this article is here:

I awoke early as the sun was rising and greeted with a real view of a blue sky over the hills in front of our hotel room. It did seem to be that the better days were spent in the coach on this trip!

Out itinerary for the day was to visit a family coffee farm, the Sarchi village where artists in their workshop create the famous oxcarts of Costa Rica and finally a metal church in Grecia Village that was imported from Belgium. For some reason the last one was not mentioned. Could I be cruel and say that it must have rusted away…

I went out into the grounds of the hotel to see if the birds were awake and did manage to see this Brown Jay calling as the sun rose.

We were in a coach for all these journeys that held maybe 40 people. Not as large as a typical USA coach, but still substantial. Heading towards the coffee farm, we went higher and higher up a narrow street out of a town until suddenly the road ended at some locked gates. Google Maps showed that the road continued, but clearly not. Christian, our driver, worked wonders turning the coach round in a 10-point turn and the owners of the coffee farm turned up in their car to guide us to the farm. The entrance to their road was a very tight turn and once again, our coach struggled to get round, then on this equally narrow road, there was a tight 90-degree turn onto a very narrow bridge over a river. How we managed that is beyond me, but we just about did. Finally, the entrance to the farm was through some very narrow stone gateposts and the coach managed to just fit with perhaps 3 inches to spare on my side of the vehicle. The owner did admit that they had never had anything larger than an extended van bring visitors before! And I doubt if that will change, to be honest!

This really was a family farm that had been in their family for perhaps 40 years. Even at the entrance, there was a very welcoming rocking chair in a beautiful position to watch the gorgeous garden and covered walkway.

We were invited into their home for lunch, sitting out on their covered patio. And a good job it was covered, because no sooner had we sat down for lunch when it started to rain. And hard! Plants grow abundantly in these areas (high on the hillside) and just below my seat were these very colorful ornamental Beehive Ginger Plants.

 The plan had been to go on a tour of the coffee farm itself, which specializes in high quality artisan coffee that is both grown, dried in the sun and then sold directly from the farm. A tasting was arranged where the coffee was drained through a cloth filter and it was much lighter with flavors more distinct than you get in typical over-roasted coffee. I’m not sure they sell it in Keurig pods though!

Coffee beans here are picked by hand, usually by immigrant workers from neighboring countries, and only the red beans must be picked with no leaves.

It must be back breaking work looking for the red beans on the trees planted on the steeply sloped fields of this high altitude farm!

By now, the rain was coming down very heavily.

The pathway back to the coach, which had managed to reverse out of the gateway and park much higher up the road, was now a torrent of water:

And even our pleasant rocking chair was looking onto a much different scene:

And so we said our goodbyes to the family and dashed through the downpour back to the coach to continue our trip to San Jose. The artisan studio was also a large souvenir shop, and the two artisan painters were demonstrating their skill at painting a Christmas ornament and the center of a cartwheel. As each one probably took many hours to complete, I cynically think that the hundreds of Christmas decorations in the store could have been mechanically painted in China, perhaps!

As I said above, the metal church was not mentioned that afternoon and we headed into an hour-long traffic jam in an absolute downpour near the center of San Jose and our final hotel. With a final dinner as a group, we headed the next morning to the airport and the start of our long journey back to Texas. We had certainly had an adventure. Perhaps we were just unlucky with the weather, or perhaps it was too early in the transition between the wet season and the dry season in Costa Rica. We did see some interesting things, but not what we were expecting to see, to be honest. But it is what it is!

Conclusions

If you are reading this to decide if you should visit Costa Rica, then please don’t take our experiences as typical. Would I ever take another vacation with Premier World Discovery – no chance. I can’t believe that anyone in that company had any experience of this tour at this time of year. Almost every planned tour was either not possible because of the weather or did not deliver on the experience we expected. If it hadn’t been for me spending 2 hours searching out the monkeys at the first lodge and then seeing some hummingbirds in what was really a “Zoo environment” where they were displayed for tourists, we would have seen nothing of the vibrant wildlife in Costa Rica. Butterflies – I see more in my garden here than I saw on this vacation. Check out my numerous reviews of excursions with Viking Cruises and you will never find that an excursion was cancelled because of the weather. So, I’m disappointed, but still excited to have at least seen a little of this fascinating country.