This might very well be our very last post in Central America :( We are back in Costa Rica, on a very mellow and beautiful beach town called Nosara. We had heard that it?s the perfect place to learn to surf and it?s going well so far!
We made an unprecedented one-day, 14 hour trip from Ometepe Island on Lake Nicaragua. It started with a 2 hour bus ride at 3:45am, an hour boat ride, a 45 minute ride to the border, a 1.5 hour wait through the most inefficient immigration line to enter Costa Rica, an hour bus ride to Liberia, another 2 hour bus ride to Nicoya and finally a 1.5 hour bumpy ride to Nosara!! whew, what a day!
Ometepe Island was beautiful! It consists of two volcanos on a sort of hour glass shape island. Looks like a pair of boobs, except the volcanos arent the same height, hee hee. We stayed at a hostel on the water. Did a muddy hike up on of the volcanos with a cloudforest type vegetation on the top (it?s almost always covered on clouds). Another day we hiked to a 50m waterfall. We would have stayed longer to do some kayaking but the waves were calling...
Won?t be in much contact probably till next weekend when we are back in San Francisco since, unfortunately, internet and other things are quite expensive out here, especially since we just came back from Nicaragua where it cost us about $25 a day!
So that?s about it, we will be spending the next 4 or 5 days surfing and hopefully the last few days building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Will see some of you soon in San Francisco and Vancouver!
We had a really fun time with Jessica and Evan in the Monteverde Cloudforest Reserve. We enjoyed a view of Lake and Volcan Arenal from our mountain bungalow, hikes to waterfalls, and catching glimpses of Howler Monkies, rarely seen colorful birds such as the Trogon and the Quetzal, amongst other animals and critters. One of the coolest and most fascinating places we went was the Frog Pond where we saw and learned about a number of different species of frogs, some as small as my thumb, others were translucent. I now have a new found interest in frogs!
The next stop was of course, a beach. We headed out to the Nicoya Pennisula and parked ourselves on Playa Sୡra on the pacific coast for a couple days to soak up some sun. It was a really nice swimming beach but no surfing.
Since we are so hooked on traveling in real third world countries, we decided to head north to Nicaragua, stopping by a couple more dry forest parks along the way. Should be interesting. We don`t really have a plan but we do have 4 more weeks here in Central America.
oh, and a belated Feliz Auevo!