Costa Rica: Pura Vida

Hola todos! I have officially passed the halfway mark of my time here. One day last week while I was walking home from volunteering, we heard drums playing…at first I just thought it was street performers playing drums, but as we got closer and I saw all the people, it was actually a parade! It was the anniversary of a school and they had a band (hence the drums), people on stilts, banners, and on down the road they had set up tents with information inside. I don’t know what was in them because the other volunteers I work with are boring so we just kept walking instead of exploring. Oh well.

We decided to go to Montezuma this past weekend. There were only 3 of us, and we were kinda wingin it, cause we didn’t really plan anything except that we wanted to go and what time to meet up to leave. It was fun not knowing what I was doing, but it was a looong trip there. We left early Friday morning and took a taxi to the bus station, then started the trip on a good note when we found out we were at the wrong bus station. So then we took another taxi to the right bus station, waited an hour for it to leave, then rode it to Puntarenas on the coast. Then we had to take another taxi to get to where you buy tickets for the ferry. Then we waited 2 hours for the ferry to leave, then took the ferry for a little over an hour. Once we arrived in Paquera (that’s where the ferry landed) we took another 2 buses to finally arrive in Montezuma. So. It took us pretty much all day to get there. But the journey was an adventure! We had a basic outline of how we needed to get there, but we were pretty much just like asking people along the way where to go haha.

I made a friend on the ferry. There was this little girl (she was 2) from the family who was sitting next to us, and she eventually wandered over to where we were sitting and kinda leaned on my leg, then proceeded to stare at me for a good 10 minutes. Like never looking away, just staring. She was really cute and it was pretty funny watching her…so I felt pretty popular for about the last 15 minutes of the ride. When the ferry docked in Paquera I felt like we were being dropped off for an episode of Survivor…there was nothing there except a small port to dock the boat. It was all jungle, mountain, and nothingness.

Montezuma was definitely a different type of place than we’d been before. It was a really quiet small town, kinda quaint. It’s not tourist-y like some of the other places. We kept joking that we were roughing it cause it was all like dirt roads and stuff. We walked down the road till we found our hotel, Hotel Lucy…supposedly it was the first hotel that was in the town. It was cute, pretty similar to the hostels we’ve been staying in. Except it didn’t have hot water or mirrors…terrifying, I know! Nah really it was fine because it was SUPER hot the whole time so I would just keep jumping in the cold shower to cool off. Our hotel was right on the beach too so I liked that we could always hear the ocean and stuff.

The first night we ate at a restaurant that showed a free movie with dinner, so that was cool. It was on a projector screen and we watched “The King’s Speech.” Saturday we went to the beach for a few hours. The water was VERY strong though, probably the strongest I’ve experienced so far, but here there were huge waves and they didn’t break until right at the edge of the shore…so swimming wasn’t much of an option, unless you could make it past the waves…I passed. I was just walking along the shore and the water would wash up and almost knock me over! We’d only been laying out on the beach a short while when I suddenly heard water rushing closer and closer…I jumped up in time to grab my purse—the important things!—to save everything in it that couldn’t get wet, like my camera and money and stuff. But everything else got soaked. So I guess I kind of underestimated how far the water would come up! But the good news is, it was so hot that my towel dried really fast.

Later that afternoon Becca and I decided to take a walk down the street to see what we could find. We passed a small sign on the side of the road that said “Montezuma Waterfall Trail” and below it, a lovely warning that said many people had died there because it was dangerous and blah blah blah, so then we really wanted to check it out haha. So we follow the trail and it comes out on a river, with lots of rocks and kind of like mini waterfalls. So we followed it up for about 20 minutes, climbing over the rocks and trees and everything, kind of making our own path, until we found the big mama waterfall at the end! It was really pretty and I was happy we found it on our own, without having to pay to get in like the last waterfall we went to! So that was really fun and took up some time since we didn’t really have any activities planned.

Later that night after dinner we went back to the same restaurant we’d been at the night before to get milkshakes, and we had the same waiter that we’d had the night before, and when I ordered my shake he said, “ok, but only because you have pretty eyes!” haha he was really nice though. Oh and I forgot to say when we ate breakfast on Saturday there were these birds that would swoop down and steal the bread from the empty tables, and one of them landed right behind me so I was keepin an eye on it so he didn't try to attack my food! And there was a big iguana that climbed a tree right behind us...so we really felt like we were living in the jungle.

Sunday morning we got up early to head home…the trip home wasn’t as long or as haphazard as the trip there though. We had to wait about an hour for the ferry to leave, and the bus back to San Jose was perfect timing because it left as soon as we got on. Before the ferry left they loaded on a bunch of cars, including a full sized bus, a huge truck of bananas, and a truck with a bunch of cows in the trailer! So it was a pretty sizable boat. But I think there were cockroaches on it. Ew. Anyways we got back to San Jose in the early afternoon so it wasn’t too bad. Montezuma really isn’t that far away, but it was just all the transportation and waiting in between that took so long!

I’m not sure yet what we’ll be doing this weekend. We have two new girls living with us, so now we have 6 girls upstairs and one downstairs. The roommates change all the time so we’ll see what happens this week.

What’s everyone doing back home? Miss you all, and see you in less than a month now!