Thursday, August 10th
The real truth about last night was that we had tons of fun dancing and drinking with all the friends we made at the hostel. Jenn from Ireland, Alicia from LonGGIsland, Scarlet from Singapore, Debbie from Israel, and Maggie from Georgia. We also met a few guys but their names are irrelevant :) No no, we also met this Irish guy who just happened to have been a bartending at a bar that we knew in Granada, Nicaragua.
In any case, today we were expected to wake up early and go surfing. We were supposed to wake up Jen who was going to join us for an early round of waves. However, we went to bed too late and we were not really in the mood for anything too physical. Greg and Alexey did get up but found the waves were not challenging enough to merit getting wet at the early hours of 9AM. So we decided to leave the beautiful beaches of Tamarindo and drive to Monteverde a little further in the interior of the country.
We packed up and settled our bills at the counter of the awesome Playa Tamarindo Hostel (because it has AC!). Next, we managed to get the car through some deep craters on the dirt road and got to the center of town. The center of Tamarindo is really just like if you were in a city of the US. You can find any fast food restaurant from the US here and banks, etc.. etc.. So we went for Subway for lunch just to take a break from the rice and beans. It was great!! Even though it was at almost the same price as in the US.
So we started our drive. Now, we do not have good maps for our trip so we have to do with what you have. It was my turn to drive today and Greg was my copilot, navigator, documenter, financial accountant, and other things (these are all copilot duties in the car while the person in the back, Alexey, has to rest for a future drive). The drive there was uneventful really. We tried to visit the campus of the EARTH school in this area (very good and famous agricultural university) but the guard did not let us in. So we continued on to the Panamerican hiway. Once there we found that the conditions of the road did not improve by much. It was still tough to go through all these humungous holes on the road.
The rain started pouring down.. When it rains here, it really rains. Once the rain subsided we started going a bit faster since we want to arrive into Monteverde early enough to plan our activities for tomorrow. We are going around 100+ kph and a copy with a radar gun stops us. He shows us that we are going at 115 kph. So he is telling me the whole story of how this is so incredibly bad for us and he is going to take off our license plates until we can pay it and we cannot leave the country, etc.. etc.. "This is very bad news, very bad" he says in Spanish. Then I said "ok so give me the ticket and we will pay it". You know, corruption is not one of those things that we support. However, he asked us, as it is customary, for "a little something for drinks" or "Algo para las colas". So after consulting with the guys, we decided to give him 2000 Colones (Just for the record, I wanted to give 500 but the guys thought it would be insulting). The 2000Cl equate to about 4bucks US. The guy then let us go freely.
Our next hurdle was a 2 hour journey through a road out of the Panamerican hiway which was in the worse condition we have seen so far. There was no pavement aside from a 20 meter stretch that was actually worse than the dirt road. The pot holes were immense!! Our car had incredible trouble passing through these and the rocks near them. Our velocity was nearing an average of 10kpm. However, we made it!
After searching for a hotel around the town of Santa Elena (Only 3 kms away from the actual town on Monteverde) we settled for a place called Posada Sinai. It turned out to be awesome! The kid in the front desk was nice and we basically had the whole place to ourselves since the only other people staying there was a French couple. There was shared bathroom and kitchen. We quickly went to shop for some food and decided to cook instead of eat out.. yeah!!! This is really awesome because we have not had this opportunity elsewhere in the trip. We made spaghetty with some sauce there. It tasted great. I had to make my own non-tomato base sauce due to problems with my digestion.
The guy at the front desk helped us arrange the canopy tours through the jungle tomorrow and also a visit to the wilderness on a hike that would take us through 7 bridges. The company is called Aventura. We will tell you more about this tomorrow. Now we go to an internet cafe to catch up on blogging.
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