El Caribe

Last weekend I went to the carribean side of Costa Rica with 2 friends from my Spanish classes, Paul and Julia. We went to this little town called Cahuita which had a very laidback, Carribean feel to it that was very different from the rest of Costa Rica. Nobody was in a hurry to do much of anything. The town wasn´t even awake when we arrived at 11:00 in the morning. It was also VERY hot and humid. We found this really nice hotel right by the entrance to Cahuita national park (which is basically a forest trail beside a spectacular beach. When we arrived it was raining and my travel companions were tired so I went for a walk down to Playa Negra, the black sand beach. The beach was empty when I got there so I had this strip of black sand beach all to myself, albeit in a light rain. Later, the weather cleared up and we all went swimming for a while at Playa Blanca right by our hotel which had the most powerful waves ever. If you weren´t careful to jump at the right time, you ended up with a nose full of salt unsure of which way was up.

The day we woke up early to do a tour that cost us $20 each and included a boat ride out to snorkle at the coral reef, and a guided hike back through the national park. We went with quite a large group in our boat. There were the 3 of us, a girl from Oregon who was working in San Jose and had come up for the weekend by herself, and 8 people from Spain. I was the only one who didn´t speak fluent Spanish so I had a good chance to soak up the experience instead of putting on my concentrating face and trying to understand what was being said. Snorkeling was amazing. I´ve snorkled before and was never able to get over the mental block of breathing while my face was in the water but there was just too much to see to worry about that. There were huge fish of all different colors as well as little ones flitting all around through the coral. Coral looks a lot different than I thought it would too, it was more like big colored rocks with very intricate patterns on it than the lichens and moving plants that you see on tv. After people tired themselves out snorkeling, the tour operator took us to a nearby beach where he sliced up fresh pineapple and watermelon for us before we started the hike. Then we started on the hike with our guide pointing out animals in Spanish (the girl from Oregon translated for me, how nice). Going with a guide was a really good idea because we saw so many different things. There were 2 kinds of monkeys, tons of sloths, crazy-coloured crabs of purple and blue and red, birds, and a really big spider that our guide held in his hand. (You would´ve loved it mom.)

After the tour, we had dinner with the girl from Oregon and then caught a bus into Puerto Viajo, the typical tourist destination of the Carribean coast. It has a reputation for partying and abundant drugs and it didn´t disappoint. It was actually really horrible, dirty and well, sketchy. The town was also full when we got there so we ended up in this horrible, horrible room of this suedo hotel that had an enormous spider in the bathroom. At least the room was cheap at $12 a night and we did meet some other travellors there, including a man who had run away from life in Vancouver, who had some interesting things to say about the town. Mercifully we were only there for the night so we had dinner as a really nice restaurant with authentic carribean food and a live band playing a good carribean beat with marimbas and the like. Then we forced ourselves to get some sleep under the mosquitos net in room and caught the bus back to Atenas early in the morning.

We had a bad scare a few days after we got back. Paul got very sick and everyone thought that he had Dengue fever, which is transmitted by mosquito, has no cure and is basically a horrible flu that you have to weather out in extreme pain for about a week and stays with you for 3-5 months. My organization sent him to the private hospital in San Jose where they tested him for Dengue and found out he was just extremely dehydrated, and now he can´t eat anything except beans, rice and veggies for the next few days. So all´s well I guess but I am never forgetting my mosquito repellant.