The beast with two shells

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After Playa del Coco we headed further south to Tamarindo...a town full of surfers, so we figured we'd try our hand. We found a lesson at our second hostel and along with lots of other beginners we let the ocean knock us around for the afternoon. But after several attempts, and a bit of figuring out the timing, I managed to stand up! It was awesome... though short lived. I managed to get up a few times during the lesson...though standing with no control was really what i was doing. When we had set up our lesson the day before, along the same dusty street (we were filthy after everyday from this road it was unbelievable) we found a place offering deep sea fishing trips, and we had asked about pricing just about everywhere, only to find it far out of our means. BUT this was by far the best price we had found, and remains so... so we set up a trip for the day after our surf lesson. So the Monday morning we got up before EVERYONE else, and headed to the beach at 6am to meet a boat. The man who sold us the trip was on the beach, and then the boat showed up with the captain Coto and who i think was his son Eddie. We headed out into the ocean a few miles...and dropped some lines. We caught a pretty big black tuna that was quickly cut into 4 LARGE chunks and used as bait. We had some bites that would've pulled me overboard but they all got away... some with a hook larger than a caribeaner key ring! We actually went through this slightly frustrating process through 3 good sized black tuna.. i Caught one of them! YEP! Somewhere between the 3 tuna I saw something in the water... i was afraid it was a large piece of garbage, but NO much better than garbage, a big ol' sea turtle swimming the waves. IT was sooo cool. And just when i was bouncing up an down with excitment there was more! Two more big sea turtles latched together in an embrace...one day soon it will be on the beach nearby laying eggs! How awesome. We looked up the local sea turtles and i'm pretty sure they were olive ridley (?) turtles based on their size and color. Then after we caught and lost our last tuna... dolphins through the water within a few feet of our boat. Groups of 2 or 3 of them. While we didnt catch anything huge it was incredible to see Costa Rica's wildlife diversity. Tamarindo certainly wasn't the place to see Costa Rica's local culture, though it was a prefect place to take advantage of a few things that the area is known for, and our boat captain was a blast! This guy sang and talked to the fish and joked with us the whole time. In Tamarindo we met 2 Argentinian guys who had rented a car and were headed south in the general direction we were interested in. They offered us a ride and the next day we found ourselves in Samara. The town didn't have much to offer, though it was a break from the other developed beach areas. After Samara the guys decided to head to Santa Teresa, so free transportation was hard to deny and so the real adventure began. We took off before 8am and headed along the coast, on the crazies "road" i have ever experienced. Not only was it Not paved at all, the whole things was rocks, BIG rocks, and interrupted by rivers. We hit a river, turned back found someone to ask directions and they told us the road continued on the other side. We went back to the road and the Argentinian driver looks at his friend, who he had called the GPS, and pointed out the door with his thumb. The GPS got out and trudged across to make sure it wasn't too deep... and them we followed. This process went on 4 times. Then we curved around cliffs and around tight corners following the ocean... until the road ended on a deserted beach the was surrounded by jungle. So we drove along the beach following a pickup...crossed a few streams.. and then i realized that had the road gone on behind the beach the rivers were far too deep to cross...but what would we have done at hightide? Good thing it wasn't. SO yesterday we made it to Santa Teresa just over 2 hours after the adventure began. We found a hostel filled with interesting people. We rented a surf board, to share (because of budget) and tried the waves again for the day. It was a good time, something fun to do, though very tiring. Our Argentinian friends met us on the beach and we spent the afternoon hanging around the beach. At this point we decided we were done with beach stuff, and wanted to get going onto something more... but the guidebook made it sound very difficult and expensive to get out of Santa Teresa by public transportation... so we started talking to people. We found out that it would be much easier than we had thought. We bought and cooked our own dinner, and sitting around with a bunch of Canadians who had done the same we started to formulate a new plan... and after several hours of Bananagrams (a travel game we have) and a bottle of rum we had a ride into Cobano. We ended up tieing 5 backpacks to the top of a small CRV, and putting 7people inside. We tried to arrange an island snorkeling adventure with 3 Canadian girls but it turned out to be too expensive.. and impossible to get cheaper... so Ben and I split off of them and headed into Montezuma where we are now. In Montezuma we found a place to stay.. that was too expensive and we happened to run into a couple who already had a room at a place that we found to be full, but really would have liked to stay where we were looking...so We swapped and they stayed at the nicer place.. and we stayed within our means. We then took off for the hike that we came to Montezuma for. We were a bit late in the day but we managed to hike to all 3 water falls, though we skipped swimming in the pools.. we might go back tomorrow morning. Between the 2nd and 3rd waterfall we heard then saw howler monkeys in the trees! It was so exciting. When we got back we cleaned up and headed to a Soda to eat.... one we had seen near the bus stop. It turned out to be the front of someone's house with basically half the wall of the kitchen knocked out so they could serve people at a counter. We had one of the best rice and beans plates yet! And let me tell you, we are officially rice, bean, and chicken connoisseurs! That's it for the day really... like i said we might do the waterfalls again tomorrow, but we're also planning on crossing the peninsula to the Monteverde/ Santa Elena area of the country to hike parts of the rainforests, get a night tour, zipline through the jungle, and maybe check out an active volcano... We'll see what tomorrow brings!

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