On Tamarindo Time

---

---

Hola Everyone!·

Well sorry for taking so long to update this site, but you know how it is. Foreign country, new language, new people, new places....its all to easy to get carried away and put it off one more day. But not any more. Finally got a good internet connection which suprisingly is free so here it goes, time to update you to the present...

So after getting into San Jose at 6 in the morning our first day we decided to get to the beach as fast as we could. Long story short (and some long bus rides later), we arrived in Tamarindo at around 6 in the evening, exhausted after having been awake for most of the past 36 hours. We found a cool little hostel called the Coral Reef and crashed hard. Tamarindo is an extremely touristy place on the beaten path of Americans and is growing like crazy. Also know as Tama'gringo', this place sees a lot of Americans on short holidays. Although it is a more expensive than other areas, it does boast an excellent beginner surfing break that is literally right in front of the town, so it was a good place to get our feet wet. It also seems to be slightly more afflent in english than the rest of Costa Rica, which, suprisingly seems that very few people actually speak english in a country that relies heavily on tourism dollars. The people are still very friendly and helpful, even when we struggle thru with some odd spanish words mixed into our english sentences along with a lot of hand signals!

So to sum up the highlights for the five days we were in Tamarindo...
- Scuba diving in the Santa Catalina Islands where Nas experinced her very first 'real' dive outside her certification (she did awesome) - we swam with 10' white-tip reef sharks, spotted manta rays and some very large puffer fish! Also saw a turtle orgy and jumping dolphins while in the boat!
- Surfing was great, felt so good to be in 80 degree water with no wetsuit, the learning curve is dropping fast!
-Nathan and Jenny, our new friends from Vail, Colorado. Nathan with his spanish toungue definately helped us out. We met while out scuba diving and quickly became good friends; with two very important interests, surf and snow. They were down here for two weeks and had a plan similar to ours for our first two weeks. In fact we left Tamarindo together and headed north into Nicaragua....

---

Photos

Ben and Nastassia after scuba!
A shot of us between our dives at Santa Catalina Islands. Our first dive was around the Island in the back ground of this picture.

Pacfic Coast of Costa Rica
The pacfic coast near Tamarindo from our dive boat.

Ben at Hostel
Ben chilling in the big Tamarindo surf.