The Nicoya Peninsula

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Bring on the white sandy palm tree swept beaches of Costa Rica!!!!
After an altogether painless border crossing.....lets rephrase that....The best and fastest border crossing we have had yet! We arrived in the famously touristy town of Tamarindo.
We weren't sure what to expect because most backpackers are not too complementory about the place...most call it 'Tama Gringo', which says it all!
Besides the accomodation being on the expensive side (not set up for backpackers at all) as the town caters very much for the smoozy holiday. Mainly Americans flying in for 10 days or so to blow alot of cash.
Ken had great visions of doing a week of Surf Camp at a great place called Witchesrock, but at well over $1000 a week we soon blew off that idea! Affordable if we were just on holiday, but denitely not now on our $30 a day each budget.

We admit it ! We liked 'Gringoville'! It was great being around decent shops, boutiques, salons....you know the luxuries in life we had not seen for a while. Even for budget travellers like us their were great deals around. We discovered that Subway did daily 15inch long sandwiches for $2, Saturday nights was 2 for 1 pizza specials at The Monkey Bar, Wed and Fridays there were ladies nights.....and guess this girls.....the ladies pay nada (nothing!) for their drinks! Fantastic!

We spent 3 lazy days, sunning ourselves and swimming. There were plenty of smart hotels and we did the sneaky backpacker thing and used their pools. We found out the Happy Hour times and then would nurse our cocktails in their glorious infinity pools! John (from UK) and another girl Sam (Australian surfer) spent the three days with us. Sam was working as a surfing instructor at another beach (Malpais)down the coast and so we made plans to head her way the following week.

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Photos

Freeloading
Backpacking lets you be cheap.We snuck into a fancy hotel for a sunset swim.

Tamarindo beach
I know this photo is under San juan beach.but it is really Tamarindo, sorry.