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Published: August 25th 2014
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It was an early start so I could take full advantage of the car hire and Kate met me just outside the car rental place in the high street of Samara. The car rental firm were called Alamo and they seem to have locations all around Costa Rica and globally. I had the option to be able to drop the car off at another location which would have been good if I needed to go back to San Jose. Once I had sorted out the paperwork we were good to go. I also decided to hire a Satnav as thought this would come in very handy. I felt quite calm given the fact that I was driving in a foreign country for the first time which meant driving on the right hand side of the road and trying to understand road signs which were in Spanish.
At first, it felt very weird being on the other side of the road and I kept thinking to myself that the gear stick is to my right not left. Once we got going the journey to Tamarindo was straight forward and we had arrived at our destination within 1 hour. The first thing
we did once we had arrived at Tamarindo was find a restaurant near to the beach so we could get cold drinks. I felt really thirsty after concentrating hard on the driving and the weather was very hot. The beach at Tamarindo was beautiful but felt a lot more livelier than Samara as there was lots of tourists about and plenty of locals trying to sell us random items. My friend Walter had texted me to say he couldn't get as close as originally planned and closest he could get to us was Canas. Therefore, we only really had about an hour on this amazing beach before we needed to leave. We managed to haggle the price for some sun loungers as we only needed them for an hour and not the full day, so Kate and myself just chilled on the sun loungers admiring the beautiful view on Tamarindo and occasionally having to say "no gracias" to locals trying to sell us stuff.
Before leaving Tamarindo we checked a few souvenir shops. I was gutted not to have been able to have spent more time at this great place. I definitely plan to come back to Tamarindo if
I were ever to visit Costa Rica again.
The journey to Canas became a bit of a nightmare, the motorway was being made bigger and resulted in all traffic going into one lane. The roads were not tarmacked so we were unable to travel with speed and by the time we finally met Walter in Canas it was around 3pm. We decided to try and find another beach place before it got too dark. However, the nightmare continued with us having to stop twice with roadworks and some kind of motorcycle race. It wasn't a case of just waiting 10 minutes it was more like an hour each time. Very frustrating and, before we knew it, it was getting dark. I was starting to race a bit on the way back to Samara as I was fed up of driving. I felt like I had been in this car the whole day. We wasn't far from Samara when I started to go over a bridge but needed to give way to a motorcycle on the other side, luckily I had braked in time but I don't feel the locals on the bike were happy with me. They probably said
something very abusive to me in Spanish.
Once we were back in Samara, we did pizza and a few drinks at a nearby bar before it was time to say goodbye to Kate. The next day I would be heading back to San Jose were my journey would be nearly coming to an end.
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