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Published: February 27th 2010
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Actually we are not in Uvita we are in Neily. Spending a lovely night in our A/C room at my favorite place, Hotel Andrea.
We Finished the 4 days of Spanish school in San Juan Del Sur, I (Jordan) believe that the lessons really helped out, I think the others agree on that as well. We Had a few big meals with our friends in the hostel, including plenty of locally caught Dorado. I did the best i could hiding from the sun, which seemed to work very well, as the hammock choose to lay in for a few days was in the shade. We set a day to leave into Costa Rica on Sunday morning ( the 21 of Feb) but Allyne and Jordan went out the night prior and had a few drinks, needless to say we decided to leave the next day... Monday.
The border of Penas Blancos went fairly well. We told every Nico/Tico running towards us that "no we did not want their help" and the did the crossing ourselves. it seemed to work when you told them 10 times in a row. We waited in the line for a couple hours and got all out passports stamped, then got our permit for the dog and car... The offices were all very spread out, which on a hot day makes walking back and forth miserable. after 4 hours at the border we grabbed a quick (and expensive) lunch and headed towards our destination...Tamarindo!
We arrived in Tamarindo just before dark which gave us very little time to find a place to park. We found a hostel that wanted to charge us 20 bucks to park, plug in, and use their washrooms. We agreed to the offer... 10 minutes later the receptionist (also the drug dealer) came back to ask for more money. We were very confused and said we would not pay more as it is already very expensive. We decided to leave and got our money back. It took a good 10 minutes to explain to the guy that we wanted our money back and that we did not want to stay anymore. We ended up staying at the botte de leche for 25 dollars which gave us a private room and a huge kitchen to cook in and hammocks.
We decided to leave the next day do to the amount of people in the water and no waves, we set our destination to Jaco, or just past Jaco. two hours into our drive we hit traffic, it seems a semi flipped and was spread across the road many miles ahead of us, we were able to squeeze by the line up of traffic where the police were telling people to take a bypass route. we ended up following many other people though a series of narrow bumpy gravel roads, which led to a river crossing we were unable to cross, after turning around and driving even further down the dirt roads we find a crossing we could handle and drove right through the river where a very friendly tico family was bathing and doing their laundry. 45 minutes later, we were on the road once again. After asking several people directions to Jaco ( their signs down here still suck) we came to a police check... turns out I wasn't suppose to be driving, not because my license was printed horribly on a piece of paper, but because my name wasn't on the driving permit. 20 minutes of arguing and 20 dollars later we were on our way. We drove past Jaco and headed for a small town called esterillos oeste which turned out to be a amazing little town.
We met Steve the owner of a great pizzeria who offered us to park in his back yard (seriously a stones through from some very fun surfing) we took the offer up and were also able to weasel an outdoor shower, some washrooms, and a plug to plug in. we had some drinks and ate some great pizza at his pizzeria. The waves were very calm, more of a long borders wave but none the less we all had a great time, and spent a couple days there. If it wasn't so damn hot, we would've stayed a bit longer but we were itching for a batch of A/C due to the constant sweating all day and night in the tin can we call our home. Thanks again Steve, see you on the way back up!
We made are way to Domincal, upon arrival we realized it was to hectic and busy and left the same day to Uvita we we found a great hostel to park in, too bad the owner ad to charge us a ridiculous amount of money ( more then RV parks to plug in and use the showers) so we decided which was cheaper to rent a room. I think we are all getting a little sick of the RV and have been craving rooms.
We spent today looking around the area for surf, when we did find some surf, it was going to cost us 6 bucks per person to go to the beach (national parks are expensive too!) and decided to just keep driving out of the park, we ended up going to Playa Tortuga. Which was an estuary/river-mouth next to the beach with surf miles and miles away, we ended up having pizza at Gringo Mikes/Joe's cafe. He serves up a descent pie which made the stress of looking for surf well worth it.
We made it to Neily safely, through a serious of rain storms, the first of the trip.
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Doooooooglascz
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Cheapster
Wasting four hours at the border is complete idiocy. Ask for Gold tooth Freddy. He'll have you in and gone in 10 minutes. $20 for 2 people.