But on to the recapping of my trip from last weekend:
I went with three other girls from the ISEP program, Caitlin, Callie, and Corrylee (I guess I missed the memo on the "C" name). We left early Friday morning (I skipped my Friday afternoon class) and took a bus from San José to Brasilito, a little town on the western coast of Costa Rica, in the region of Guanacaste. The bus trip was about five hours, so by the time we got there we were sweaty and hungry. After checking into our hotel, we ate lunch at the nearby restaurant, Outback Jack's, where we were serenaded by a mariachi band (we then had to pay them). Then we went straight to the beach, which was literally right by the restaurant and hotel. The beach was beautiful, the water felt great, and we had a lot of fun swimming and looking for shells. When it started to get dark we went back to our room, showered, then went to the nearby soda for dinner. (Quick note: a "soda" is like a little family-owned restaurant, and they usually sell typical Costa Rican food for fairly cheap.) The food was deliciosa, and after walking around town a bit we went back to our hotel and watched "Pan's Labrynth," which was good, but dark. So we watched half of "Raising Helen" to cheer ourselves up. :)
Saturday we got up and took the bus to Playa Tamarindo, a bigger beach about 18 km away. There we rented surfboards and Caitlin, who's from Hawaii, taught us how to surf. I have to confess I didn't get very far though. At one point, Caitlin was helping Callie, and Corrylee and I were sitting on our boards in the water, when a set of big waves came in, and we kept getting shoved underwater and hit with our surfboards. So I took a break and sat on the beach. Later Caitlin took me out again, and I rode a couple waves in just lying on my surfboard. It was actually really fun, but that was as far as I got. We ate lunch in the town of Tamarindo then went back to Brasilito, which was a little trickier than it had been in the morning. See, there's a direct bus from Brasilito to Tamarindo, but not one from Tamarindo to Brasilito. We asked a guy which bus we should take, and he told us we could take a taxi, and then proceeded to hail one for us. Only it cost about $30, which is ridiculous, so we turned him down. Then the man got another taxi for us (people are sometimes overly helpful), and this taxi driver lowered the price to $18. That was still way too high, so we said no thanks, but it took us about 10 minutes to convince the man we really didn't want to take a taxi. When our bus finally came, Corrylee got pooped on by a bird right as we were getting on. A girl told us it was good luck, and it kind of turned out to be true, since when we got off that bus at Haucas, the bus for Brasilito was right there.
Once we made it back to Brasilito, we went exploring and walked to Playa Conchal, which we had heard a lot about. It was a beautiful beach, and a good portion of it is made up entirely of shell pieces! (Hence the name, "conchal" means "shell.") We stayed there for a bit, until it started raining, and then we went back to our hotel, showered, and ate dinner at Outback Jack's again.
Sunday we were planning to go back to Tamarindo, but we missed the bus. So we had to wait a while for the next one, which would only take us to Haucas, but we met these two nice women from the Netherlands who were on vacation in Costa Rica. Once in Haucas we waited for a while, but the bus to Tamarindo never came, so we walked over to the taxi drivers and asked how much it would be. It was only $5, so we took it. On our way we got stopped by, of all things, a herd of cows walking down the road. Our taxi driver, who was really nice, said this happened pretty often. We finally made it to Playa Tamarindo, where the other three girls rented surfboards again (I was content to lie on the beach, read, and take pictures). We ate lunch at a soda in Tamarindo, then hung out there until the next bus came (figuring out the buses in Costa Rica can be frustrating). For dinner we ate at a pizza place in Brasilito-- it was a really cute place, with all the tables under these grass-roof huts, and the pizza was yummy.
Monday was a very long day. We walked to the bus ticket office to buy our tickets for San José, only to find out that the 9 o'clock bus was full. And the next bus wasn't until 2. Shoot. So we went back to our hotel and asked the manager. She told us we could take a bus to Santa Cruz, where buses leave for San José every hour or so. Oh, but the bus for Santa Cruz was leaving.... now. So we ran across the town square to the bus stop, made it onto the bus and took it to Santa Cruz. But we found out the 10 o'clock bus was full. As was the Noon bus. Argh. If we wanted to, we could take the noon bus, but we would have to stand. Since we wanted to make it home, we decided to do that. So we sat in the bus station for a couple hours, making quick trips to the grocery store across the street for food, since we still hadn't eaten breakfast. The bus trip wasn't as bad as I expected. We stood or sat on the floor the whole way, but the ride was only about 4 hours, with a rest stop about half-way. We got off at the airport and took another bus to Heredia, and I was home before 5. As fun as the beach was, I felt good to be home.
Here's a link to the facebook photo album of pictures from the trip. You should be able to look at them even if you don't have facebook:
Well, I should be getting back to homework now. Sorry that this was a really long entry...but as you may know, I'm really bad at making short summaries. :) This week looks to be full of paper writing, since I have two term papers coming up in the next couple weeks. But I'll try to keep you updated if I do anything interesting. ¡Hasta luego!
No comments:
Post a Comment