Early Adventures

Well, aside from being bit up by mosquitoes, things are still going great! While I am still uninterested in going out with the 20 year olds to get wasted and surf, I did have a small adventure that will soon lead to more alike. First, I began my dance class….it was so fun! Most of you know that I am a horrific dancer so for me to say that the dance class was fun really is a huge step! I really had a blast, Carlitos (que suave!) is my teachers name and he really makes it more comfortable…some of the students do know what they are doing and many of the others are just like me…terrible! We began with Merigue, we will move into Salsa and Cumbia soon but the Merigue dance is much more basic than Salsa. It is fun when I dance with someone who knows how because it doesn’t seem to matter that I don’t know how, he literally spins us around and puts our bodies where they need to be to look semi normal! Anyway, in November we take a trip to San Jose and go see a formal dance performance and then we all go out dancing at a fancy club. I have a lot of work to do, he says our homework every week is to go out dancing on the weekend….this weekend I got an F! hehehe

Friday after class, Alli and Ashley (two girlies from So Cal)


decided we wanted to take the Ferry to the Nicoya Penninsula across the gulf from us….so we did. It really was a quick trip. We got on the ferrie at 12:30 and arrived to Paquera around 2. Here is a view of the “punta” of Puntarenas. It is the tip of the little place I call home. Pretty weird huh?


It looks like a tiny little tropical island! However, where I am is not a tropical get-away by any means, I am sure I will have more pictures of Puntarenas soon.

This is a pic from the pier where all of the cruise liners dock, though right now is not peak season.

See how the beach is wet all the way to the top? There are high and low tides but it also rains every day therefore there aren’t dry beaches yet…the rain will start to slow down mid October/November, and the dry season begins in December (right when I leave!).

Okay back to the story about my trip to the Nicoya Penninsula….Once we got to Paquera, we then jumped on a bus for another hour (only because it stopped about every mile and a half) to go to a beach that seemed like it would be nice based on our lovely travel books. The hotspot to go is Montezuma but it is definitely for an overnight trip for a weekend that we have completely free. So we stopped at the closer beach called Tambor. It is large bay where Whales come…the pics show gorgeous bright blue water and nice dry sandy beaches. What we saw was totally different. It isn’t that the pics lied….it’s that it is winter here and because we are getting sooooo much rain, the rivers are high and dirty and the rivers let out near this bay…therefore the water was dirty and brown!! There was basically some ocean water in the driftwood!



While the water was incredibly warm, it was full of wooden debris and wasn’t looking like something that we would call refreshing. We walked up and down the beach a bit…basically killing about 2 hours before the bus came back. We ended up accidentally flagging down a taxi (my fault). Lots of ticos like to wave and say hello to the gringas…when he drove by and waved, I waved back…to which he slammed on his breaks and put it in reverse. He offered a good deal so we jumped in. Ashley sat in the front and got to practice some Spanish with the driver. The ticos really are nice so far! The taxi man got us back just in time for the 6pm ferry. The ferry that took us back to Puntarenas must have been for the night trips because they had loud reggeton music and an big bar, the last thing I expected on a Ferry. It was a nice exploratory trip… the next one we take will be there but we will go and stay in Montezuma for fri and sat night in a hostle. The beaches in Montezuma and Mal Pais are suppose to be fantastic and they are pretty close together.

Saturday morning we had a field trip for the USAC students. These are cool, but sometimes it just sucks to be with 40 other students! We went to a National Park and took a hike (I say “Hike” but really it was a very slow walk because there were so many of us, and with all of the stops for picture taking etc. it took forever!) through the rainforest. It was pretty cool. The have some HUGE trees with enormous roots! It was incredible walking through here because the sounds you could hear. There must have been dozens of birds up in the top that we couldn’t even see because it was so loud. Now I am sure that many of the noises were coming from animals or bugs that I never want to see…but it was cool to hear the sounds of the rainforest.

Next we ate a nice tico lunch and got on a bus AGAIN and went to a river that lets out into the ocean. The University of Costa Rica has done studies that show that there are significantly high numbers of Crocodiles per square kilometer for the first 20 km from the ocean up the river. Basically, nobody swims there. The crocs were everywhere! We were on a boat that seated about 25-30 people…

We took a nice cruise with a guide who told us all about the birds and lots of facts about the vegetation… but we really just wanted to see the crocks. We kept spotting them and pulling the boat very close to where they were to snap some pics. I knew that we would be seeing a good show because there was raw meat in a cooler that I knew was for the crocks. Eventually we found one who looked hungry…I don’t think I have to say a whole lot more, the pics say it all. Some other students got a video, why I didn’t think of it I have no idea but if I get a copy I will post it on Myspace.


We also got to the very still mangroves which were way cool…the tree roots grow very weird because of the changing tide, this river is highly affected by the tide because it is so close to the ocean. I felt like I was in the swamps (or what I imagine them to be like) in the south. There were little crabs everywhere!


Well I think this is enough for now.