Bye Bye Caribbean

Last night was our last on the Caribbean Coast. We had a nice dinner with our new friends and said goodbye to them today as they travel in a different direction. We also said goodbye to JT and his lovely wife Sarah, though I'm sure we'll be seeing them again sometime. This video is of the band at our dinner last night - completely relaxing music that I thought I'd share. We also said goodbye to all of the sweet dogs running around town. This one was very fond of Scott after he fed him ice cream.

Leaving Panama

We headed back from Panama with our new friends Jayme and Caroline from Vancouver. We left Rita and Lan behind to head down to the Panama Canal - hope you had fun guys! This is the bridge that you have to walk across at this border crossing. People, cars, trucks, and trains (in the past) all use this same bridge. It's totally sketchy, but gets the crossing done. Here you can see Scott and I and our new friends back at the lovely Kaya's Place. Although we had a good time in Panama, JT (the owner of Kaya's Place) had just come back after spending a night in jail down by the Panamanian border! His story was crazy! They put him in jail for having a backpack at a bar! It was completely ridiculous, but he tried to keep up his spirits by singing songs about Panama. This is him singing some of his songs for us after he finally got back home. Poor JT!

More at the beach

Here´s more at the beautiful beach where we stayed for a while. We got into the water a little bit, but the waves were crazy strong, so I didn´t stay in too long. I took the opportunity to get some photos of Scott getting hit by the big waves. You can see part of the beach here and the entrance where the boat docked. We met some awesome people from Vancouver. Actually two sets of people who were both from Vancouver and had met up in Cahuita. This is all of us out at dinner. They were super fun and we had a nice time roaming the streets of Bocas with them.












On a side note, we saw a lot of this woman shown here. We found it funny and thought it would be funny to share. We actually first saw her when we were at Manzanillo walking along the beach and she was also walking along, but in a wetsuit. It was pretty warm there, so this seemed a little odd. Then, when we were stopped for lunch with our boat in Bocas, we saw her getting off another boat, again in her wetsuit. Their boat was snorkeling in the general area, but she just jumped in right away right beside the boat dock and started snorkeling. Then, AGAIN at the beach where we played for awhile, we saw her playing in the ocean in her wetsuit. It was silly of us to even take notice, but made us smile, so hopefully will make you smile too.

PANAMA!

Since we were already so close, we decided to take a side trip to Panama. There is a town on the water that we heard was very beautiful, so we took a bus, a taxi and then a boat to Bocas del Toro. I guess it has just recently been discovered by tourists in the last 5-10 years, so though it is very touristy, it is not built up too much yet. We took a trip one day and went to a dolphin bay, went snorkeling in two spots, and went to a beautiful, secluded beach. As you can see, I had my hair braided before we came, so I look very Caribbean now. :D All of the kids laughed at me on the bus because I´m sure they´ve never seen a white girl look so silly.
The dolphin watching was awesome. When we were first roaming around in the boat, I was upset with the driver because he kept driving fast right past where the dolphins had been, so I thought he was scaring them off. However, we went over to another location and he did donuts in the water and the dolphins started swimming behind us and playing in our wake. There were 3 of them and they just swam and played and jumped behind us for quite a while. They loved it! It was really fun to watch them moving around so playfully with us.
The first place we went snorkeling was the most beautiful and colorful underwater world I could have ever imagined. Alex - this would be YOUR heaven! I so wish we had underwater cameras because I don´t think I can describe how incredible the sights were. I felt like I was in a cartoon watching underwater plants that were purple, blue, pink, orange, red, green and all shapes and sizes that you can imagine. The fish were very cool, but the underwater plantlife was even more amazing. This would be a snorkeler or scuba diver´s paradise. We went to another snorkeling location that was still pretty cool but not nearly as colorful as the first location. At the second place, the water was a little deeper and there were some huge schools of these little tiny fish. The bottom depth dropped off dramatically into a big black hole, but I stayed away from there. I didn´t want any sharks chasing after me. Every time I saw a bunch of fish swimming away quickly, so did I. :D
We also went to this awesome private island and beach that this guy owns and allows people to visit for a small charge. We arrived by boat and then walked through the island where you could find cute little red frogs (hence the name red frog beach), crocodiles in the water and tons of leaf cutter ant colonies. At the end of a trail was a beautiful beach. You can see new friends of ours here relaxing in a swing on the beach.

Manzanillo

We went down even further south one day to a park at Manzanillo. It was a beautiful walk on the beach and in the jungle next to the beach. At one point, we heard a loud noise, which we think was howler monkeys and we decided to walk back along the beach. It was really quite beautiful here.
We also went up to Cahuita for a very short amount of time and didn´t see much, but did see this sloth in the tree sleeping in the middle of town. There were tons of people gathered around taking pictures.

Headed South and loving life at Kaya´s Place

We headed down to Puerto Viejo on the Southern edge of the Caribbean Coast. We found a great eco-lodge called Kaya´s place and loved it so much, we decided to stay for a week. It´s owned by a great couple from Vermont and is the perfect place to relax on the patio watching the waves roll in. We loved their two huge dogs and three sweet cats and the great conversation with everyone there. If you head to Puerto Viejo, you definitely should check out Kaya´s Place.
Puerto Viejo was a nice, very relaxed beach town. A lot of people from Jamaica were brought over as slaves in 1872 to work on the railroads that were built to transport bananas. Many of the people stayed and so this area has a completely different feel than the rest of Costa Rica. Bob Marley is played almost everywhere you go and the Caribbean food is great. One thing that we didn´t like was the separation that we continued to see between the locals and the expats living and working in the tourist industry. It seems that people move down to this area and open businesses, but then mingle among each other and not as much with the locals. It actually kind of reminded me of some of the separation between races in the South, but this could just be my own perception.
In any case, people have been dissuaded from visiting this area because of safety concerns, but we definitely recommend the area as a great laid back and safe beach town.



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More in Tortuguero

We saw more birds than you can imagine, but didn´t get nearly enough pictures of them. This is a bird watchers paradise. This lizard looking guy is called a basilisk. They were everywhere, but stayed really still most of the time. Isn´t the term basilisk from some movie or book like Harry Potter? It sounded familiar to me but not as a lizard creature. They do have alligators in Tortuguero, but not in the area we were in. This is a caiman, who is a smaller relative of the alligators. They were everywhere! It was pretty cool to see so many and we even saw a group of baby caimans swimming around.











I´m sure it´s odd to show pictures of boots, but this is again to show how ridiculous our tour guide was. She told us all that we were going for a hike in the forest and that we needed to wear pants and boots because the snakes are very dangerous. It was more hot than I´ve ever been in my life and wearing socks and these rubber boots made us all miserable. When we showed up to go, what was our guide wearing but a tank top, short shorts and flip-flops! It was ridiculous. We were walking on a pretty wide trail and did not need anything like the getup we were wearing. I guess we had some good pictures from it, though. :S I am brushing my hair here with a plant that monkeys often use to brush their hair. Here, I am really living with and like the monkeys! Rebecca - you were right! :D

Boat Tours in Tortuguero and more Monkeys!

Tortuguero is named after the turtle (Tortuga) because this is a very common place for turtles to come and nest. The place in the last 50 years has been very protected so that the turtles will not be killed and hurt as they have been in so many other places. We were not there for the turtle season, but saw an informational video about them.
The boat tours that we took while in Tortuguero were great. We saw so many things, many of which we had seen before, but still amazing. We saw all three types of monkey that are in this part, spider monkeys, white-faced monkeys and howler monkeys. We were so close to them through many times. It´s so amazing to see them moving around in the trees hanging from one branch to another. They also seem to have their tails wrapped around something in order to keep them steady. They are not at all very afraid of humans.

Smart, Cool plant

There was this awesome plant in Tortuguero that has an amazing ability to protect itself from predators. Whenever you touch it, it immediately closes up and starts to look brown and dead. We don´t know how long it takes for it to come back out again, but it does come back out. How smart! It was too cool for me not to take a video. :D

Off to Tortuguero

Tortuguero, or City of Turtles, was the next stop on our journey. Almost the only opportunities go take there are through tour groups to stay in lodges. You have to take a bus and then a boat to get to the town. At first, we thought our tour guide might be okay because along the way, she showed us sloths and a local banana plantation and told us how things worked around there. However, as the trip went on, we liked her less and less. We did see some amazing things (more to come in later posts), but most were not because of her. There is an interesting separation between the locals and the town in Tortuguero and the resorts and tourists. There are some photos of the town here, including the local church and the ´main street´. This was the one and only time we saw the town. It was unfortunate because we would have liked to spend more time there. We asked our tour guide about going out there in the evenings (we could tell she was going out) and she strongly dissuaded us from going into town saying it was dangerous and she couldn´t condone us leaving the resort. It was actually BS because she had spoken on the way there about how much the tourism helped the small town of Tortuguero, but we quickly saw that the only people we were helping were the lodges and those who owned them. We did give the kids in town some money to open a coconut for us so that we could drink the juice and eat the fruit, but that was about it. It was sad, really because we both like to meet the locals and see how things are socially in the country and not just in the tourism spots. We did meet some great people from Switzerland, Spain, Chili, and Costa Rica who were on our tour. It was nice speaking with them. Of course everyone spoke a little English, so they spoke to us in English mostly. We were embarrased to not speak more Spanish, but hopefully we can learn more soon! Thanks, guys! Our tour guide, another Cindy was also very bossy and talked too much for our tastes. It´s too bad, because Tortuguero is a lovely place and someone who was a little more authentic could have made our trip a lot better.
As a side note for my girls, here also are my lovely cankles lounging in a hammock at Mawamba Lodge. Mawamba Lodge where we stayed is a very nice place and we highly recommend it - I just wanted to add a side note about our tour guide and the way things are set up in the town.

Irazu Volcano

We drove up to another Volcano called Irazu volcano. It's very high and quite cold at night! We stayed close by in a place that Scott thought was haunted. I thought it was a very cool old place with wooden floors and stairs. However, when we showed up, there was a security guy sitting in the entrance with a rifle beside him. We were the only people that stayed there that night in a huge mansion looking place. Weird. It must have gotten down to freezing - it was so incredibly cold since the elevation is so high there. This volcano is also active and was quite beautiful with the green color. We have myself goofily jumping around and our great photographer.