Manual Antonio

We visited the town of Quepos and Manual Antonio National Park and absolutely loved all of the beautiful sites we saw. This was definitely the most beautiful park we've been to. There were the most beautiful beaches and views of the ocean from hikes in the rainforest. There was so much wildlife just right next to you at every moment. It was a little funny for us, because we had seen most of these things before and everyone around us was freaking out. They would freak out when they saw even just a lizard or a crab! Also, the white faced monkeys are great and we love them every time we see them, but it was interesting to see the kind of excitement from others that we had on our first viewing of them. They are the virgin Costa Rican explorers while we are now pros. It was really funny when we were on the beach because both the regular raccoons that we see in the states and the Costa Rican racoons that are all over down here kept coming up to people. They would walk right up and even take food out of tourists bags while they were laying at the beach. We all got a kick out of it. There were also a few deer becoming very confused as they were feeding in the brush and people from the beach moved very close to them. They turned around to run, but we were on the trail in that direction. They ended up just sprinting back down the trail and another tourist told us later that he saw the deer running at him. We saw a sloth sleeping up on a power line, so I had to of course take a picture of that.

Tortuga Isle

We went on a day trip to Tortuga Isle and did snorkeling at a couple of spots and beaching and lunching. The snorking was pretty cool and we saw tons of large schools of fish. It was crazy swimming through some of these schools - as if it didn't even phase the fish that we were there. The beach where we stopped for a cookout at lunch was beautiful. On that island, there was also a resident pig that we had been told liked beer. I put some in my hands to feed him and he did, indeed love it! It was crazy seeing a pig lap up beer like that. There were also many deer walking around the forest next to the grill. They just stood there eating and staring at us occasionally. It was a very nice day with some great views and great company.

Montezuma

We headed over to Montezuma back on the West Coast. We took a boat to get there as it is on the other side of a large gulf. When we arrived to port, I thought it looked just perfect with the Costa Rican flag hanging on the ship and the port right in front of us. The area was very beautiful. The drive to Montezuma after the boat landed was very rough due to the roads and riding in a school bus, but it was also a beautiful view all around us.
I really liked Montezuma a lot. It is a town laid out around a very beautiful area of Costa Rica. It's right on a cove and there are waterfalls and many beautiful beaches nearby. We did the hike to the main waterfalls one day. It was a little weird to swim in the water because it was very brown and you couldn't see into it at all. It was very refreshing after the hike to get there, however. We got lost getting up to the next set of falls and went quite a ways in the wrong direction. A blue morpho butterfly saved us, though by flying right by us and to the trail that we would not have seen had it not come along. I think the butterflies speak to me. :D
When we finally got to the top area, we found many other people around and everyone had come a different way. There were a couple of jumps that you could do - one was only about 30 feet and the other was closer to 60 or 70 feet. We both did the smaller jump after standing and looking down for a little while first. I certainly wasn't going to do the other jump and just sat back and watched as the guys did the jump. Next thing I knew, I turned around and saw Scott jumping off the larger jump! I didn't see him come up since there were trees in the way, so I made everyone else assure me that he was back to the top of the water and fine.
The beaches all around were very beautiful and walking along to and from these beaches, we saw so many of these really colorful crabs. They'd hide when they saw us, but we must have seen 10-20 every few feet we walked.

Perspective from the other side (Scott's Commentary)

Tiffany finally decided to share some of the spotlight on Tiffmac.blogspot. I'll leave the activities and pictures to Tiffany, she's great at it. For my "guest commentary", I have a few stories from the past week of travels.

"Leaving Puerto Viejo With A Bang"
Alas, we are leaving Puerto Viejo and the Carribean coast. We had a great time here as you can see from Tiffany's posts. Actually, as I'm writing this we are making plans to go back. Turns out we have a job for three weeks working at Kaya's Place while the owners (JT and Sarah) head back to the US for some business and much needed vacation time. More on the job stuff later.

So, it was last Thursday morning when we parted ways with our new friends from Vancouver, Jaime and Carolyn and all the great people at Kayas Place. We arrived to the bus stop around noon for the nearly five hour trip back to San Jose. In Puerto Viejo there are two bus stop shelters. They are about 20 meters apart and consist of a wooden plank underneath mismatched shapes of corrugated metal with precariously anchored corner posts holding up the structure. We were standing under the larger of the two shelters awaiting our bus for San Jose. Taking the public bus a long distance is always a nervous time as we've run into a few minor challenges on public buses already. A five hour ride on these buses is also a test of endurance in many ways. Dealing with the heat, dust, crowds, bad roads, and lack of comfort takes its toll. Anyway, just before our bus arrived a local bus pulled up to the shelter next to us. Apparently the driver was enjoying the ocean view rather than watching his driving and the outside bus mirror clipped the shelter. This minor force was too much and the shelter slowly began to sway. Luckily, the few people underneath had already moved toward the street in anticipation of boarding and thus were clear when the entire shelter crashed to the ground. We laughed and resigned ourselves to the fact that things like that happen down here and no one seems to pause for a second to worry about it. The remainder of our bus experience back to San Jose was uneventful, which is a much welcome occurence.

"K&S Brewery A Bust"
Back in San Jose and driven by my love for beer I was determined to visit the only brewery in Costa Rica. First problem was finding the place. Addresses here are much different than in the USA. Typically the address will be something like: “200 meters south of the old stump”, or “across from the plaza near Big Pop´s Ice Cream Shack.” Inquiring about the location of a restaurant or bar is further complicated by the language barrier. None of the taxi drivers knew the location of the bar and several did not seem to understand what we were asking. Finally, the internet saved the day and we found an address that stated “in Plaza Crystal”. This was sufficient to get
us there.

We arrived at nearly 8pm on a Thursday night, but the place was empty. After paying the overpriced cover charge for the eventual live music we ordered a taster. I was quite dissapointed when all five beers being offered were lagers. I do not understand why they choose to brew lagers in a country with a perfect climate for ales (lagers must be brewed cold, while ales like the semi-tropical temperatures of San Jose). We tasted all the beers and once again I was disappointed. The flavor reminded of Karl Strauss beer in San Diego with all beers having very similar taste and finish. The best of the bunch was a traditional German pilsner which I envision is very similar to the German Budweiser. At around 9pm the crowd started to pour in and the band was warming up. At that point we tried to get the attention of our server for nearly 45 minutes. We ordered one last beer and the check, listened to a couple songs, and got out of there. The band along with the beer was unimpressive.

“El General”
Many small towns across the world have at least one strange town figure and Montezuma is no exception. In fact, this particular town jester immediately caught my attention. I first witnessed this crazy man walking down the main street, halting to attention, clicking his shoeless feet together, saluting an imaginary authority figure and yelling a string of rehearsed words into the air. It was then he became “El General” to us. The next incident took place around 7am one morning. The General was strolling along the main street of town, which is approximately three blocks square, shouting “No estoy loco”. Translated with my less than polished Spanish skills, “I´m not crazy.” At this point the General was just warming up. For the remainder of the day he walked around town shooting everyone with his imaginary guns. Sometime the weapon was a simple handgun, other times a machine gun. The last time I saw the General he was hopping around and making strange expressions during some sort of a dance. We will remember many great things about Montezuma, like the beaches, the waterfalls, the snorkeling, and the jungle, but we will also remember “El General”.

Well, that´s all from me for now. I´ll let Tiffany update all of you with the details and pictures of our adventures in Montezuma, Quepos, and Manuel Antonio. Cheers.

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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