Goober Madness

This post is from yesterday (the 26th) - haven't blogged for today yet.

Picking up where we left off. Our nights are always the most exciting parts of our days. Last night was more of the same. We spent the night eating up our “goober” brand PB & J’s (side note: why would you ever name food as goober? Does that sound appealing to anyone to say they are eating a goober? I will be pondering this question the rest of the trip). Our grand total for PB & J sandwiches has reached 12. I also have eaten 1,000 bananas (plus a few plantains) because they are dirt cheap. We also bought some off-brand granola bars and they taste as if they got their recipe a little off. They contained “prebioticos” which we had no idea what it was, but we are still alive. If you can’t already tell, I miss normal food. After dinner we spent the night reading/watching movies. There really wasn’t anything to do in Liberia outside of our hike in Rincon. Most of the time we find ourselves going to bed early so we can get up at 5/6 am to catch a bus. It gets dark at 6 here so I’m not complaining about the early nights. The less we go out at night, the less chance we have of getting robbed.

This morning we got up early again around 6:30 to catch a bus to Tamarindo and eventually to Las Avellanas Villas. We will have our own cabin near a secluded beach called Playa Avellana. Before the bus we headed to the bank again and took out some more colones (I feel like I have a whole in my wallet because it’s never full). We then headed to the bus stop and bought a ticket to Tamarindo for $2! In comparison the fee online for a tourist bus was $45 a person. Tamarindo also was only 87 Km away so we thought this would be a short trip. After getting hassled for taxis for about 40 minutes, we eventually got on our bus and headed for the beach.

We made it about 10 meters (I’m not sure how far that is either, but I thought I should try to use the lingo down here), when the bus stopped to pick up more people. This is not a good sign. We got going again so I thought this was a fluke. Wrong again. We stopped about 100 times in every tiny little city in between Liberia and Tamarindo. We would essentially drive in to the city and drive back out with a couple more people. A bus ride that would normally take about an hour lasted for 2.5 hours. We both agreed that it was still worth the money to take the public bus. At about 11 we finally made it to Tamarindo, but we had a slight problem figuring out where to get off the bus. We assumed there would be a bus station, but the driver just stopped in the middle of the gravel road and said this was the last stop. We were finally in Tamarindo.

After walking about 500 m, we found a taxi that would take us to our villas. However, we broke the cardinal rule of taxi riding by not setting a price before we got on. He also made us sign some sort of insurance waiver before we took off which made us somewhat nervous. (It took a really long time to fill out the form, since we had to give him our social security number, passport number, and home address…this was a joke from Austin  Take it easy moms – we actually just had to give one of our names and sign it). He turned out to be a friendly guy with a not so friendly price. A 20 minute taxi ride to our destination cost $40. We will not be calling him back for our return trip. Anyways it is now 12 and we made it to Las Avellanas Villas. This is the “luxury” portion of our trip. I say that term loosely because we will still be eating spaghetti for almost every meal. Essentially these villas are in a plot of land that doesn’t resemble the rest of the countryside. The plants and trees were all planted in specific formations around the villas for added privacy. There are five cabins on the lot and we were given number five, the one farthest away. The villa itself is great. We finally have space to put our clothes and our own kitchen. The deck has two hammocks which are perfect for accomplishing nothing during the day. The shower is unique too in that there is no roof over the top of it. (Just a screen – so you could essentially take a shower in the rain). From the hammock, you really can’t see anything but tons of trees and plants that were planted by the owners, it’s beautiful. The place was designed by a famous Costa Rican architect and it seems like he thought of just about everything. That’s the best I can do for a description until you can see the video for yourself.

So after we checked in to our villa, we spent the next couple hours relaxing and settling in. We* took naps (*we = Matt)/read in the hammocks for a couple hours. We then headed to the store and bought some cheap pasta for the next few days. We somehow ended up killing all the power in our villa though and ate semi-cooked noodles. Not a problem though because after lunch we headed to the beach. The road there is a boardwalk (you literally walk on boards nailed to posts above the marsh) through the marshes, but we ended up on a secluded beach on the Pacific side of Costa Rica. There were probably 10 people there total, but it was also raining.

After the beach we ate more noodles (expect this to be a trend in the next couple blogs) and are now trying to cook up some black beans. Why black beans you say? I think we are asking ourselves the same question right now. Supposedly they need to soak for 2 hours and cook for 2 hours. Aside from cooking the beans all night, we are probably just going to read and watch some TV. (We would relax on the hammock at night since even those have a light directly above each of them in the ceiling – what an architect – but the bugs are vicious and frogs keep scaring Austin).

Tomorrow morning we plan on going back to hang on the beach and check out Lola’s, a local restaurant that should have epic fruit smoothies. Pura Vida!!
(side note: as I (Matt) am writing this note, there are howler monkeys screeching outside our villa. They are only a couple feet tall, but have a loud growl. I have been practicing my howler monkey call the past few days, and it’s improving. They were eating some sort of fruit in the trees right outside of our villa, and we got a good view of them. One of the momma howlers was carrying her baby on her back. It was a great experience and one that would never happen in Minnesota)