Montezume, Mal Pais and Santa Teresita

Since our last blog entry so much has happened. First, we took a drive north of San Ramon to La Paz, a very remote place at the end of a windy dirt road. La Paz has a beautiful stream full of fish and is surrounded by cloud covered mountains. The views during the drive were amazing. We also saw two vivid quetzals, a very rare and hard to find bird.

On Friday morning we left the cool mountains to drive to the coastal town of Puntarenas, where we caught a ferry to the Nicoya Peninsula. We waited for about 2 hours to drive our car onto the ferry. The ferry ride was 1 hour long and as we arrived in Paquera we saw a beautiful sunset over the green hillside. From Paquera, we drove 45 km south to the beach town of Montezuma. We ended up driving the entire way in the dark on windy dirt roads dotted with pot holes. When we got to Montezuma we were happy to have the drive behind us. We parked the car and got a room at a small hotel in the center of town. Montezuma is definitely a party town. Outside of our balcony you could hear drums, laughing and of course many cerveza bottles being opened.

We went to bed early and woke up at sunrise for a walk on the beach. The beaches at Montezuma are spectacular. There are very few people and the water is 75 degrees. We hiked a few miles with a stray dog by our side and had cafe con leche on a shady part of a beach. After a swim in the water, we hiked back to Montezuma and hit the road south to Mal Pais.

We drove to the last town on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, the road ends at the Pacific Ocean. The 10 km drive was on a very rough dirt road. The drive was worth it though. We found a jungle cabina tucked into the lush hillside. The cabina resembled a lavish tree house and we felt like we were part of swiss family robinson. We were in the canopy of the rainforest and we could see the howler monkeys swinging around the trees. We spent the past few days hiking and swimming on the beaches of Mal Pais. We also went to Santa Teresta, which is a well known surfing area. That beach really reminded us of San Diego because there were so many surfers. We went for a brief dip in the water next to some boogie boarders and didn´t notice that the tide was getting pretty high. When we got back to our stuff, Rich found one of Michelle´s shoes floating in the ocean and the other was no where to be found. Needless to say, Michelle was hopping back to the car on one foot.

We had some really good pizza for dinner and a couple of Imperials and when we got back to our jungle bungalow, we realized that we weren´t alone, there were dozens of half foot-long grasshoppers, lizards, one large mean looking cockroach and a scorpion-spider thing that had pinchers and long antennae. We tried to exterminate the best that we could but there were too many that we couldn´t reach on the ceiling. Before we put the mosquito net up, a fat brown worm landed on Rich! When we finally got the net up, it started to thunder and lightning. It rained buckets of water, the hardest we have ever experienced. We laid in bed, covered by our mosquito net, with rain pouring on the tin roof, tree branches landing on our roof and watched the lighting out of our window. What a night, it wasn´t for the faint-hearted.

Today we are heading back toward San Ramon to stay with our Tico family for a few nights. Instead of riding the ferry, we are planning to drive across a new bridge which is further up the Nicoya Peninsula. If we have time we will go to Arenal to swim in the thermal waters. Tomorrow is the Costa Rica/U.S. Copa de Oro soccer match so we´ll be watching that game and sipping on some cervezas.