Having spent the last six or so weekends beach hopping I felt I had a good solid handle on the criteria for my last Central American beach weekend: alone, close and tranquil. I was able to achieve all three goals and had a fabuloso weekend!

Since so many of my weekends had started out with five and six hour travel times I knew for certain I didn't want to spend that much time on a bus. I did a little research and asked my mama's advice and settled on the beaches of the southern point of Puntarenas. Previously I'd gone as far as Samara, but had heard great things about Montezuma and other beaches in the area. Friday after school I took a bus from San Jose to the town of Puntarenas on the right side of the map.

I was greeted in Puntarenas by one of the most stunning sunsets I've seen...and I've seen a LOT of breathtaking sunsets here. I only regret I wasn't able to stop the bus and run out and find some sand to sit on, but I stuck my head as far out of the bus window as possible and even took a picture so you could enjoy it with me.

I spent the night at a not-so-cheap hotel ($20...that's a lot here, but there wasn't much choice) the upside being it was super clean, had a/c and cable. Cable! Sure the movies were 13 years old but they were in English!!! The next morning, Saturday, I rose at 6am and walked the four blocks to the ferry stop. The town of Puntarenas used to be hoppin until other towns further down the coast blossomed into tourist havens. Now the town is pretty run down and used mainly as a sleep over for people taking the morning ferry.

This was the first time I've ridden a ferry in a location other than Massachusetts, and the experience was mostly the same except the scenery was better, everyone on the boat was latin and we all drank beer. While I was buying my ticket for the ferry I asked a nice tico young man behind me a question about the beach I was heading towards. He politely answered back and then asked me a question in English. Thinking he was merely being polite I assulted him further with my Spanish. As we conversed this was for a while, me in Spanish and he in English, I finally asked him where he was from. "Canada". Oh. I guess I can drop the Spanish thing, huh?! It was funny. His name was Will from Edmonton. Having an English father, Costa Rican mother and Canadian citizenship made him the most trans-continentially diverse person I've met to date.

Here's the line cueing up for the ferry (check out the guy who impresses the chicks by wearing a lot of hats at once)...

While Will and I were talking and waiting in line for the ferry I was astounded to see two people I knew walking towards me. Neal met Meg and Nick, a mother/son team, while flying from Spokane to Dallas. Meg and Nick were going to Costa Rica too, after a stop-over in Florida. When Neal and I were in the caribbean we ran into Meg and Nick (what are the chances?!) at the bus stop and shared a nice meal with them talking about our travels and marveling at the coincidence. Well how about the freaking chances that Meg and Nick would also be taking the 8:30am ferry to the small point of Puntarenes?! I hollered at them and we all embraced, talking more about what had happened in the two weeks since I'd last seen them. The four of us hopped on the ferry and our gabbing made the hour ride fly by.

Will's in the back, Nick and Meg are in the front...

The view was nice as we manuevered through the little islands that dot the waters between the mainlands.

And of course in order to fit in we enjoyed the traditional tico breakfast of Imperial and granola. Well the granola part might have been our influence...

The mainland we were pulling up to was exactly what I wanted to see...green, secluded and beachy.

While on the ferry I told Will I was heading to the beach town of Montezuma for a little R&R, but he moved me to reconsider by dropping the loathsome word "tourists". He said Montezuma had that unshakable sickness of tourism and that he was meeting up with a group of two Swiss gals and an Austrailian dude whom he also just met along the way and they were going to Santa Teresa and then Mal Pais...two beaches located in the remote Southwestern point of the tip. Sounded good to me! The four of us headed on the same bus for about thirty minutes, then Meg and Nick got off and Will and I traveled for the next twenty minutes to the town of Cobano. From Cobano we had to get to Santa Teresa and had two options: the totally touristy way of hiring a cab for like $12 (no thank you), or the totally cool tico way of hitchin a ride (hell yeah!).

So once our feet hit the pavement our thumbs went out and it wasn't all that long before a family picking up supplies at the hardware store in town gave us a ride in the back of their truck. That's Will hitchin himself up there. Thank GOD no one was photographing me from behind trying to hike my backpacked self into that freaking truck.

We were joined in the truck by two furry friends and one tico friend...

The road was, of course, unpaved. But also I imagine this road has had the dubious distinction of winning the Most Potholes on One Road Award for the entirety of Costa Rica. Of course the guy driving the truck was used to it and his answer was to tackle the road at top speed and we were left to try to hang on. He may have also gotten a little kick out of playing "scramble the gringos"...I would've if I were him.

All I did was my very best to hang on, it was hellafied fun though!!! (Look sympathetically at the cut on my left knee acquired during my not-so-graceful truck entrance)

That family dropped us off at one junction, then we caught another ride (INSIDE a car this time) to our final destination. Santa Teresa was little more than a long, muddy road dotted with occasional sodas and hotels. The beaches were just what I wanted, though...long, lovely and no one but me and the surfers.

So as I said the entirety of Santa Teresa was seen by a trip down the long road.

But we managed to stumble upon Will's friends and they took us to the cabina/camp site they were staying at. What a great place!

Zenida's was a combination of camping ($3) and cabinas ($10) located directly on the beach and inhabited mainly by a campground of hard core surfers looking only for a way to make their money extend as long as possible.

Of course I, not being the EXTREME hard core type, opted for the nice cabina with an actual bed which I thought was lovely. Two windows opened on either side of the bed where you could see the ocean or let it lull you to sleep. I liked the cabina very much.

And as you walk a few hundred feet down from the cabina you come on to the village of tents.

And here is standing on the beach looking back up into the campground and the cabina behind it.

Some people were there for a few nights or a few weekends, some people (like the guy in the extensive tarp room the size of a small house) had more permanent plans.

At the fringe of the campground before you reached the water was a grouping of hammocks. Ohhhhh....I love hammocks. I've purchased two hammocks that I'm bringing home with me and lord knows what I'll do with them but I sure do love a good hammock.

And so, take a good look at this particular hammock...

...because I spent the next two days lying in it and either reading or watching surfers. During the long weekend we hooked up with other groups of people, one group from Texas, other Austrailians, and at night we'd have fires. But during the day there was an endless supply of Imperial and sodas close by to get a bite to eat, and so I spent two days reclined in a hammock swaying in the ocean breeze and getting my final fill of Pacific Coast sunsets. It was just how I wanted to say goodbye to my weekends in Central America....quietly, a little sadly but mostly hugely appreciative of this wonderful, peaceful, friendly little country.

At times I feel like I'm just not getting enough of a cultural experience and so I like to mix it up by going to an opera sung in Italian, set in Japan, subtitled in Spanish, shown in a European theater located in Central America. THEN AND ONLY THEN do I feel like I'm getting a good experience!

Last night some girlfriends and I went to see Madame Butterfly playing at the beautiful Teatro Nacional in San Jose. It was a chance to get dressed up, put makeup on for the first time in six weeks, have a nice dinner and go to the theater. It was stupendous!

Lindsay and I were lookin pretty snappy, and believe me we all fawned over each other. We were wearing clothes that in the US would be standard fare, but in our subculture of Tevas and tank tops we were rollin high!

Before the opera we all had dinner at the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, which is in the same plaza as the theater. The restaurant was open air but replete with chandeliers, china and the works. Having depended on $1 lunches at local sodas this looked like unparalleled elegance! We were reveling in it.

This is the entrance of the Gran Hotel Costa Rica.

Look...even a guy playing the piano!

We had a lovely dinner, I had sea bass in garlic sauce and shared a bottle of German white wine with Lindsay. We all thoroughly enjoyed the American style food.

At 7:00 we crossed the plaza to the theater. It was absolutely georgeous! Built in the 1870s it was built to mirror the European style theaters and art houses the Costa Ricans had seen in their recent trips there as they built trade relations. Recall that Costa Rica obtained their first printing press in the early 1830s, so culture was slow to develop and when it did it was largely borrowed from the Europeans. The theater is small but divine.

The inside is full of marble sculptures and rich red velvets with gold guilding...

And the opera itself was wonderful to watch, a timeless story of course. The costuming was great, our seats were fantastic and the orchestra was top notch!

We had a great night all around, it was a wonderful experience!!

I have felt fear. Well, before today I thought I'd felt fear....ghosts, the aftermath of scary movies, aloneness, near accidents, standard stuff. What a lightweight...I had no idea what REAL fear felt like.

Until today.

Today a group of us went bungee jumping. What I didn't know before I got there was that we were bungee jumping off the highest locale in all of Northern, Central and South Americas....a 250 foot drop off a bridge in the middle of nowhere. For perspective, a 25 story building. The top of it.

I watched people get up on the platform, watched them jump off screaming and come up laughing. I was informed that the company we were using was the only one in Central America to use both regular safety gear and backup safety gear...no way anything could go wrong. They'd done 22,000 jumps over the years and not one death. Good odds! In theory. I am telling you people that when you are standing on a rusty bridge 250 feet in the air and you look over to the raging river below it will drop your stomach out of your feet to think of lurching towards it at uncontrollable speed.

Here is the bungee site as we approached it..

...and here's a picture looking over the edge of the bridge (that's a tiny, tiny person at the end of the long blue cord on the right)

I'm telling you right now that the moment I looked over the edge of the bridge I did NOT want to bungee jump any longer. Nope, no desire. None. However my girlfriends there wanted me to sign up with them and everyone was doing it and, well, you know how peer pressure can be. So I filled out the paperwork and found my zen place and kinda zoned out about it.

I was chattin with friends, hanging out, and watching other people fall over the edge. It was kinda fun!

Fun until they called my name. Seriously, when they called me over to suit up I was like, "Me? You want ME to go now? I have to do this too?!" I wasn't nervous, I was scared and had a deep and growing feeling of NOT wanting to do it.

But I got suited up....

...got ready, took the final picture....

....and walked out to the platform.

At this point I knew, really knew what it felt like to be so scared I would have wet myself if I'd been able to even do that. I was paralyzed, I've never been that scared. The guide was trying to talk me through it, seeing that I hadn't yet been able to peel my fingers off the metal support bar. I tried, I really did, to let go but every cell of my body screamed at me to get the hell off the platform!

So I did.

And I have to report that the pure white-hot blast of unabashed JOY and HAPPINESS and DELERIUM I felt when I stood on solid pavement rivaled the high any of those yahoos experienced on their bungee jump!

And so, at the end of this story I don't have any kickass pictures like this...

....only this picture representing pure relief.

There's a major part of Costa Rica I hadn't seen yet, and a part I was saving for Neal's visit: the infamous Caribbean side. Infamous because it could just as well be a completely seperate country for all it has in common with the Costa Rica I'd experienced up to that point.

Yesterday was el Dia de Independencia for the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica. Way back in the 1800s Guanacaste used to belong to Nicaragua even though they were attached to Costa Rica. The people of Guanacaste, seeing how laid back and fun the ticos were, wanted to get in on that and so they took a vote and in the mid 1850s became a part of Costa Rica. And so this past weekend was a huge celebratory weekend for all of Guanacaste, not that the Costa Ricans need more of an excuse to fiesta.

This past weekend was a pre-planned group excursion to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. This particular rainforest is one of Costa Rica's largest and most popular. It straddles the Continental Divide at 4,662 ft above sea level.

So I left off with stories of Tamarindo, so first I'll finish the story of Sally's trip and then I'll take you deep into the heart of the rainforest.

Last Monday, the morning after we returned from a whirlwind trip to Tamarindo, Sally and I got up early to head up to Volcan Poas, the closest (and coolest) inactive volcano around. This map will show you where this volcano is in proximity to Alajuela where I live.