Playa Venao
The first thing I remember is the ride there. It was a freezing, fume-filled bus and I had slept maybe 2 hours the night before. I had my ipod blaring, jamming out with myself in my little bus seat. As we got closer to our destination, everything started looking different-greener, and surprisingly void of trash on the side of the road (an eyesore everywhere else in Central America, the plastic bag epidemic is a world-wide disease. I don’t know why they would destroy their beautiful country like that…). At any rate, I remember thinking to myself that just because I had been traveling for so long, I still didn’t know what was ahead of us, and I had to let myself be surprised by what my travels had in store for me. And that’s the best way I could have prefaced our next destination, because Playa Venao blew me away.
Its one of those things that has become so special to me, it’s hard to put into words. I cried when I left, and I still feel a pang when I think about it. Here’s an excerpt from one of my travelogues: “Today we are in Playa Venao, possibly my favorite place yet. The beach is unlike any I’ve seen so far-black sand that sometimes looks like gold paint, unyielding storm-colored waves, places right under our feet that look like entire worlds seen from an airplane. I could stare at the sea forever, get lost in it and lose all pre-conceived notions of time and living. It’s been raining all day, just now starting to let up, soon we’ll go sink our feet into the earth and let our pulses become in sync with the tide…”
And let’s see, there were blankets of stars at night that we watched from the best seat in the house (lying flat on our backs in the middle of the completely dark road), fireflies, surfers, river hikes where monkeys were passing by right over our heads, a trampoline, sweet cats who cuddled in hammocks with us, a plethora of good food and smoothies, yoga every morning (not that I went every morning, but I could have), parties on the weekends….. I think the thing that best sums up the entire time for me was my afternoon jogs, where it was just me, my ipod, and the cows, and I would dance in the middle of the road with the biggest smile on my face that has ever existed.
Oh, and by the way this place is super cheap and awesome, and in 5 years the whole area is probably going to be overrun with hotels and condos, so I would suggest to anyone that they should see this awesome place before they die, or before it’s ruined. Oh, and I surfed! I was actually better at it than I thought I would be, but that still didn’t change the fact that it was pretty much 98% a wrestling match between me and the ocean, and 2% “surfing”. But that one wave……..totally worth it 🙂
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