(silvena) Hi guys -

Actually, excuse me, today i want to start with HELLO GIRLS AND WOMEN! Happy Woman´s Day! This holiday is much debated today and some say it is a remnant of the communist times, but i like it and i think we deserve to be pampered for one day :) So to all the women who are reading, enjoy it fully!

We have been in Costa Rica for 4 days already and you would think we have just been lying on the beach with a coctail with an umbrella, as in the movies, as my brother sugested :) but actually our Costa Rica experience until now has been quite intense, for several reasons.

Firstly, in order not to overload our luggage with books, and because we will be here for less than a week, we did not bring a lonely planet guide. Oh well, this makes travelling a bit harder so when we arrived in the capital San Jose we had to spend more than 45 minutes at the information desk at the airport where several young people were tryin to help us find a budget hotel but it was not so easy. We did in the end and the lady at whose Bed and Breakfast we stayed was extremely nice, prepared breakfast for us and did not stop talking to Michal when she understood he learned Spanish without a course (his Spanish is getting really good).

Our decision was that in Costa Rica we spend 4 days at one of its beaches and rest before Peru... The bus ride to the Pacific coast (170km) took 4 hours and the bus experience (from the bus station in San Jose to the actual bus or the road) was nowhere near as pleasant as in Mexico. We were climbing some mountains with lots and lots of all kinds of strange plants reminding us of Jurassic Park (filmed here) until we finally reached the coast.

They say you need to come to Costa Rica if you are a nature lover. and it is true. the landscapes of green mountains meeting the vast ocean are breathtaking. But when we were coming here somehow it did not occur to me that nature also meant animals. Many of them! And noone looking like anything we have in our countries. So it took me more than a few minutes (and a search for a new hotel with nets on the windows in the middle of the night) to recover from my first encounter with several of the smaller cousins of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs - lizards!!! noone seems to notice them here and they are everywhere, including on the walls of the rooms of our first hotel.

With our luck, the day we arrived, it started raining (in the dryest month of the year in Manuel Antonio!!!). So we were starting to reconsider our 4 days stay at the beach. There are too many tourists here and we were quite disappointed.

But after visiting the Manuel Antonio National Park today (and with the rain gone and a clear sky today), i dare to chane my mind. It is really amazing. Per the advice of some helpful Americans in San Jose, we started out early and entered the park (which borders the ocean) at 7am. And it was entirely worth it. By 1pm, and after walkin quite a few killometers among tropical vegetation, we had seen two types of monkeys jumping on trees, more iguanas (whom we already consider friends from Uxmal and i am no loner so afraid), some strange red and orange crab who lives in holes in the woods, and two other animals whose names i do not know (one looked like half dog, half termite eater of some kind, and the other was just a pile of fur on top of one tree), and of course many more of my friends the lizards, as well as we had seen some amazing views and swam in the ocean at some small far away beaches. Overall, it was a great experience. We have many pictures and will try to post them tomorrow because these computers are very slow.

All from me for today.
Going to look for this cocktail with an umbrella :)
S.