Relaxation, darn it!
Sunday, November 12th, 2006So we arrived on Greyline, better known as the gringo bus, from Taramindo to Quepos. We left around 2 and got there around 8. I think the guy that sold us the tickets was smoking crack when he said it would take 4 hours. So of course we had no clue where we were staying so we wandered around and enquired at a few places. Then we took the easy route. We splurged and stayed at the Best Western. It was the best move we made yet. After the container stay for 3 nights having a real shower in a real room with air conditioning and our own tv. It was amazing. We went and had tex mex at this place down the street and then totally crashed out.
The next morning, back to reality and a cheaper place to stay. We found the Mar y Luna – kind of a weird thing – first off cold water shower which I was okay with but John had a little problem with (it kind of takes a while to get used to it) and it opened out into this courtyard with semi-open windows – let`s just say the privacy was a bit lacking. Nice owners though.
Anyway, our main purpose to coming down here in the first place was to see Manuel Antonio park. Well, we never got around to it. The first day we wandered around and went to the Internet Cafe.
The 2nd day we followed, once again, a cartoon map. But this one actually worked out pretty well. After getting dropped off by a taxi to some random hotel we walked down the road, saw a trail on the side of the road and followed it down to the Playa that we were actually looking for. Kind of amazing. John was dead-set on finding the lighthouse on the cartoon map but after talking to the security guard of the beach (I think something got missed in the translation because I`m not sure why a guard is needed on this tiny little beach – but it would have cost us $100 USD since it`s on private land. But the security guy took us on this walk up to this vista – no way we would have found it otherwise – and ended up on some private road. But nobody seemed to care that we popped out onto this private property and at the entrance to the road we saw white-faced monkeys in this tree – they were much cuter than the howler monkeys. After that we ended up at the main Playa in Manuel Antonio. We stayed there for a while and then headed back to town for a siesta.
The 3rd day we went to the beach again. We rented a couple of chairs and an umbrella so John`s white butt wouldn`t get totally burned. After a few hours where I just totally lazed and John was getting antsier and his head was hurting because of the wave noise – which I think is kind of funny considering the guy works in a computer lab with hundreds of buzzing computers all day – so we headed back to town for a cold shower and some time in this here internet cafe.
Not the most exciting of times, but we are trying to learn how to relax and all that business. Tomorrow we take the bus to San Jose and we`re planning on staying in Alajuela which is near the airport and closer to some sites we want to see including another Volcano, a town with a Belgium church and some other things.
JohnCin