Friday afternoon, all five student teachers from the Country Day School (my three roommates, one other student teacher, and myself) left school in the middle of a downpour to make it just in time to the San Jose bus station for our 4:00 bus to Puerto Viejo. The bus was a large modern-ish Gray Hound, but without bathrooms and air conditioning. (Reminder: This is summer in a Central American country...That means it's warm!) I was lucky enough to sit by myself in a seat with nobody next to me, so I scooted to the window which allowed the air to blow right on my face the whole drive.
The drive was pretty pleasant for the most part. We drove through a cloudy rainforest before it got dark, which was beautiful! I was happy to have Kim's ipod to listen to some music too. The four hours went pretty quickly, though rationing water in the heat was quite a pain. The roads were in much better shape than I anticipated; however, the bus stalled 3-4 times and had a hard time restarting each time. We finally arrived in Puerto Viejo around 7:30, where we found a taxi to take us to our hotel, La Costa de Papito.
While at La Costa we stayed in a bungalow, where we had our own porch (complete with a large wooden table and chairs and a hammock), three beds and one bunk bed with blue zebra print sheets and mosquito nets, and a bathroom which had a border around the top open to outside. This was not my favorite part of the room, mostly because the toilet was black. Who would have known if something had crawled in there during the night?! We kept the lid shut and the door closed to the main room, but that would have been one major change I would have made!! Thankfully there were ceiling fans to help (albeit very little) cool things down. We stopped in the hotel dining room for supper and to catch up on all the water we couldn't drink on the bus because of the lack of bathroom.
Saturday morning we had breakfast at the hotel (rice and beans, pancakes, fresh fruit, coffee, and juice) and headed in to town. We had to get our bus tickets to come home and did a little looking in the shops. The rest of the morning, we spent on the beach. I've never felt such heat! I reapplied my SPF 50 sunscreen four or five times throughout our two hours. The beach was gorgeous. There are no hotels on most of Costa Rican beaches, so the background to the beach is all natural and untouched by human hands. It really reminds me of Jurassic Park, the way the trees are so thick and green. For lunch, we went back to the hotel and crashed for a few hours. The sun wiped us out! Around 2:00, we went back and stayed until sunset. It was so much more comfortable then! We watched some crabs and even saw a wild horse run by! We didn't do much actual swimming because of some strong rip tides (plus, you know me and fish...we DONT mix!) but we did a lot of wading in the water which was a stunning clear blue-green.
After a refreshing shower, we went back to the restaurant for supper. By this point, we were all low on cash and using any sort of card charged an extra 16%, so we continued to eat off the appetizer menu like we did for the two previous meals. Sunday morning found us back on the beach admiring God's creation for a few minutes before taking a taxi back to the town to catch our bus. After some confusion with our tickets (we needed to upgrade them because the main road was shut down ? [we still don't understand it all!]), we found the bus stop and waited in the shade under the hottest tent I've ever felt in my life. In fact, I found myself desiring to be out in to the sun just to be able to feel the breeze.
The 9:00 bus finally left the bus stop at 9:30 and we began our six hour trip home. You might be thinking 'Wait, the trip to Puerto Viejo only took 4 hours.' I was thinking the same, no worries. Just like the trip here, we rationed our water, not knowing if there would be any rest stops. Well, we ended up stopping more often than the first trip. We had two 15-minute breaks and then picked up various people along the road.
We also had a stop at a police barricade where we were all escorted off the bus. As the wise travelers we are, we brought our bags with us. [Make sure to do this when you travel! The girls in front of us didn't do this at any of the stops...Reminder: Saving your seats are not as important as your stuff!] Anyways, they asked the passengers to get out passports so they could be examined. Well, four of us had copies of our passports, but nobody had the actual passport. Sam didn't even have a copy of it. To add to matters, Costa Rica only allows tourists to stay for 90 days without a visa and three of our five girls are here past their 90 days. Thankfully, by only having the copy of the passports, the police officer was unable to see that the girls were here after their 90 days and allowed us all through (including Sam with just her driver's license).
All in all, it was a quick awesome weekend!
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