Costa Rica, the Miniseries, vol. 2

After about four days in Costa Rica by myself, I decided that I couldn’t handle another night of going to bed a 8 o’clock and waking up before sunrise without an alarm, so I got up the gumption to talk to some people I had crossed paths with on the beach and later in a bar. They happened to be a group of about eight Argentineans and two Spaniards, all about the same age as me. We hung out for a good while at a reggae bar, dancing and drinking among a mostly local crowd. With our numbers quickly diminishing due to a slumber induced by a long day in the sun, the four of us left dancing in the club headed down to the beach for a night-time dip. The half-awake guard and his long-distance flashlight attempted to put a damper on our fun, but the same samurai stealth skills noticeably lacking the previous week when I almost cut my thumb off with a pocket knife (see previous post) were able to keep us under the radar of this buzz-kill beach-sentry. This motley crew of European, North and South American blood headed back to the bar to dry off with some more reggae beats. Despite the fact that by this point we were the only white people in the bar, we continued to prove that while white men may not be able to jump, some of us can certainly dance. All in all, a great night with a much lower risk index than walking along the highway at night.

From Cahuita I caught a couple buses from Cahuita through San José out to Puntarenas, a seedy coastal town along the Pacific coast where a couple Peace Corps volunteers who I had previously contacted are living. Puntarenas was a good time with two really chill volunteers, Kelley and Marianne, and was a good opportunity to get to see the Peace Corps side of Costa Rica beyond the relative glitz and glamour of the tourist traps. Then, on the bus up to Liberia to meet up with my family, I crossed paths with two Pennsylvanians living in Costa Rica who had just left a shady situation where they had been hired to teach English to businesspeople yet were curiously being lodged in a discotheque-meets-whorehouse.

This wild parrot apparently figured out that if you hang out at touristy places and talk that people will givey you lots of food. This was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Whenever poeple would laugh at it, the parrot would imitate their laugh, which would make them laugh more, making him imitate them even more.

So that big piece of leaf in the picture is being held up and drageed along by a little tiny ant that you can't even see.

The camera wouldn't focus on the spider, but the spot where i've added emphasis in the top right is a huge spider I almost walked into in the Cahuita National Park area.

Like the parrot, as you walk deeper into the National Park area, there are monkeys just chilling all over the place and while they don't like to get too close to people, they defintely don't keep too much distance.

A camouflaged crab, waiting for unsuspecting prey.

A hermit crab taking a stroll down a branch.

A totally abandoned stretch of beach about a mile into the national park. These beaches could have perfectly been the set of Castaway. Really beautiful and really secluded.

So, as you can tell, the wildlife was abundant in Cahuita, and all these pictures were literally from about an hour or two in the national park total. This was definitely my favorite part of Costa Rica, and somewhere I'd love to go back to. Check it out if you're in Costa Rica someday.