costa rica, day 3

"happy birthday, miss h.!!!" i think, as she's staring at me to get the fuck up already. she thinks it's really late, but of course we don't know this because the watch IS LOCKED IN THE DAMN SAFE with everything else.  well, turns out that it's only 8:15. which means 10:15 in nyc, yet 7:15 in my brain. (((yawn)))

we trek up to the kitchen area, where "mother teresa" makes us breakfast every day. btw, this daily ritual was a really great part of the trip, not only for the convenience factor, but to also catch up with the other couples staying at the lodge. (yes, it was all couples -- totally noah's ark.) all couples except for us, the faux lesbians. story of my life.

this is one of the few days that we planned to a 't', on account of it being the big 4-0 for miss h. *woot*!  welcome to my decade! tho it was admittedly a bit of a challenge having a schedule when we never had a clue as to what time it was --the only clock we had was in the car. i know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but just try it. i dare you to just try it.

first up on the agenda is the canopy tour, aka ziplining. this was also the day i woke up with crazy vertigo.  i had been feeling a bit loopy since landing in san jose, but chalked it up to lack of sleep/food/temperate weather/my usual airhead self. tho now it's day 3 and i'm starting to think something is seriously wrong with me. but i'm also not going to go all the way to costa rica just to be sick, or totally afraid of heights (which i am), so time to man up! 

 

our reservation isn't until 11:00, but since we have no idea what time it is we decide to leave -- figure even if we get there early there would be plenty of places to walk around and check out while we were waiting. also, spicoli told us that it was going to take about 15-20 minutes to get there. um, suffice it to say that we were wrong on both counts. left our hotel at 10:00 and got there at 10:05, and it turns out that there is nothing at the end of the road except the little canopy tour hut.  hmmm. decide to walk down to the beach and check it out, tho by this point i can barely walk a straight line. seriously, if i had been pulled over and given one of those drunk driving tests, i would have been thrown in the pokey for sure.

go down to la playa and it smells like dead fish.  sure enough, there is big fish carcass on the sand so i make miss h. take a picture of it.  (this is probably the only time super geek here didn't have her camera.) and i'm not really sure how the following actually transpired, but it went a little something like this:

 

1) miss h. takes off her flip flops and sets them down what seems like a pretty decent distance from the water

2) i do the same

3) miss h. wades into the water about ankle deep

4) i do the same

5) i see a silver flip flop in the water and wonder where it came from

6) one of us realizes that it's miss h's flip flop and we start laughing

7) i run to get mine and she is able to rescue one of hers

8) she realizes the other one isn't coming back, so walks into the water to get it

i must point out at this juncture that so far, all of our ventures into the ocean have taken forever -- meaning, the water never seems to get any deeper and you feel like you'd have to go out a couple hundred yards before it would even get up to your knees... HA! NOT THIS TIME!  because about two steps into her flip-flop-rescue mission, there is a ledge and poof!  there she went! suddenly she's about waist deep. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ooooh i know it was terrible, but i hadn't laughed that hard since the last time i smoked "the other helen" and watched wayne's world. ha ha ha ha! so of course i had to take a picture of her, but i was laughing so hard i could barely stop shaking long enough to take it.

after that bit of morning entertainment, we decide that we have plenty of time. and since it seems the only thing to do while waiting is to get into shenanigans, we decide to go back to the hotel and change. but this time we left at 10:55. ok, much better.

ziplining was AWESOME. there were just the two of us plus the two guides, so we got through the two-hour tour in 45 minutes. (i've talked to lots of people that have done it, and most got stuck in groups of 20 or 30. i realize now how lucky we were to not have to deal with that shit.)  especially since i was having a slight heart attack in the beginning. the vertigo didn't help, but man-o-man am i afraid of heights!  and to just jump off a ledge is so counterintuitive to what your body wants to do, but you just have to do it.  besides, the ledge is pretty sketchy, so in my opinion the sooner i got off of that thing the better.

i think we had about 9 platforms, and by the 3rd or 4th one we were HAULING ASS.  omg, so fun.  then one of the last cables was 500 meters long, and dipped down beneath some trees ... our guide told us to break at the trees but of course, the speed racer twins said fuck that!  so i almost took him out at the end ("tia! you didn't break at the trees, did you???" heh heh!) and two minutes later i watched miss h. do the same. he pretended to be 'mad' at us but i don't think he was. i think he'd rather have two speed demons than some 'fraidy cats that have to be rescued mid-cable.  good times.

back to the pool and sandra, then off to tropical latino for massages.  miss h. got the "body bliss" -- aka "the lesbian special" -- a four hand massage (yes, two girls), body scrub, shower and massage.  i went traditional and got a 90 minute massage. my room was open and overlooking the beach,  which i thought was wicked cool until i remembered that my head was going to be in the vice the entire time. anyway, i usually don't like girls rubbing my back (in case that isn't highly evident by this point) but this girl had hands like a man.  she also told me that she used to work at the grove.  yah, so much for getting away from it all.

we pay the girls $250, which leaves us $12,000 colones. that's about $24 dollars for you math majors. (ok, yes, i just had to whip out the calculator to cough up that number. pathetic.)  aidan is supposed to be back by 7:00, so we'll just have to go to dinner a bit later than our usual 'blue hair special' time of 6pm.

well!  we're back at the ranch, chatting with todd and stacy when todd mentions something about aidan not coming back until the next day.  WTF!?!?  we want to be annoyed at this point, but then again, is it HIS fault that the re-re's locked all of their dinero up? ugh. but we're tired and sweaty and hungry and from LA so of course we're annoyed. we are also all in agreement that his wife better come back in a full body cast, or something damn close, just so we know that it was all worth it.

back to the room to peruse the aidan-authored guide to mal pais dining.  decide upon a pizza place, since the description said "cheap and cheerful!"  tho i'm not really so sure what's "cheerful" about spending your 40th birthday dinner with only $24 ... "hmmm, 4 queso pizza... yummy...  oh, but it's $7,000 colones! can we afford it?  maybe if we split a water???"  

UM, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! it certainly makes for a great story now though. 

ha!

costa rica, day 2

aidan calls to tell us that he's not coming back for a few days, so he has "spicoli" give us $400. again, not his real name, but you know how bad i am with those things in english let alone a foreign language. (at least "spicoli" speaks english, unlike "gloria" and "mother teresa".) very happy to have money!  turns out that barely anyone one takes credit cards in mal pais -- and we certainly weren't getting carded -- so aside from my other lens, we're cool with the fact that we're not going to be getting into the safe any time soon.

drive thru mal pais/santa teresa and kept waiting for the town to actually start.  turns out that it never does and it's even smaller than we imagined. begin our journey looking for beach towels, which proves much harder than you'd think it would be in the surfing capital of costa rica. end up at the 360 surf shop and wake up the total stoner that works there. we ask him if he has beach towels, and he ponders that question for a few minutes. we find this quite funny as the store is the size of a closet.  he finally realizes that he has some -- four, to be exact -- then tells us that they are $15. $15!?!?  are you kidding me? we're in a third world country, for crying out loud. but we are also the dumb-ass tourists who just really want to get to the beach so we take them.  he then proceeds to tell us that he used to live in venice beach, and that i look familiar. ha ha ha ha. tho admittedly i find it necessary to check in with rainman real quick, just to make sure that he isn't some drunken grovel from my past. ok, he' not. whew.

go to the beach right down the road from the surf shop. it's beautiful!  and crazy to me how the trees go right up to the sand, and how vast the area is.  but it's humid. really humid.  you can feel it in the air, and also rising up from the sand. i've never experienced anything like it. i race into the water asap. it looks a lot like the pacific ocean up in my 'hood, but it's much warmer. so we hang out there for a bit, then mosey down to the tropical latino hotel to have lunch.  the bill comes and we're like $1,000 colones short.  yes, i know you are wondering how we could be $2 short on the bill when we just got $400 from aidan.  well we didn't think we were going to need all of that money and didn't want to bring it to the beach.  we also didn't know that towels were going to cost $30.

so the waitress covered us (do you see a theme emerging?) with the promise that we'd be back the next day. actually, she didn't seem to care one way or another, but by this point we're not feeling like gainfully employed girls from the US of A.

back to the moana lodge for daily ritual of hanging out with sandra and the crabs. (oh yes, sandra is the owner's dog, and she's pretty damn cuters.) walk past the room next to us and see that they are setting it up for the next guest... flowers and champagne chilling... uh oh, you know what that means: NEWLYWEDS. great. just who we want to be next door to.

cruise up to the pool and after a little bit, i think i'm starting to doze off from the heat and the pilsens when i hear this crazy noise. you know, the kind of noise that you think you just imagined hearing, but one look at miss h's face and i realize that it's for real.  the trees are rustling so we look up to find monkeys. lots of them! come to find out that they are howler monkeys, which is a pretty accurate description of that random noise we had just heard. try to take pictures of them, but without my big lens they just end up looking like coconuts.

on the way back to the room we meet the aforementioned newlyweds, stacy and todd. they seem very nice. they also look SPENT. but we can appreciate the toll the little journey to mal pais takes on you. we're also figuring that they are going to be asleep by 8:00.  sweet!

went to beija flor for dinner, which was quite yummy, probably because the chef was from nyc. (either that or it was the 7 mango margaritas we quickly consumed/hoovered.) however, eventually all of those tasty beverages caught up with us and shenanigans ensued upon our return back to the room.  nothing any of ya'll would find funny, i'm sure, but i will say that it involved a lot of bug killing and list making.

costa rica: a special shout out to the crabs

allow me to preface this post by saying that i like to think that i'm not super girly. yah yah yah i have fake hair and a 3-series, but i can usually man-up when the situation calls for it. well not in this case, sister. 

good god, these little fuckers creeped me out to no end. i don't know if it's because there were, oh, about a million of them, or if it's because they had evil, painted-on faces that seemed to look at you and say, "hey, i'm going to get 49 of my other friends and come back and eat you alive!" i think mostly tho it's because i'm completely scarred from childhood, from growing up in so cal with a pool, where you would come up from under water to find a ginormous potato bug staring you in the eye. eeeeeeeeeek. they were AWFUL! they looked like little old bald men, with all of their veins popping out in that clear forehead of theirs. sick, totally fucking sick.

ok, back to the crabs:  i feel guilty using a picture from my google search, but by the time my zoom lens was no longer being held hostage in the safe, i didn't see too many of them.  and there was NO WAY i was going to get any closer than i already was. we would either see them running around, or even worse, hear them scurrying about in the plants.  ok, logically you realize that they are not going to come up and get you, but when you are outnumbered 500:1 it seems totally and completely possible.

we were lounging by the pool that first afternoon, and i saw one. then ten. then a hundred.  then sandra chased one into the pool, which admittedly was pretty damn funny. (immediate note to self: always check pool for crabs before swimming.)  miss h. was laughing at me for being such a puss about it, but what can i say -- she had never seen a potato bug!  but my breaking point came when i was lying on my lounge, looking up at the wall, and i saw one peek over the edge. "fuck, it's going to jump!" so i was keeping my eye on him when i saw another one, and like before, suddenly there was an entire army.  by this point i was convinced that they were going to band together in a suicide pact and jump down all at once.  freaking out, i get off of my lounge chair only to remember that there were just as many on the ground.  (((sweat beads))). i'm officially in hell.

as we drove to dinner that night we ran over a few in the driveway, which was fine by me because they were obviously not on any 'endangered species' list. but by the time we got to the road, there were THOUSANDS. i shit you not!  thousands of them trying to cross the road (going i'm not sure where), so suffice it to say that i'm just really glad that we didn't decide to walk. can you imagine!?!? i probably would have had a coronary and dropped dead on the spot.

so while i was getting this sick and twisted pleasure by knocking the crab population down by 50%, miss h. felt bad (but she's always much nicer than i am, as you know.) so the next night i offered to drive, just to see how many i could take out. i felt like i was playing asteroids! wicked fun!

tho as the week went on, there were less and less of them. turns out that it had rained the night before we got there, and that apparently brings them out in droves.  so they were all running down to the ocean to mate (at least they had a plan, right?) that night we saw them on the road. then as it got hotter, they went into hiding, which i was obviously quite happy about. tho by this point my zoom lens and i had been reunited and i really just wanted to get one good shot. oh well.

the best part of this whole new crab fear of mine probably came when we were ziplining, and i said to our guide, "crabs! yuck! no me gusta!" he laughed at my pathetic spanglish, and was the one who explained to us why they were currently out in full force.  then he said, "well, be careful. a friend of mine was just visiting me, and when he got back home ..."

"omg, there was one in his suitcase!!!!"

"no, there were FIVE."

(GASP) "you mean ... they didn't die on the plane?!?!?!?"

"oh no, tia. THEY DON'T DIE."

needless to say, i re-packed and re-checked my bag about 10 times before we left.

costa rica, day 1

friday night. i get to LAX around midnight and there were like a MILLION people in my terminal. wtf?!? are all of these people REALLY going to costa rica? turns out that they are, but i bypass the hideous check in line since i'm carrying on my carefully-weighed duffle bag (24.5 lbs, to be exact.)  however, the security line is just as hideous, and at the end of it i got the lecture about "too many fluids". (oh yes, totally forgot that terrorists make bombs out of SPF 15, right? ugh.) so back downstairs just to go through the whole thing again. at least they put me on a direct flight this go around, instead of having a layover in el salvador.  (granted, i've never actually been to el salvador, but it sounded pretty sketchy. at least not someplace that i wanted to hang out for a few hours at the crack of dawn.)

by the time i get back upstairs, all of the stores are closed. so no water/treats/magazines for me. boo! i also don't have any xanax.  god, this is going to be one long-ass flight. never fell asleep, but once we land in san jose i'm too excited to be on vacation to care.  

meet miss h. at the baggage claim, where my bag took wayyyy too long to come down...  beginning to panic that this trip is starting off with bad ju ju and hope it's not a sign of things to come. bag finally appears and we walk over to the other airport. yes, WALK.  sansa airlines is in a little building next door to the main airport. and it was hot. HOT HOT HOT. in hindsight tho i realize that this was nothing compared to how it was going to be by the end of the week... 

ok, not that i was looking forward to taking the little JFK jr. plane in the first place, but there is nothing like sitting there for three hours, waiting, giving you plenty of time to build up the anxiety level. thankfully miss h. had a little box of treats, but seriously, at that point i needed about 50mgs.  and by far the most reassuring part of the whole situation was watching a few mechanics work on what looked like our plane; they were scratching their heads, looking very confused (concerned?) as they called over the supervisor.  (((gulp))). miss h. has a picture of me at this point, where it looks like i'm just impatiently awaiting our departure, but the truth is that i was actually contemplating my imminent death. besides, i had been hoping that if the plane went down, it would be the one at the END of the trip.

we eventually get on the flight and survive the 30 minutes. coming in for a landing at tambor was hilarious (which is one way to put it, i guess) because the "runway" is really just a landing strip, a glorified dirt road in the middle of nowhere. omg. what have i gotten myself into?

land at the "airport" and get a taxi to the rental car place, then rental car + dirt road + 1 hour = moana lodge. oh wait. while we we driving there we saw an accident, a few suv's pulled over on the side of the road, with this woman basically lying in a ditch. a man was holding her hand while another guy was on a cell phone, presumably calling for help.  of course our immediate thought was "oh, silly & lame tourists!" quickly followed by "there is nofuckway we're getting on a ATV on these roads."

ok, back to moana lodge. finally!  it's so cute, and even if it hadn't been i think we were both pretty much done with the traveling at this point. the woman at the front didn't speak english, but was somehow able to convey to us that the owners weren't there at the moment because there was an accident. YES, THAT ACCIDENT. turns out the woman in the ditch (vicki) was one of the owners, and that her husband (aidan) had just left to go take her to the hospital. jeeesus.

anyway, "gloria" (not her real name, but close enough) gets us into our room and we are in there for about 5 minutes before we change, grab a few pilsens, and run up to the pool.  ahhhhhhhhh, vacation.

after a little swim, it's time to take a shower and get some food -- needless to say we are both starving by this point. but ahhh, just one little problem:  miss h., in her beer & xanax fog, locked all of our stuff in the safe.  money, passports, credit cards, money .... fuuuuuck.  track down gloria and in the most basic of espanol, manage to tell her that 1) we are starving to death and 2) we have no dinero. god bless gloria, because she went and got us $130 (presumably out of her own money). we only felt guilty for about 30 seconds before we said "MUCHAS GRACIAS!" and jumped back in the car.  had a yummy dinner, and still had $80 left. plenty to tide us over because aidan was coming back the next day, right? HA!

costa rica: the novel

i'm back!  yah, i know i kept warning ya'll that i was going to get a job as a bartender down there and never return, but i think i changed my mind re: that little plan on or around day 2...  i also had visions of american express hiring a bounty hunter to come track my ass down.

i will (eventually) be posting a day-by-day breakdown of our trip for all of you curious georges -- or just for the peeps that are super bored at work -- but for now i can tell you that costa rica is pretty damn cool!  mainly because aside from the journey to the tambor aeropuerto, we never went more than 15 miles or so away from our hotel, yet each beach looked like an entirely different country. it's a really chill place and beyond relaxing. the water is warm and the food can be pretty tasty -- and cheap.

however, i do not recommend going in april!!!  it's the hottest month of the year @ 97 degrees and about 100% humidity, which needless to say is almost unbearable. then apparently it rains like 25" in the month of october alone, so most of the resorts are closed.  sounds like the time to go is december through february, with january being ideal. i would also suggest either spending about 4-5 days in one town (since there's not that much to do), or extend your trip to a few weeks, deal with the ambitious inter-country travel, and go to 3 or 4 different places. there is so much to see, and the variety would make the trip even that much better.

also, no matter how much you read about the roads beforehand, you will still NOT be prepared to actually DRIVE on them. omfg. dusty, rocky, bumpy ... crazyness.  i don't think i ever went higher than 3rd gear, and even that was pushing tolerable (as miss h. will probably attest to.) then there are the crabs that look like like little old men, and the sketchy JFK plane that gets you from san jose to tambor... all of these fun little details are reasons why i'll have to post about each day in detail. (because for not doing much, we sure did a lot... well, at least it felt that way to us!) 

stay tuned!

/t$