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Days 17-21: Tamarindo and Jaco

Posted by Erik Frey Sun, 03 Apr 2005 01:34:00 GMT

Out of school and with few actual plans, I spent the next week tracing my way from beach to beach down the Pacific coast. If the previous week had marked my first steps, this one I charged forward into complete abandon. My only concerns were sun, surf, good people, and cheap eats.

They were great times, but in retrospect it makes for sort of boring, aimless Kerouac-y writing.

day 17

Took the bus to Tamarindo. Showed up and scoped out the town for a while until finding a spot to camp down by the beach. Admittedly, the place I picked to camp was a bit suspect, and I considered packing up and finding another spot. I’d set up camp right in the middle of a colony of drug dealers and odd, cult-like Rastafarians. A number of guys visited trying to sell me pot. One was a Colombian guy with shadowy, deep-set eyes. “Wow… that sure is a nice tent,” was his opening line when he walked up. I smiled nervously. In the end I decided they were all rather nice drug dealers; I put my trust in humanity and stayed put.

That evening I walked over to a spot in town called the “Witch’s Rock Surf Camp”. I decided to go in because a sign outside advertised “NACHOS AS BIG AS YOUR ASS”. As always, I was sitting there for perhaps 20 minutes before I found myself invited over to a table full of people. We all talked for a while and then hit the foosball table. Foosball is apparently a game that makes me talk a lot of trash.

We walked over to a lively bar at the end of town, had a few drinks and met many more people. Although I somewhat obliviously navigated myself through conversations with a number of people that night, the only two that stand out are a professional jeweller of the stars that described to me how awful of a client J-Lo was, and a couple of blotto Canadians who were trying in slapstick fashion to take home two women they’d just met.

I came home late and was quite pleased to find all my belongings waiting right where I’d left them. Had a terrible night sleeping; there was no breeze, so it was unbearably hot and the bugs were biting.

day 18

Woke up early with the noble intention of spending the whole day learning to surf. I now know that you can’t learn to surf in a day; which is not such an absurd assumption! Most sports you can at least learn the basics of in a day. Surfing is not one of those sports – at least not for me.

I dragged a longboard out to the beach and crashed and rolled and tumbled and spluttered for a good three or four hours. I tried to watch what other people were doing; I think this frustrated me more than helping. Nevertheless, on two occasions I did manage to stand up on the board for a good few seconds before toppling over. I dragged myself back to town in the afternoon: exhausted, but pleased.

There I found myself talking to a guy at the checkout line of a supermarket. We were having quite an engaging conversation, and then he mentioned he was from Vail, Colorado. I began, “Vail? I went to a wedding once in…” but trailed off. I looked at him. Then I said,

“Have we had this conversation already?”

“Were you the guy who went to a wedding in Aspen? You were the best man or something?”

The story seemed familiar to him. We backtracked and found that we had both been in Bahia Portrero the week before. After a little more piecing together of facts, we surmised that we must have met one night at Las Brisas. We chalked it up to part curious coincidence, part too many beers. In that vein he told me to read the Celestine Prophecy; naturally I told him to read Cosmic Trigger.

Found the Swiss guy I’d met the night before at the bar. We ended up trading books and talking for a while about nerdy computer stuff.

While having dinner that evening, I ran into the two Canadians I’d seen from the bar the night before. I asked them how their hot pursuit had turned out, and in varying degrees of delicacy they explained to me that they had been more or less shot down. Nonetheless, we had a memorable conversation over casados about women. They quoted three golden rules for meeting women that they’d learned from The Tao of Steve:

• Be desireless.
• Be excellent.
• Be gone.

They described each rule in full. It was actually quite interesting. I could tell they’d really thought it all through. They invited me out to a little cabina they’d rented for a month out in St. Teresa. They planned to do nothing but body surf during the day and try to meet women at night. It was a vaguely tempting proposition, but I ended up passing.

I spent the night in a palatial hotel room (with my own bathroom!), which was welcome after the awful night of camping. That night I spent the most I’d ever spend on a room in Costa Rica – $17.

day 19

Threw my pack together and took the noon bus out of Tamarindo. I couldn’t decide whether to hit Montezuma, Manuel Antonio, or Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast next. I figured I’d let the bus schedule decide. I arrived back at Liberia in the late afternoon, walked over to the giant wooden board listing bus times, and heard a voice behind me say, “Oh no, not you again?”

I turned around and found Dan standing right behind me. He’d just come down from Nicaragua as they were beginning a country-wide transportation strike. What are the odds? We both agreed his timing was impeccable.

“So where you headed?” I asked.

“Well I was thinking of checking out Jaco. I heard it’s got some nice beaches. You should come.”

“Isn’t that on the way to Manuel Antonio?”

“Yup.”

I thought about it for a minute. “That bus over there?”

“Yup.”

“Sure! Why not.”

We climbed aboard a packed bus and made it to Puntarenas in the evening, and ended up having to overnight there. Puntarenas is the second largest city in Costa Rica. It’s a seedy, dirty, but otherwise nondescript industrial port town. We dropped our bags in a cheap hotel, then wandered the streets a bit, found the docks, and eventually ended up at a cheap joint for fried chicken. I got into an arguement with the lady behind the counter because she picked out a leg piece with a giant hole in it.

The situation was resolved peacefully.

day 20

Took the 11am bus to Jaco. I had been warned away from the town by both guidebooks and other travelers, but found the place quite nice. If anything, the fact that I saw much fewer guidebook-glued tourists was already a plus over Tamarindo. The view here was prettier, too: stunning rainforest headlands framed each end of the beach.

Dan and I found a decent hostel called Chuck’s Cabinas. Met an interesting crowd: two guys from San Diego named Adam and Darren, a Russian/Israeli girl named Sonia, and a curiously standoffish British guy named Adam who told some great stories about travelling all around Africa after he warmed up.

Spent the afternoon at the beach with Dan, body-surfing and getting furiously pummeled by the waves.

That evening, Sonia suggested we all play a drinking game called Edward 40-Hands. I won’t say much except that the game involved taping a 40-ounce bottle of beer to each hand. All sorts of drunk carousing ensued. Afterwards we wandered over to ladies’ night at the Monkey Bar. Got to talk with Sonia a bit. Interesting girl! Saw Darren getting down on the dance floor with a midget. He told me later that she was Italian. “You know, ” he slurred to me at one point, “man… little people are cool.”

That night, Darren was arrested for urinating in public.

day 21

Started the day with a healthy breakfast at Mussmani, sort of the Costa Rican version of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Spent the day surfing with Dan.

In the evening, met a group from Whistler, Canada. They were a crowd of die-hard snowboarders who planned to spend their summer season surfing around Central America. When they began to talk about snowboarding I’d sort of zone out – they’d say things like “Woah so I buttered the biscuit then hit this sick 360 indy front side but bonked hard”, and that would make my eyes cross involuntarily.