Costa Rica—

Hey guys, I know it’s been over two weeks since my last post but it has been difficult for me to balance preparing this with all the other things I do while I’m traveling. I’ll get better at this. It’s probably riddled with errors and have some questionable quality of content but I felt I needed to get this out ASAP. Hope you guys enjoy!

San Fran to SJO

I left San Francisco late Saturday evening, and after a transfer in Denver, I landed in Costa Rica, 6am Sunday, their local time. After exchanging some American dollars for some Costa Rican colones, I stepped outside and met the onslaught of taxi drivers. At this point, I didn’t have any clue where to go this early in the morning, and was just ignoring all the drivers till I stepped to end of the airport, and saw nothing around, no stores, not even people. I decided I’d go with this particular driver who was hounding me hard but once we got to his car, it looked like a normal car. Official taxis in Costa Rica should have a triangle on the side that identifies them. I wasn’t comfortable so ended up jumping into an official one.

Airport to mercado

The airport isn’t actually in San Jose, their capital, it’s about 25Km out in a place called Alajuela. “Dónde quieres ir?” the driver asked. With 6 hours to kill before getting on the Bus to Santa Teresa, I told the driver “Mercado de centro”, not knowing where it physically was but at this point, I was truly at the mercy of the driver. I was dropped off at the one of the inner streets of the market at a cost of 12500 colones, which met the standard price of 500 colones per km. My first setting of foot in San Jose wasn’t the prettiest or most comfortable as you’ll soon find out.

San Jose downtown

It was 7am when I arrive in the market. All the stores were shut, aluminum roller doors down, with only a few small carts selling fresh fruit and vegetables. Despite the lack of business, there were many pedestrians walking the street at this time. At most of the corners, there were at least 1 or 2 police officers, scanning for any impending trouble. There wasn’t much to distinguish between the stores, the majority of the signage must be under the shutters. I wandered aimlessly for several minutes, realising that I had not had a copy of the downtown San Jose and no access to internet as Telecom NZ does not have roaming here. I stumbled upon the Avenida Centro, the main strip down the centre of the town. Here, there was the familiar sight of a McDonalds store, but even at 7:30am in the morning, it was still closed. I settled at sitting in front of “El Banco Centro de Costa Rica”, which had a modern facade in comparison to the surrounding buildings.

Encounter with con artist

I occupied myself reading books on my Kindle until some local Tico came up to me with some sob story. Unfortunately, he was only a native speaker of Spanish, with the speed of his speech making his communication slightly indecipherable. I knew he was trying to con me out of money though, he showed me his ID, and kept saying “No tengo colones” (I have no money), and he was robbed at gunpoint, which I clearly understood with the pistol shaped hand gesture he had pointing at his gut. At this point, I was trying to figure out a way to get him away from me “How many colones do I have to give him?”. A husky voice then spoke above me “Sus documentos.”

Encounter with con artist

I looked up and saw two cleanly dressed Tico police officers, kitted out in the typical patrol gear. I showed the one closest to me my NZ passport. The other one attended to the local. This police officer, that had my passport, took it with him and asked him to come with me to his car. I noticed that their standard issue vehicle here are new Toyota Hiluxs. He asked me if I spoke Spanish. I replied “Muy un poco” (Very little). He began to give me a lecture on what this local was up to, which I only realised from the hand gestures and the odd word. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t oblivious to that fact. Anyway, he gave me back my passport and ended the conversation with “Vamos” (Go away), which I obediently proceeded to do.

Bus station

I was fed up with nothing to do in town and having run into an incident like this, I flagged down the nearest taxi and took it to my only known destination in San Jose, “Terminal San Carlos”. This bus terminal was a very basic facility, providing a toilet (that cost 50c USD to use each time), some eateries and wooden seating for the awaiting passengers. This was one of the most boring parts of the trips as I spent the next 5 hours loitering around the station, reading and listening to music. I did get hungry and ate a packet of local chips, which I wasn’t a fan of so resorted to some fried chicken from one of the eateries.

Journey (look at making a plugin)

At 2pm I caught the bus that was headed for Santa Teresa on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. A 6 hour journey and $17 USD for the whole trip, it starts from San Jose and heads to the inner coastal town of Puntarenas, where we took a ferry from over to Nicoya peninsula, landing at

1st night at the surf camp

I finally arrived at the surf camp at 8:30pm, at the cost of 6000 colones, which I heard today is 1000 more than normal from the town to the surf camp. I stumbled in to an open living area, where many of the guests were just kicking back and relaxing. I found the one of the employees here, Filipo, an Italian surf instructor. I wasn’t suppose to actually arrive tonight, I had a 1 day buffer just in case something happened, but they had a spare bed from someone leaving that afternoon. I was taken to one of the open huts they have, that had a mezzanine that you climbed some very steep steps to get to. On the top was essentially 3 queen sized beds, separated by thin cloth. Each bed had a mosquito net. It was so close to the beach that despite the sounds of all the insects and lizards crawling around the hut, the waves of the oceans softened their clicks and rattles. It had been 24 hours since I had left San Francisco, 32 hours since I got a good night sleep, so I just crashed.

Zopilote Surf Camp was founded by a pair of passionate Austrian surfers 8 years ago so that they could get the best of both worlds, spend half the year surfing, and the other half in their hometowns. It can accommodate around 20 guests, who stay in stints of 1 to 3 weeks. The facilities are basic, but it is a very homely and community feel here. There are 3 buildings: the main house that contains the kitchen, open living and eating area, beds for the guests and the employees. Then there are 2 ranchos, which are two storey huts that have an open living area underneath with electricity, shower, sink and fridge. A climb up some steep stairs to the second storey which contains several beds separated by mosquito nets and thin cloth.

The first few nights, I had two single mattresses to myself. Unfortunately, I lost that privilege once some of the new guests started arriving, and a small separator was put up. Because it was two mattresses on a single base, any sudden jerking movement like rolling will shake the base, as I found out from my sleeping buddy. Sorry Rene. You aim to use the bed purely for sleeping as there are many other areas to hang out.

I had the rancho that was closest to the beach, so I fell asleep to the sound of the waves and woke up to a view of the beach. Under the sleeping area, we had a shower, sink fridge, seating area and power.

As you can see, there is an outdoor-indoor flow going on, so from my bed, I’ve seen many insects and animals, such as Iguanas, monkeys, heaps of hermit crabs and squirrels.

I’ll give you a run down of the demographics of the guests staying here when I arrived:

• 12 German
• 2 Swiss
• 1 Austrian
• 1 Korean
• 1 NZ
• Total = 17 people

People that understand German:

• 16 that understand
• 1 that doesn’t understand at all (me)

The Korean was here had lived in Germany for 10 years. The 2 Italians had studied for a couple of years. When I realised this, I was thinking, “I had trouble having to speak Spanish on my way here, now I have to deal with all this German!”. Even the people running the camp were from Austria and Germany. Thankfully, everyone staying at the camp were empathetic and most of the time, translate the conversation to English for me.

Despite no indication of German-speaking owners on their website, the place attracts a high number of Germans. The Italians who have spent the last 4 months working here and said that I have been the only NZer to pass through. I was quite surprised that I haven’t met a single native NZer or Australian yet. I was humbled by the many stories of the foreigners I have met that love New Zealand, since one of the reason of these trips was to take a break from it. Unfortunately, not very many of them get there because of the high cost of flights.

1st supermarket trip

Costa Rican paradise doesn’t come cheap though. My first full day here, a group of us went out the local café and a sandwich and fries there set me back cause to $10 USD. I went to the Supermarket on Tuesday, about 5 minute car ride down the road. I was longing for a cold beverage, and the camp does provide cold beer and soda but at an increased price. They have a few mainstream beers, the two biggest being Imperial and Pilsen. After tasting them, it makes Tui look like a high quality drop so probably is the equivalent to Lion Red or Ranfurly. On top of that, a 6 pack is about $7.50 for crappy beer. A little cheaper than NZ. I understand why they call Costa Rica “The Switzerland of Central America”.

I picked up 2 6-packs of some local beer. When the lady at the counter scanned the cans and the price was 3300 colones (just under $9 NZD), I interrupted and put one pack back. I wasn’t going to pay $9 for 6 cans of the equivalent of Ranfurly, except in normal sized cans. I should just buy a bottle of rum, climb up some coconut trees, steal some pineapples and make me some Pina Colada. The P

Rene

At some point, I lost my double bed privileges, and a small 10cm sheet was put in between the bed, and my new sleeping buddy Rene moved in. He is a doctor from Switzerland who is a really nice guy, I just felt bad for him that he had to sleep next to me, these ranchos aren’t very solid so when I moved jerkingly, the whole bed and rancho would shake. He politely let me know of this, so my sleeping movements had to be in slow motion now.

What I have done and 1st lunch

I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary; the majority of the day is taken up surfing and relaxing. We wake up early in the morning, have breakfast at 8:30am which is a range of fresh fruit, bread, nothing local. Then we go out for a surf at Playa Hermosa de Cobano, the local beach break which is a 10 minute walk. I’ve had a lot of fun surfing at this particular break, it’s not too crowded and at least while I was there, there was decent surf for beginners and intermediate surfers. It works best at high tide for everyone, as the waves get faster and steeper the tide goes down. Apparently, it’s not as good as the Santa Teresa beach break in front of the main township, but that gets too crowded from what I have heard. I started on a 7’10” NSP funboard and graduated to a 6’8” NSP shortboard. The funboard was generally more fun, as the waves weren’t always as good, but in the last days there, the waves were getting too big and I was not a fan of having to turtle roll all the time to get through. We would normally surf in groups, and do this once in the morning and once in the late afternoon according to the high tides.

After surfing, we head back to the camp to relax and get food. The camp doesn’t provide lunch so we fend for ourselves. To save money, I typically have some nondescript muesli cereal and milk, but I have gone out to local restaurants ranging from Tico shacks . At this place, I ordered the ‘Casado con pollo’, which is the typical Tican lunch consisting of rice, beans, salad, fries in chicken. It wasn’t a very flavourful or exotic meal, but it was plentiful and the cheapest I’ve had out, a sandwich at the local French café was $8 USD compared to $5 USD I paid for this authentic local meal. For dinners, the camp prepared us a wide variety of different foods, mostly non-local and vegetarian dishes. The food was always plentiful and satisfying after a tiring day.

I’ve also been out to the local township of Santa Teresa, which looks like every other coastal tourist town in the tropics, very dusty, dirt roads, people on dirt bikes holding surfboards. I avoided going out to the township as there isn’t really anything exotic and it costs about $10 USD one way on a taxi, but it is easy to hitch a ride down. The township is equipped with everything that you may need on a daily basis, such as a supermarket, ATM, surf shops, laundry and basic emergency clinic. This really isn’t a party orientated town, but I’m not in the best position to judge as I was a bit of a nana, going home at midnight on the nights we’d go out and not bothering to see what was available. I’d say there a better towns for it, which I’ll get into more detail in my next blog posts.

Picture of Main street Santa Teresa

The only touristy thing I have done was a group of us hired a bunch of quad bikes ($55USD for 8 hours + around $10USD petrol) and took it out on the beach for a spin, before heading to Montezuma, which is a small town, an hour drive away, to go relax at some waterfalls. We had run racing down the beach (though it’s illegal to do this, but everyone does it anyway) and it was my first time to drive a quad bike. I had a pillion passenger, Tina, whom I recently met so didn’t go too crazy on it. I did let her ride it on the beach though, and while I was on the back, I told her to try shift it up a gear, but she’d do it while with full gas so the quad would violently jolt and after a close call nearly falling backwards, I was holding onto the handle bars for dear life. We came to the mutual agreement that I should ride it for the rest of the journey.

The journey from the beach to Montezuma didn’t go so smoothly. First we got lost and went up some ridiculously steep dirt road where one of the quad bikes had lost control after avoiding a big rock and crashed into a ditch. Thankfully, both rider and passenger just had some minor superficial injuries, the quad bike was intact and we were able to lift it out. The roads are also extremely dusty here, so we all made sure to have wrap our faces up to prevent us inhaling it in, but the dust combined with sunstrike made it sometimes a precarious ride on the unmaintained windy roads. Probably an hour and a half later, we got to Montezuma, grabbed a bite to eat before going up to the waterfalls in amongst the jungle. The waterfalls here is a bit of a walk, nothing major as it is a prepared track. It’s about 20 minutes to the first waterfall, then you pretty much hike vertically, grabbing onto tree trunks, for another 20 minutes to get to the second waterfall where you can do the 12m cliff jump. We all under-estimated the heat within the jungle as well as the physical effort required to get there, so we all out of water and drenched in sweat by the last waterfall. It was a nice reward to be able to jump into the cold body of water, which is actually quite hard to find during the day as the sea temperature is tropical at around 28C. To be honest, while it was good to have a change of scenery and activity, the place paled in comparison to similar places in New Zealand. Another reason to look forward to going back home at some point.

What we do in the evenings

In the evenings, we are normally too tired to do anything strenuous, so once again, we just relax. I just hang out with the other guests at the main house, looking over pictures or videos we had taken over the day, or conversing over anything, or listening to one of the more musically talented guests sing and jam on the guitar. I’ve been out a couple of times to the local bars. Despite the high supermarket prices, drinks at bars are cheaper than our New Zealand counterparts. They call Coke and Rum here “Cuba libre”. I haven’t tried any drinks that have been unavailable in NZ yet, as nothing has come across my path that is exotic. Both Saturdays, we have gone down to Pablo’s bar and restaurant, which is only a 15 minute walk down the beach. Victor, resident of Zopilote for the last 4 to 5 months and very talented singer and guitar player would perform a set there so we’d go down there for a few drinks and watch him perform.

Picture of night at Zopilote

Picture at Kyka’s bar

The first was at a resort catering for high-end paying customers, one of the helpers at the camp has a boyfriend that works behind the bar and indulged us in some complimentary Margaritas and White Sangria. On my first Saturday here.

1st night out

That evening, a group of us sent off one the guests, Claus, walking 15 minutes down the road to “Flor Blanca” resort where some people from the surf camp recommended going to. This resort was bleeding opulence, the 2 minute walk from the entrance to the bar was in some specially layed out garden with different exotic plants every step of the way. It was a quiet night at the bar, we were the biggest group at 7 people, but it had a very nice ambienace, The next day, I learnt from the owner of the surf camp that it costs around $1000 USD for a night at one of the houses on the resort.

2nd night out

On Friday, we went dont to Flor Blanca again, with some of the camp employees and the new guests. I had many interesting conversations there over some generous amounts of Mojitos and White Sangria. It was the first time I had met someone who lived in an isolated remote village, Madagascar, that did not have any running power or water.

By the end of my stay, there was only 1 person left of the original group I saw when I arrived. One thing stayed consistent though, which was the influx of native German speakers. I was speaking regularly used German words. My skin colour has now changed to one of the locals. I have numerous bites on my feet from insects, and cuts and bruises from surfing. I am now able to travel pretty much any part in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and have somewhere to crash. Likewise, I offered the same to people coming to NZ. Though staying at a surf camp like this doesn’t offer the party debaucherous atmosphere some people are looking, you get to know your peers more intimately and exchange different stories, experiences and philosophies about life and travel. It was the perfect start to my trip.

Anyway, I still managed to learn a few things about travel, specifically:

• Don’t exchange money at the airport in Costa Rica, the public transport accept USD and offer a much better rate (450 vs 500).
• Avoid going out to lunch with alot of people unless you can split the bill.
• ANZ charge $5 per ATM withdrawal with a debit card.
• The Air NZ Onesmart card works on the ATM with the name facing the ground, contrary to all other ATM cards.
• Many more things but I was too lazy to note them down.

Today, I left Zopilote at 7:45am for the shuttle to Tamarindo. Tamarindo is a another surfing town but also one of the party towns on the pacific side of Costa Rica, which I’ll go into more detail in my next post. During the shuttle ride, I finally met some NZers here in Costa Rica. For them, I was also the first Kiwi they had seen in the last three weeks. We easily related our experiences in Costa Rica to what we have back home, all appreciating New Zealand. Right now, I’ve booked to stay at the [Blue Trailz(http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g309253-d1626265-Reviews-Blue_Trailz_Hostel-Tamarindo_Province_of_Guanacaste.html) hostel for two nights. I may extend it because even with the little amount of things I have, I managed to leave my iPod shuffle and a decent pair of earphones, though I could coerce some of the guests to bring it over to Tamarindo when they arrive here on Wednesday.

Because the majority of the experience staying at the surf camp was the people I met, I’ll be posting that up very soon. On top of that, I’ll put up a post of my time here in Tamarindo, before I leave for the intended destination of San Juan Del Sur in Nicaragua. I have 3 more nights here, and leave on Thursday. My stories should get a bit more interesting now that I am out of the comfort that is the surf camp. I’ll also try do a better job updating my Instagram.

Bis später,

Charlie

Corinna

Most of the guests at the camp were on just on short holidays, with many returning to their respective places of work after the end of their surf camp stint. I have only met one person who is travelling on, doing her first RTW trip. Corinna has also quit her job to go on a 4 month trip, starting in Costa Rica and travelling west to her final RTW destination of Indonesia. She also shares the same admiration of New Zealand that appears to be ubiquitous amongst all the foreigners I have met, and spends 1 month in New Zealand. , then going to Vita is an exuberant girl.

Jill

One of the first guests I met at the camp was this pretty German girl, Jill. During our initial conversation, we realised that we share the same passion and respect for ocean, despite our lack of incredible surfing skills. Working in the documentary department of one of the large German broadcasters, she dreams of a life away from German, down in the pleasant, warm climates of New Zealand. I was humbled for her love of a place she hasn’t even been yet; part of this trip was to escape New Zealand, though I have intentions of living in New Zealand in the future.