Speaking of which, we did the partial canal cruise – I would have liked to do the full, but it’s only offered twice a month by every single company I checked with, and all pretty much the same days. It’s just as well, as the half day was more than enough. To be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed by the canal. Yes, it’s huge and an amazing feat of engineering and the locks are tremendous, but, well, it’s just not that exciting, you know?

*Upon entering Costa Rica, Americans (I don’t know what it’s like for citizens of other countries) get a stamp in your passport that allows you to stay for three months. You have to leave the country for at least 72 hours to get it renewed, and apparently there are people that have been doing this over and over for years. The government is cracking down a bit though – they say that they start looking at you a little suspiciously the third time you leave and return, but we didn’t have any trouble.

Other than a week in October when we went to NYC, we were here straight through the rainy season. Part-year residents can hardly believe that we didn’t leave for at least a couple of months. I’m not sure if they all just happened to experience a really bad rainy season, or if this last one was very mild (which I find hard to believe), or if we’re just really easy-going, but we weren’t all that bothered by it. Tourists and part-year residents have been arriving in droves, and I guess Christmas to late January is the true high season, when the beaches will be covered in bodies. But my husband and I agreed that the early rainy season (May to July) was much more pleasant than this relentless heat. I don’t know – maybe the fact that everyone else is coming here from cold and windy places makes the heat somehow more palatable. But if and when we ever come back to Costa Rica, it will definitely be in the rainy season, not the dry.

Plastic bags are absolutely everywhere. In both Morocco and Costa Rica, they’re stacked high in shops, and it’s not uncommon to walk out of a store with $10 worth of groceries in 3 or 4 bags. Even though we bring bags with us, the baggers always seem to be trying to give us more bags, as if to make us feel we got our money’s worth. In the US, the “paper or plastic?” debate was never really resolved. Even our local natural foods store offerred both – though at least they were usually reused.

I don’t know. It’s not as if I have some amazing insights to share on this subject, but I just couldn’t bear to ignore it. Here’s more info, if you’re interested.

The Plastic Sea
Our Oceans Are Turning Into Plastic… Are We?
North Pacific Subtropical Gyre Garbage Map

The other day, we watched five monkeys devour the leaves of a papaya tree across the road from our apartment. We stood and took pictures for about 15 minutes, while they clambered around and ate as if they’d been starved for weeks. Babies clung to two of them, their little tails wrapped around their mothers’.

One monkey sat holding on to a long stem that looked for all the world like a huge piece of celery, and chomped on it while staring back at us. Makes you wonder what they think of us, with our squeals of delight at seeing the babies and our cameras recording something so banal as lunch.

Our neighbor is a lodge with a great restaurant and one of the best views in the area – 180 degrees of surf, sand, river, and forest reserve. The beaches are gorgeous and the water is almost warm.

The sun sets around 5:30 and it gets very dark, very fast. It’s between 77 and 82 degrees all day, every day. The birds and monkeys start chattering around 4am and I’m up by 6.

The roads are unpaved and quite dangerous – the rain leaves gaping potholes and ditches all over the place. We had planned to walk and ride bikes to get around, but now that we’re here, we are debating whether to buy a little motorcycle. We are fairly removed and it’s just too far to walk to most places.

The other day we took a wrong turn and ended up hiking quite a ways through the rain forest, which was muddy and cool and kind of dark and just a little bit scary – but we did discover the tennis court right smack in the middle of it. (Weird place, but maybe because it’s cooler in there?) We’ve seen monkeys, a three-foot-long iguana, tiny lizards, bizarre orange-and-purple crabs, and tons of birds and butterflies. And there are lots of bugs – the noseeum’s, in particular, are awful.

It’s at least as beautiful as I expected, but we are a fair hike from the beach (I know, I know, poor me) and most everything else. It rains a lot some days and not at all others. The real rainy season is mid-September to the end of October, when I guess it will literally rain all time. I don’t think that will be much fun.

It’s hot (80ish), breezy, and very humid, and it rains off and on throughout the day, sometimes quite unexpectedly. The beaches are gorgeous and pretty much deserted at the moment. The ocean water is fairly cool at the beach closest to us and warmer at the better surfing beach to the south, which is the one we can see from our terrace.

Thursday was a very long day. We got up without too much trouble and took the shuttle to the airport. We had to pay $350 for excess and overweight baggage, but considering that we had 5 large suitcases, 2 small ones, 2 backpacks, and a boogie board case, it didn’t seem like such a bad deal. (People stared at us, thinking, no doubt, “typical tourists taking too much stuff,” but a lot of it is for my work: tons of books, two computers, a flat-screen monitor, a bunch of software, zillions of cables and connectors – can’t expect to be able to live in paradise without paying for it somehow!)

Both flights were right on time, but the one from Dallas to Liberia took longer than we expected, because even though Costa Rica is in the Central Time zone, it doesn’t do daylight savings, so it’s actually the same as Mountain Time in the summer. We made it through customs with no real problems – we were worried that they’d ask us a bunch of questions because of all the stuff, but they just opened two or three cases and then waved us through. The shuttle I’d arranged to drive us to Nicoya didn’t show up, but a taxi was happy to take us, and actually cost $5 less than the shuttle would have. Our landlady was at the pre-arranged meeting spot and all of our stuff just barely fit into her SUV. We got to the apartment around 4:30…

Then when I finally did go, for two weeks at the end of December 1998/beginning of January 1999, I fell in love. We visited both coasts, went white water rafting through the rainforest (one of most amazing things I’ve ever done), hiked in the cloud forest, took an aerial tram over the rainforest, and just generally had a blast. The people we met were nice and the beaches are gorgeous.

There were a few hiccups. The Spanish is different than anything I’d ever heard before – a lot of the vowels get swallowed, making it harder to understand (though I’m sure I’ll get used to it before long). The capital, San José, isn’t really anything to write home about. And we learned that the best way to travel in the country is with the domestic airlines, rather than the buses, at least in the western half of the country. We once got on a bus that for some reason we thought would take a couple of hours, but turned out to take nearly 12, due to horribly potholed roads and numerous stops.

When we went again in 2005, we concentrated on what we’d liked the most: rafting and the beach. It was, again, phenomenal.