Pura vida vacaciones

My former roomie Victoria has been bugging me to travel with her for years.  I'm kind of a bear to plan travel with, because I only want to go very specific places, and I'm hard to tack down for planning, and I don't like to make firm plans very far in advance - somewhere between yoga and Africa, I've learned everything will work out if I have a headlamp, a credit card, and a passport.

This past year, my bff and travel buddy got married to a wonderful man, and is settling down in our hometown.  With Becky all domesticated, I needed to travel with someone new - but it's really hard to break in a travel buddy on both sides.  Do you have similar sleep habits?  Want the same things from your vacation?  Get stressed out over little things?  Pack too much?  Have different hotel standards?  Anyone who has traveled will tell you this is not an easy person to find!  Because Victoria and I have lived together and are both somewhat laid back, we figured we'd give it a shot.  Victoria is a wedding photographer, a total foodie, and one of the friendliest people you'll ever meet.  She can strike up a conversation with a brick wall :)  And she's patient and determined enough to make sure we bought plane tickets and made some sort of hotel reservations.

We stayed the first night in San Jose with Victoria's friend's mom's house-sitters, who were the most delightful family!  Immediately when we walked in the door, they had fresh Costa Rican coffee for us, along with an afternoon snack.  Jeanette and Giovanni took us out for dinner at this amaaaaazing restaurant that served all the fried queso, nachos mixtos, and chilles rellenos we could possibly want.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.  It was so fun to speak Spanish again - to remember that I can speak Spanish, and to try to translate for Victoria.  Early the next morning we hopped on a bus headed all the way west to a tiny surfer town called Santa Teresa.  I love taking buses around different countries, because you really get to see what the country looks like.

When we finally arrived in ST, we were pretty tired and hungry - so we headed directly to a local restaurant and had fresh fish tacos and batidos (milkshakes!).  Then of course I wanted to get to the beach as fast as humanly possible - I may have even skipped there.  The beach in ST is almost indescribable.  It's warm sand, crystal blue water, and open skies.  Rocky outcroppings surround either side of our beach and separate us from the other towns.  We were there a little before high season, so there were always a few people about - but never too many.  I loved watching the surfers catch waves, fall, try again, and there are always lots of town dogs running around the beach.  People are relaxedly friendly - it's pura vida, man.

Adventures were waiting for us, and we didn't disappoint!  The first evening, I made a friend nameed Melanie who let me tag along with her to sunset yoga class in a raised open-air pavilion.  Victoria lined up surf instructors for the next day, and made several new friends at the bar while she was waiting for me.  The next day's highlight's were banana pancakes served by the chef named Nacho (you can't make these things up) and our hilarious awkwardness on surfboards.  Our instructors were Marcello and Leo, and their surfer abs made it a little hard to concentrate on technique, but at some point I think we both got up onto the waves.  That night we found an incredible Argentinian grill and feasted.

The next day, our new friend Jack took me to rent ATVs or 'quads' as we now call them very coolly, and we raced over to the next town called Montezuma.  The roads are dusty since it's dry season, so we wore makeshift masks of bandanas, helmets, and sunglasses.  Of all the cool, fun things to make your heart race, this one was at the top.  Once we got to Montezuma, we jumped in the ocean, grabbed some sort of fresh lunch (including batidos), and then hiked to the Montezuma waterfall.  At some point on the trip, Jack took us to the highest lookout point over the ocean, and we all yelled off a cliff, Garden State-style.

I think the next day we took the quads to a fishing village and Victoria bargained her way into buying giant red snappers and sea bass - which we were going to cook at the communal kitchen that night.  One of the guys working at the hostel, Martin, used to work as a professional chef - so he promised to help.  Then in the afternoon Victoria wandered the town taking pictures, while I laid on the beach reading.  Looking back at this post, I realize it's written day-by-day, which is consistent with the feeling of our vacation - we slept as long as we wished, decided each step one meal, one surfing lesson, one swim in the water at a time - the best way to have a vacation!

We had decided ahead of time to do both beach and mountains, and to build in enough time for travel in between. So we rode a bus up to the tiny touristy town of La Fortuna, which sits at the bottom of the (mostly dormant) volcano Arenal.  The drive took about 8 hours, but again - we got to see so much of Costa Rican countryside. We packed the next couple of days with activities - went ziplining, hiked the volcano base, swam in the hot springs, hiked to a waterfall, and got mud massages.

We also took a coffee tour for this organic, cooperative farm called Arenal Campesino.  Their mission is so interesting, 70 families living entirely off the land - including growing natural pesticides and medicines. They taught us how to make real tortillas ticas, and served us proper coffee in a pourover style - wow!  We had a really interesting conversation about the way tourism is taking over the country, and people are no longer doing the work that they grew up with - farming. Arenal Campesino is working to preserve this life, along with several strains of coffee that have become rare.  It was hard to think about the tourism industry taking over the whole country and creating a class system while we were there as tourists, but I hope it will help me think about responsible tourism for future trips.

We headed back to San Jose, had dinner with our friends Jeanette and Giovanni, and headed back to DC.  I officially love Costa Rica - that is unquestionable.  In the future, I would spend the whole time at the beach, just because beaches are my favorite places in the world - but the mountains are also beautiful and wild.  Photo credits in this blog post all go to Victoria (have I mentioned how fun it is to travel with a photographer? I recommend it!) - you may see the real versions on her blog at some point.

The thing I love about grown-up vacations is that you just do only what you want, and you skip anything that doesn't interest you.  This vacation was no different, and we had the most relaxing time - full of adventures, sleep, reading, sunshine, and more adventures.  Vic, where should we go next?