After spending a lovely 4 days at the ranch we were planning to go to Tortuguero to paddle some canals in the watery jungle, but we had both been a bit sick and feeling a bit waterlogged after 2 solid days of rain. So we decided to hitch a ride to the Pacific coast for some sun and surf with Darren and Kate who are an aussie Melbourne couple we met at the ranch (small world!). The plan was to be picked up by the same guy they´d come with. Sounds simple enough, except that with all the constant rain, the area is incredibly prone to landslides (we´d had to drive around four small slides a few days earlier in the bus to La Fortuna). We got the news that a decent landslide had completely blocked the road out and our driver was stuck on the other side! After a bit of hoing and humming, the ranch owner, Juan, offerred to drive us to the spot so that we could just climb over. Luckily by the time we got there it had been cleared by another local hotel owner (government´s crap so this guy has had to prepare himself) and traffic was just starting to move through (see photo, we still had to walk through the remaining slush!).
And so we got to Nosara on the 30th - it´s a very secluded, but definitely not undiscovered beach town, which was over run with VERY loud Americans there for new year! Wasn´t quite our cup of tea, but ended up forcing us to just sit back and relax for a while - we are on holidays after all! There isn´t much there, but it´s all very spread out and you have to know someone who knows how to get to pretty much every restaurant, bar or hotel in the area because it´s all just built randomly in the bush! Lots of long walks on dusty, winding tracks! The town redeemed itself by providing us with a brilliantly starry sky on New Year´s Eve, breakfast in a little cafe next to Susan Sarandon and Tim Robins (apparently Mel Gibson has some land near here as well), monkeys galore just hanging out in the trees and waking us up in the mornings (Howler monkeys sound 5 times bigger than they are, very strange dog-howl-lion-roar-kind-of-thing), and an armadillo sighting in the bushes on our way home from dinner on the last night....quite cool all round.
Getting out of there was a bit of an ordeal, though. All the locals were heading home from their Christmas/New Year breaks as well, so getting a bus was literally impossible. Well, we managed to get a bus out of there, but found ourselves stranded in a nowhere town with no connection. After exhausting a few options it dawned on us that we were just going to have to get a taxi all the way to San Jose (try not to hum the tune now)! Not the most economical mode of transport but well at least it got us there. The driver didn´t speak English, we still don´t really speak Spanish, but we got along okay (after we made him locate the other ends of our seat belts!). He even bought us a coke later on.
So just one night in grotty, busy San Jose in a pretty damn average "mid-range budget" according to the Lonely Planet hotel. We just found a nice little Peruvian restaurant where we ate ourselves into a stupor (or that may have been the round after round of Pisco Sours - mmm Pisco Sours).
Off to Guatemala...