Last two weeks in Costa Rica and on the the next adventure... MEXICO!!!

I left off my last post at the end of March when I headed home to CT for five days.  If you're wondering why I went home for just five days then I promise that you're not alone.  I've had to answer that question more than once in the last few weeks.  Well I assure you it was for a very valid and legitimate reason... I had tickets to a Bruins game that I couldn't miss 😐.  Let me explain... I'm a member of a 12-person fantasy hockey league that consists of mostly college friends but by now we're starting to spread out across the country.  At the start of the season we somehow got all 12 members to agree to go to a game together on March 30th.  I agreed to this well before I knew I'd be heading to Central America for a few months, so in order to not be "that guy" I sucked it up and made the trek back home.  To be honest, it was an awesome time and worth every penny, especially because a few days later I was crowned fantasy hockey champion of the year 😎 (despite knowing literally nothing about hockey and only being able to name about half of my team off the top of my head).

But enough about that and back to the travel stuff.  When I returned to Coco we had one more week of "vacation mode" planned.  Our awesome friends from home, Melissa and Casey, came down to Costa Rica to do some travel and to hang out with Katie and I.  Their first stop was Rio Celeste where they got engaged!! Congrats you two!  Katie and I then met them at the Arenal volcano where we hung out for a few days.

Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica: 4/2-4/4

I can't even put to words how beautiful this rain forest is.  I took plenty of pictures, but none of them came even close to doing it justice.  For Katie and I, this was our "splurge" trip where we stayed in an actual hotel rather than in a hostel.  We stayed in the Arenal Observatory Lodge & Spa and had a room overlooking the volcano.  The first day we arrived it was pretty cloudy so we could only see the base of the mountain, but the next day we woke up and it was so clear that we could see water vapor coming out of the vent at the top.  We already had a guided nature hike scheduled for that morning but we immediately booked our zip-lining excursions for that afternoon to take advantage of the clear day.  I thought I had experienced zip-lining before but this experience blew all of the others completely out of the water.  We were 650+ feet off the ground, on seven different lines, the longest of which was just under a half-mile.  The views were breathtaking.  The next day we hiked on the lava flows from a 1968 eruption, and followed that up with a trip to a hot spring before heading back to Coco with Melissa and Casey.

View from our hotel room in the morning.

Playas del Coco, Costa Rica: 4/4-4/7

Weirdly enough, with as much time as Katie and I spent in Playas del Coco, we never really got to experience it as tourists until our friends were here to experience it with us.  It turns out that two full days is more than enough time to see this area.  On day-1 we had planned on going on a fishing charter but due to a complicated set of logistical problems, we were never picked up and our trip was canceled.  Instead we decided to have a beach day, so we headed to Playa Ocotal where the black sand is hot as lava and the snorkeling is amazing (this also happens to be the same beach where our dive shop was located).  While we were there we found a local fisherman who agreed to take us for a half day of fishing on the following day.  We spent the afternoon walking the "downtown strip" of Playas del Coco which is no more than 3-blocks long.

The following day we went on our fishing charter where we only caught two keepers but it was more than enough for us to make fish tacos for six people, have leftovers for two days, and still give one whole fish to a friend so it wouldn't spoil before we could eat it.  So while we didn't spend a whole lot of time catching fish, it was still a nice day on the water and it provided a ton of meals.  The next day, Melissa and Casey went home and Katie and I finally had some time to relax and get our lives fully planned for the next few months.

Mexico!

Given that our internship didn't exactly work out as planned, we were determined to find a way to get our divemaster certifications and not run into the same problems that we ran into here.  After hours of searching through potential locations and communicating with different shops, we finally landed on a shop that we expect to meet our needs in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.  I'm sure this location will be significantly more familiar to most of you than Playas del Coco was, as it is a pretty popular destination for American tourists.  As difficult as our experience was in Playas del Coco, we learned so much about what our priorities are, what questions to ask, and what needs to be negotiated in advance before arriving on site.  Katie plans on writing a more detailed post on her blog about what to look for when choosing a divemaster certification program, so I won't go into too much detail about it here.  A will say that we are very excited about the fact that our upcoming internship is missing all of the red flags that Katie and I should have been aware of prior to coming to Coco.

• They will value our time - They plan to reduce the cost of our divemaster training by $8 for every hour we work in the shop.
• They will not overwork us - They made it clear that our days will more often than not be split between working and training.
• They understand that we have other things going on - They had no problem with our request to have up to 3 days off per week, one of which will be together, so we can continue to work on other projects.  I plan on using this time to practice and play online poker and Katie will be immersing herself in blogging and web design.
•  They will value our business - They made it very clear that we will be getting discounts on any additional training we need because we will be working for the shop.

I wish I could say that any one of these bullets were true for our first internship attempt, but unfortunately none of things happened at our shop in Coco.  In hindsight it all seems like common sense questions that we should have asked, but this is how you learn.  We hope that our experience can eventually help other aspiring divemasters, because in our endless searching I couldn't find any resources to help guide us through the process of choosing a divemaster program.

Another great benefit to this location is the network of poker players from the U.S. who are already living there and have been helping Katie and I every step of the way.  Through online forums I've already met a few players who are giving us advice for places to live, advised me on what I'll need to do to start playing online poker, vouched for our dive shop (two of the people I've talked to dove with them before), and are looking forward to meeting us and hanging out when we arrive.

So here we are again, full of hope and looking forward to our next adventure.  I'm sure we will run into an entirely new set of challenges, but hopefully our experience here will at least help prevent us from making the same mistakes twice.  Even if we're just a little bit more prepared this time than we were last time, then this entire trip will have been worth it.

Katie and I headed home to CT Wednesday, April-12, and we will be flying to Cancun (1-hour drive from Playa del Carmen) on April-22.  We are very much looking forward to the rest of our trip home for a chance to fully recharge, get back on a healthy eating routine, and get settled before shaking it all up again for another two months.

14 Nights, 6 Stops, 5 Beaches, 2 Countries, & 1 Hospital Visit

Don't freak out too much about the title of this post.  Katie and I are both A-Okay and are both super excited to be coming home in a few days!!

Wow the more I think back over the last month the more I realize how much I have to fill you all in on.  It has been an extremely busy month and since March-11 when we first headed to Nicaragua. We haven't really had the chance to relax once until this past Saturday.  So this post will essentially be a high level overview of our two week backpacking adventure through Central America.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua: 3/11-3/15

When I come home from this trip, my fondest memories will undoubtedly come from these four days (although Arenal will be a close second).  I had no idea what to expect when Katie suggested that we check out Nicaragua.  What we found was an adorable little beach town that had some tourism but wasn't by any means overrun with tourists.  The locals were friendly, the buildings were all beautifully painted with vibrant colors, and everything was DIRT CHEAP!!  I had heard that Nicaragua was cheap but I was not prepared for what we found.  Beers at the bar were around $1 each, a large dinner was in the $5 range (but we typically paid $3-$4 for dinner), tank tops in the tourist area were $4.50; it was outrageous.  Most of our time here was either spent at one of the many local beaches, walking around town, or at the hostel which was easily the friendliest and most welcoming hostels I've ever stayed in.  We planned on only spending three nights here but we were having such a good time that we extended our stay by a day before moving on.

Officially a hippie as I attempt the slackline for the first time

Before I move on to Granada, I can't forget to talk about Sunday Funday (I'm actually writing about it like this because I inexplicably forgot to mention Sunday Funday in my original post).  Sunday Funday is a weekly tradition in San Juan del Sur.  It is a pool bar crawl that essentially draws hundreds of tourists from pool bar to pool bar over the course of about 10-hours.  It is exactly the debauchery you would expect, so I won't go into too much detail about what it entails.  I will, however, share my story of the lost sunglasses.  As we were getting ready to head out of the second bar, I realized that my new sunglasses had disappeared.  I checked all of the places that I cold have left them but eventually accepted that they were gone forever.  As we were leaving, I noticed a security guard with a pair of sunglasses on his head that looked eerily similar to mine.  I didn't think too much of it since there were literally hundreds of people in the crowd, but I did mention it to Katie.  She took a different approach from me and immediately approached the guy and checked to see of they were the same brand as mine; they were.  She confronted him (in Spanish) and sure enough he admitted that he had found them earlier that day.  He returned them to me and we bought him a drink to thank him for his honesty.  I still can't believe we managed to find them on somebody's head in that crowd.  Literally everyone who noticed us looking told us to give up because there was no chance of finding them.

Granada, Nicaragua: 3/15-3/17

This was actually our first of two stops in Granada as we left for one night in the middle to go "camping".  We felt it was important to return, however, because most of our time spent here on these dates went toward dealing with Katie's hospital visit.  I'm going to let her go into much more detail in her blog but I'll tell the high level overview of what happened from my perspective here.

About 1-week prior to this point in our trip, Katie and I were introduced to raw cashew plants which are apparently fruits that grow on trees with a single cashew nut inside.  Apparently these fruits are loaded with the same oils that are on poison ivy.  Katie found this out the hard way.  After dealing with a week's worth of itchy rashes spreading to new areas on her body, the allergic reaction moved to her face.  I'll let her show the pictures when she writes about it in her blog but let's just say I had my work cut out for me in telling her "don't worry, it's hardly noticeable, nobody will know the difference" while secretly thinking to myself "who are you, what have you done with Katie, please don't let this be anything serious, and please don't hurt me if you're not actually Katie."

Once it got to that point we got her to a private hospital early the next morning and we got her taken care of.  They gave her a couple of injections that almost immediately reduced the swelling, monitored her for a few hours, and gave her a prescription for medication that would keep the reaction at bay for a few more days.  I will admit that I was fully panicking internally while all of this was happening, between the language barrier and the fear of being in a foreign hospital, but in the end they did an excellent job.  Oh and did I mention that everything in Nicaragua was cheap?  Everything combined (hospital visit, treatment, and medications) for less than $50, and apparently it could have been 100% free if we were willing to go to the public hospital and wait a little bit longer (we weren't).

Laguna de Apoyo Natural Reserve, Nicaragua: 3/17-3/18

A slight deviation from my usual St. Patrick's day festivities, this year we wore our green at a crater lake in Nicaragua that was formed about 23,000 years ago when a volcano blew the top off of the mountain.  This stop felt more like a summer camp retreat than anything else, and it was by far the most relaxing part of our two week journey.  We stayed in a hostel called The Peace Project which is essentially a non-profit organization aimed at providing a better education for children in the area.  The coolest part of this stop for me was getting the chance to scuba dive in a crater lake which was a pretty unique experience.  It felt like I was stepping back in time to a prehistoric age.  The bottom had a fur-like texture that released sulfur bubbles when it was disturbed.  There were also species of fish that only exist in that lake, some of which were solid black in color.  The lake was also eerily warm due to the fact that it is still fed by hot springs.  The temperature never changed even though we dove to ~95ft.

Back to Granada for Actual Sightseeing this Time Around: 3/18-3/20

This stop in Granada was significantly more enjoyable than the first and we actually got to appreciate our surroundings this time around.  Granada is apparently one of the oldest (if not the oldest?) city in Central America, as it was founded in the early 1500's.  The original architecture still remains and has an incredibly beautiful combination of old styles with fresh colorful paint.  We stayed at a small bed and breakfast (our one location where we didn't stay in a hostel) and spent a bunch of time walking around the town.  We did our duties as tourists and made sure to see the Masaya volcano with its flowing lava before we left.  We also spent a few hours enjoying some beers on a boat on Lake Nicaragua which is the 19th largest lake in the world.  My only real complaint about Granada was the constant tourist heckling.  We were relentlessly pressured to buy things to the point where it was over the top annoying and made me not want to buy anything.  Other than that it was a really enjoyable stop.

View in the center of our bed & breakfast. Image from Katie

San Jose, Costa Rica: 3/20-3/22

After what was quite literally THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE BUS RIDE IN HISTORY, Katie and I arrived in Costa Rica's capital for a 2-night stay.  Note to self: San Jose does not have the same climate as Playas del Coco.  We had very quickly gotten accustomed to the dry 80s and 90s that we experienced daily in Coco, but San Jose was mid-60s and rainy.  We had not packed for this and we were cooooold.  Yea, I know, we're wimps now, you'd all be killing for that weather back home, whatever.  We spent a lot of time walking around the city, Katie got to reminisce about her college days when she was here for 2-months, and we got to hang out with one of the friends she made while she was here in 2011.  We explored the University of Costa Rica and the upper-class neighborhood of Escalante.  There was a strong craft beer presence there which is apparently new to Costa Rica, so that was a nice reminder of home.  The other not-so-nice reminder of home was the fact that prices for everything were back to US-like prices, so no more living dirt cheap like we had been for the previous week.  It was also really nice to be away from the touristy areas for a few days.

Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica: 3/22-3/25

Where rain forest meets beachfront, Manuel Antonio was one of the two most beautiful environments we encountered while we were in Central America.  In our first full day here we spent about 4 hours lounging on the secluded Playa Biesanz (beach) followed by a 3-4 mile hike to a hillside restaurant that has a spectacular view of the sunset.  This hike was along the Reto Mae "trail" which I put in quotes because it is barely a trail most of the time.  I spent half the time asking Katie if we were actually on a trail and not just waking through the woods and she assured me we were.  Either way the views over the ocean were spectacular, and the wildlife we saw was something else.  We saw a bunch of monkeys as well as a ton of weird looking orange and black crabs that apparently live in the woods nowhere near the water.  We made it to the restaurant (after accidentally trespassing through some backyards to get back to the street) and when we arrived there was nobody there.  Apparently this place does all of their business at sunset, and we beat three packed tourist buses by about 15-minutes.

The next day we spent in the Manuel Antonio National Park which involved more hiking (albeit on wider trails), beach time, and wildlife sightings.  This was the first and only place we saw sloths!!!  Granted they were super far away so none of the pictures of them came out.  I swear I saw them though.

There is actually a sloth in this picture.  Good luck finding it.  I know where it is and I still struggle to see it.

Back in Coco for a few days: 3/25-3/28

Once we got back we were looking forward to a few days to relax but that didn't quite get to happen as we went into host mode for a little while.  While we were at the hostel in San Juan del Sur, we became friends with one of the volunteers who is from England but is living in Nicaragua for a few months.  He needed to to a visa run to Costa Rica (i.e. his 90-day tourist visa was expiring and he needed to leave the country for a few days to get a new one) so we offered to host him.  It still ended up being  pretty relaxing time actually; honestly we spent most of our time lounging by the pool in our complex.  We did spend one night introducing him to downtown Coco and oddly enough we ran into another person who we had met in San Juan del Sur.

After that I headed home to CT for a few days, but this post is starting to get long so I'll save the rest of my catching up for the next one.

P.S. I mentioned above that Katie launched HER OWN BLOG and I highly encourage you all to check it out.  She has put a TON of work into it (i.e. substantially more work than I have put into mine) and she actually has plans of turning this into a future income source.  If you want more details about what we actually did on all of these trips, she'll have several posts detailing out each stop. So please support her and check it out!!