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.