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!!

Our Internship... Start to Finish

Katie and I landed in Liberia, Costa Rica on the evening of Thursday, Februard 23rd.  We were picked up by our divemaster instructor, Scott, who turns out to be one of the nicest people on the planet.  He calls himself "the mean guy" and he's a terrible liar.  Katie and I were secretly hoping for a few days off to settle into the area, but we figured that if the shop had other plans we would go along with whatever they had in mind.  Well at around 5am on the morning of Friday, February 24th, Katie and I were up and getting ready for our first day of work...

We arrived at the shop and were greeted by the shop owner, Mike, and a few other staff members who quickly put us to work.  There was no diving planned for us that day, but we did still need to help prepare for the day of diving for the customers.  I'll get more into what that work entails a little later, but for now I'll just say that we were pretty sweaty by the time the boats went out for their dives.  Once the boats went out, Katie and I got started on our training with our Emergency First Responder course.  We spent most of the day doing that, followed by some more labor when the boats came in after finishing their dives.

At this point, the apartment that Katie and I had lined up wasn't quite ready yet, so we were staying with Scott who lives in a beautiful house on the side of a mountain overlooking the ocean (pictured below).  It was a really nice place to stay, but didn't give us a chance to unpack and settle into our own place.

The pretty sick view from Scott's house

Day 2 was similar to day 1.  We helped prep the boats, but this time Katie went out with one of the boats to assist with snorkelers, while I stayed back to assist with an open water scuba dive class that was doing pool work.  We helped unload the boats when they came back and then headed back to Scott's place for some more of our own scuba training in the evening.  Our apartment still wasn't ready, so we still weren't able to fully settle in.

On day 3 we finally got to move into our studio apartment at the end of our work day.  The complex we are living in turns out to be really nice, but unfortunately the cleanliness of the apartment when we moved in wasn't exactly what we were hoping for.  The floors needed to be swept and mopped, all of the dishes / silverware / and counters needed cleaning, and there were lots of bugs.  We also had no food and the closest grocery store was a 10-minute walk away.  Given our level of exhaustion after a day of work, there was no way we could tackle all of this in one day, so we tackled each of these issues over the course of the next week.

The next week or so followed a similar daily routine, so I'll outline it here.  Wake up at ~5:00am -> make some breakfast / sunscreen / get ready to go in -> ride with Scott or walk 1.5 miles to the shop -> load customer gear bags into truck to bring to boat -> load gear bags & full scuba tanks into boat -> set up gear and prepare weight belts for customers while we head to first dive site -> complete dive #1 in chilly (~70F) water with poor visibility (~10-30ft) -> head to second dive site while switching gear to unused tanks -> complete dive #2 in chilly water with poor visibility -> disassemble gear while returning to shop -> load empty tanks and gear bags into truck -> unload used tanks at compressor station -> unload & rinse / clean all used gear at the cleaning station and load back into truck -> load unused tanks into truck for next day's use -> unload & hang clean gear in gear locker to dry for next day's use.  This process typically took us until ~2-4:00pm at which point we would either hitch a ride or walk back to our apartment.

Given how tiring this daily routine was, it took us a lot longer than we expected to settle into the apartment.  After a week of doing the little we could every day, we finally got to a point where our stuff was unpacked, we had food, and the room was clean.  We also had extremely sore muscles and a lot of sunburns.  We finally asked for our first day off one week after we arrived, and were thankfully granted it.  This gave us a chance to finally put the finishing touches on settling in.

By this point in the internship, Katie and I were starting to second guess our decision to come here.  The workload was brutal and the diving conditions were not what we expected they would be.  On top of that we were starting to wonder why our training hadn't progressed much past the training we received on our first two days.  We fully expected this to be a working internship, but we thought that meant that our time would be split between helping out in the shop and working on our divemaster training.  Up until this point, we had received very little training and had been worked to the bone at the shop.

The day we returned after our day off I was approached by the owner and "encouraged" to not take any more days off for the remainder of my time here.  He pointed out that I was 80 dives away from the minimum I needed to be an instructor, so If I wanted to reach the instructor rating I would need to dive every chance I got.  So that night I went home and did a little math.  At ~2 dives a day, it would take me 5 weeks and 5 days to complete my 80 dives if I took no days off.  If I were to take one day off per week, it would take me 6 weeks and 4 days.  So taking no days off would save me a whopping 6 days in my quest to get 80 more dives.  This did not seem worth it to me, and I was a little concerned by the suggestion that wanting one day off per week was seen as a negative.

After a couple more days with this routine, Katie and I decided it was time to talk to our schedule coordinator about their expectations for our time there.  Our understanding before we arrived in Costa Rica was that we would work 8 hour days, 6 days a week, and that our 8 hours would include shop work as well as training.  We expected to do book work / homework outside of this time.  After our conversation with management, we found out that the actual expectations were that we work 8 hour days, 6 days a week, with additional training to be completed after shop hours for an additional ~2 hours a day.

So now we had a lot of factors working against us that were forcing us to reconsider our decision to come here.  While the labor was backbreaking, Katie and I were happy with how our bodies were adjusting.  Our sunburns were turning to tans, and we weren't as sore every night as we were the night before.  On the down side, however, the diving conditions were not fun and we were frequently looking forward to short dives, the work expectations changed when we arrived, and the apartment was a 15 minute walk to town which made it difficult to have a strong social scene, especially with how tired we were at the end of the day.  The one thing we had going for us was the crew we were working with.  We absolutely loved loved loved the crew.

If any one of these issues were present by itself, I'm sure Katie and I could have gritted our teeth and gotten through it.  Unfortunately, the combination of all of these negative factors brought us to the tough decision to drop out of the divemaster internship at this shop.  We both expected the internship to be a difficult but enjoyable experience, and that was not going to happen if we stayed here.  In speaking with the other members of the crew, they encouraged us to pull the trigger and to try again in a more fun location with better diving conditions.

So at this point we are back to square one.  We still plan to complete our divemaster certifications before the summer, but now we need to regroup and decide on a new shop in a new location.  For the time being, we are already in Costa Rica and we don't plan on wasting that opportunity.  We plan on taking a month to travel around the area and enjoy everything this region has to offer.  We still have an apartment in Coco so this will be our home base.  On Saturday March-11 we headed to Nicaragua to spend a week there.  After that we plan to return to our home base in Coco for a few days before we head south to explore more of Costa Rica.  We will probably leave the country around the end of the first week of April, where we will either head home for a little while or head to our next destination.  Either way, we are super excited for what the next few months have in store, and we know it's going to be a hell of a ride :-)

Even though we only got two weeks to know them, I'm seriously going to miss these guys when we leave