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.

Come Visit Us in Costa Rica!!!

Happy Wednesday!!  Notice how I didn't say happy hump day?  That was intentional.  Part of me always hated when I was wished a happy hump day because it implied that we were wishing away the Monday - Friday work week.  I interpreted it as a shared grumbling about the fact that we were all in this miserable place but at least we had each other to work through it together.  I felt the same way any time I heard someone say they were "living the dream", which I heard multiple times every week.  It always sounded sarcastic, and I always thought to myself that if we are not actually striving to for the dream, then why do we keep coming back here every day?  I hoped that for most people "living the dream" is what they are truthfully doing with their lives, but I knew that for me it wasn't. I just hope that the sarcasm from everyone else truly is a joke and not their reality.  I don't know if I was the only one who felt that way; it's very possible that I was just being negative or that my expectations were too high, but either way it was something that I really wanted to get away from.

I take one exception to what I wrote above.  GEICO's hump day camel is hilarious.  

But that's not what I want to write about today.  Today I want to tell you about the specifics of our plans for Costa Rica, and encourage you all to come down for a visit!  I also want to make sure you understand that we are serious about this invitation.  If you are reading this blog, then you are welcome to come down to visit us.  We may not necessarily be able to hang out 24/7 or have enough space to put you up, but the area we are going to be living in has a lot to offer for everyone and we would love to help ensure that you have an awesome vacation as best we can.

When I left off in the last blog we had ideas ready but no logistics firmly in place.  We have a ton of updates since then.  On February 13th, Katie and I are flying from Boston to Liberia Airport (LIR) which is near the North Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  From there it is a 30 minute drive to Playas del Coco, which is a very popular vacation spot for Costa Rican tourists.  It is also a popular spot for American expats to settle down.  Our apartment will be a 5-minute walk from Playas del Coco, and a 15-minute walk from the black sand beaches of Playa Ocotal, which happens to be the location of our upcoming Divemaster internship.

I can't even begin to describe how excited I am for this internship at Rocket Frog Divers to begin.  For a little bit of background, the Divemaster certification is the entry level professional scuba diving certification.  It qualifies you to lead certified divers on guided dives, but it does not qualify you to teach diving courses.  Meeting all of the minimum requirements to become a certified Divemaster can probably be accomplished in 2-3 weeks, but doing the minimum would likely leave you with little experience and practically no ability to find a job at another dive shop.

The internship we are about to begin will give us much more than the bare minimum required to become certified Divemasters.  We are going to partake in a 6-8 week program that will involve six 8-hour work days per week, where we will dive in the mornings and work in the shop in the afternoons.  Over the course of our time there we will accumulate ~140-160 dives (minimum requirement is 60), and learn all aspects of what it takes to run a dive shop.  In their words, "if we know how to do it, we will teach you how to do it."  After the program is complete we will have all of the experience that any dive shop around the world would be looking for when hiring a Divemaster.  On top of that, we were encouraged to hear that there is a big need for traveling Divemasters around the world to fill in during shops' busy seasons, making our dream from my last post all the more attainable.

Beyond the dive specific experience and ability to find work as a Divemaster, this internship has the potential to provide so much more for me.  First, it allows me to enjoy my favorite hobby on a daily basis and potentially make some income from that hobby in the future.  Second, and most importantly, it provides me the opportunity to see how a small business is run from the ground level.  I completed my MBA last year with the hopes of learning how to run a business, and in theory I have all of the tools in my arsenal to do that.  But as any business owner will tell you, the theory and tools are useless if you can't apply them, and that experience is what I'm sorely missing.  I'm hopeful and confident that the skills we learn in this internship will be transferable to virtually any small business, and that even if I don't use diving as a primary source of income in the future, I'll be able to find other ways to apply this experience to all of my future endeavors.  Worst case scenario, I took a few months of my life to go diving every day, and I can't see myself ever regretting that.

So if you've made it through this entire post, I'd like to reiterate my invitation from earlier.  We will be staying in a studio apartment so our space may be limited, but depending on the circumstances we may be able to put you up.  Flights are dirt cheap; I found round trip tickets from LaGuardia (LGA) to Liberia Airport (LIR) for under $300.  We will be there from mid-February until at least mid-May, possibly longer.  If you want to scuba dive we can make that happen; if you want to become a certified diver we can make that happen too.  If you just want to enjoy some beautiful beaches that's not a problem, or if you want to enjoy the endless options for hiking, zip-lining, cloud forest tours, and other ecotourism activities that Costa Rica has to offer, that works too.  We may be working while you are in town but our hours will typically be from 7-3 so our afternoons and evenings should be free.  Either way, we encourage anyone who comes down to bring a friend.  Katie and I both really hope to see some of you guys down there :-)