Kyla and Jay's Central America Travel blog

Dos touristas Canadiences, no hablo Espanol muy bien!

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Caribbean Coast!

Hey all,

We're 5 nights in to a relaxing, sun-filled week on the Southern Coast of Costa Rica. We arrived on Friday after a really twisty bus ride through the mountains surrounding San Jose. Lots of scenery reminiscent of Jurassic Park. We took the bus almost all the way to the Panama border and got off at an awesome little town called Puerto Veijo.. that is part Rasta, part surfer vibe but all slacker.. Lots of great cheap restaurants, bars and neat little stores line the streets with beautiful beaches about 10 feet away.. Upon our arrival, we used the advice of our guidebook and checked into the Hotel Puerto Veijo. This ended up being a litte bit like a college dorm, without the books or smart people. nice folks and all, of course.

We also realized, after paying for it, that our room (10 bucks each, a night) was right beside some kind of water pumping device. I woke up thinking we were being attacked by mer-men more than once..Also the communal showers and sinks were on the other side of the room- which got annoying. After getting to know town, we moved (thankfully) to Rico Cafe cabinas. Awesome place. The owner Roger is this laid back british James Bond type, who runs the cafe (with two lovely birds)for breakfast and lunch from 6-1pm, then surfs. He's given us tips on a few wicked beaches we've biked to in the last few days. Free laundry, bikes and snorkel gear included in the room rate, as well as a private shower! The other mainstay at the cafe/cabinas is Cliff. He is an x-insurance salesman from Arizona and now Puerto Veijo's official conspiracy consultant. He is up on everything and listens to his shortwave radio 5 hours a day to learn more. From The Bilderberg Group, to Chem trails, to Bohemian Grove, to the Cancer conspiracy- he is very passionate. to say the least. He shows films nightly at the Cafe and makes Collodial Silver every couple of days- it is apparently the cure for everything.

Yesterday, we took the bus to Cahuita for a 7km hike through the national park. We met a super nice New Zealander and shared the afternoon hike and a drink afterwards. We saw some howler monkeys and some aggressive white faced monkeys, as well as a huge frightening spider. I quivered, but Kyla held me tight. We had dinner with him- and we're hoping to catch up in Monteverde as well.

Have met a few very interesting locals (foreigners who live here) around town and its been surpirisingly easy. The German owner of one place basically joined us for dinner one night and revealed that she had dated a guy who did the voice for the Transformers cartoon.. I was excited to find out he did the voice for everyone's favourite mischevious Autobot, 'Bumblebee'. They dated for 8 months, but he continually quoted the show, in character, and would even jump on open mics and verbally preform the transformer noises. She hadnt seen the show, so she got sick of it.

We're happy and safe, getting to bed relatively early and up by 8!! everyday! We are eating fruit for breakfast, and I think it might be good for us, or something..Exercising everyday and working on our Spanish. (kinda difficult as everyone here speaks english). Kyla is already looking like a mediterranean goddess, and I, her pink, almost purple guardian.

One more day here, and we'll be heading back to San Jose on Thursday. we're going to stay in another part of town and check out this Jazz Club we've heard about. Then we'll be leaving early on Friday to La Fortuna for a couple nights, to check out the Aernal Volcano, as well as the corresponding hotsprings.

The climate is supposedly completely different, so it will be interesting to see if all this crap we've packed will come in handy.

Thanks for reading! Love'n'stuff!!

Jay (and Kyla)

ps- the infamous "Leatherman" came in very handy today at the beach as we chopped up and devoured a fresh pineapple..

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

One week and counting...

Hello,

Kyla and I have established this blog to keep you abreast of our adventures in a strange land. We might not be updating very often, but we will try to have something on here once a week.

We depart in 7 days for our adventure through Central America. We're begining in San Jose, Costa Rica on the 20th of September and flying home from Cancun on the 15th of December..

We'll be starting out on the Caribe coast, then checking out the highlands, then the pacific of CR. Then onward to Nicaragua for a couple weeks.

We have managed to get our hands on a digital camera, so there will be images, but we will still try and use colorful descriptives.

Jay