Hunter Braithwaite finds more that great surf along the Costa Rican coastline.
Costa Rican roads are a cruel joke played on Americans, I thought, teary-eyed, as I clutched my forehead, which had just bounced off the windshield of our rented SUV. Why did this happen? What did we swerve to miss? Oh, the usual - a parade of stray dogs, barefoot children on dirt bikes, a rooster lazily strutting like a Caribbean dictator. I suppose parade implies motion, and dead pigs don't move, but the parade also featured a dead pig. Considering the pain, it's not remarkable that this is my chief memory from a week in Costa Rica.
A few days prior, I met a group of high school friends in Nosara for one last week of surfing before the anchors of career confined each to our own harbor of adulthood. The days that followed consisted of little more than fish tacos and sunburns. After almost a week of this, I convinced the group that there is a beautiful and varied country beyond Playa Guiones, and it would be regrettable to spend the rest of the vacation surfing. (Full disclosure: I hate surfing, it's boring and too hard.) So we did.
Around noon we bought some sandwiches and rented a Toyota Prado for the day ($96 and a valid passport). With little more than a rough approximation of where we wanted to go (south) we took the 116 to Samara. Samara is the type of place where the locals only talk to you if attempting to sell you pot. They'll saunter up, chat about the waves or about Obama, and just when you think you've made a new friend, whisper into your ear:
"You want the weed?" Here we ate empanadas and smoothies at a rancid-smelling soda shop. Despite the maddening heat, it was one of the best meals of the trip. In Costa Rican tourist towns, there is a negative correlation between cleanliness and food quality.
The road south from Samara turns quickly from bad to worse. Drivers are required to ford several rivers. Luckily, this was the peak of the dry season, so a river is nothing more than a bone-dry ditch. If we had come three months later, the Prado would never have made it. It barely did as is. In front of an audience of old Costa Rican women and cows, we spent 10 minutes trying to get out of a sandpit. You could hear it rustling from the palm trees,
"muy estúpido." Camaronal is a black beach. As we drove up to it, the sun was setting and the wind was kicking up a lot of sand. It looked like smoke as it hung in the air. Very intense. Down by the water a single person stood watching baby turtles walking into the sea.
Plant a tree in the rainforest. Provide clean water for a river community. Deliver school supplies to an Amazonian school. By traveling with International Expeditions, not only will you experience the rich cultural and biological diversity of the world, but your trip will also help ensure that future generations can experience it, too.
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