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Hola!
We have just returned from a long weekend at Samara Beach, a little dusty beach town about 4 hours east of Palmares. The beach was absolutely stunning, lined with Palm Trees and backed by lush forest. We stayed in a hotel on the beach...about 3 metres from our room and you are walking on the sand! The Hotel was really cool and had a cocktail bar and restaurant also on the beach so we spent two evenings sitting with our feet in the sand, beer in hand watching the waves! Goooood times!
The weekend didn´t quite get off to the best start! We were told by i-to-i that the bus to Samara beach would stop to pick us up on the main road outside the orphanage, but instead went whizzing past us! We then decided to get a bus to San Jose, 1 hour away to see if we could get a bus to another beach town for the weekend. When we stepped off the bus in San Jose it was one of the scariest moments of my life! It was full of people hurrying around, selling things, trying to grab onto us and all around us were people begging and sleeping in corners of the pavement. It was a very shocking thing to see as we had no yet seen the inner city area and we felt vulnerable and a little lost!
After grabbing on to our bags very tightly we wondered up and down the streets trying to locate some kind of information about bus times, nothing made sense and nothing was signposted! We spent about an hour wondering around looking like lost gringos! I even used my new and improved spanish to ask people that looked sane and less scary than those trying to grab us! They understood me perfectly...but we were given different information from each person. It then started to rain...and rain...and so we gave up and jumped on the first bus back to Palmares...slightly chickened out...definetly defeated!
As you can imagine our host family laughed at the sight of us when we returned back to the house. They did not expect us and after hearing our story...laughed, rather than sympathised! After expressing our anger at the Costa Rican bus system they eventually agreed with us and Marita rang the bus station for us and gathered the information we would need to give it another go the next day! ...So we did, and we made it to Samara. Although we had one less day there it was definetly worth the stress and hassle! A beautiful drive to get there and when we arrived the hotel and beach and little town of Samara was absolutely amazing, it looked like something you would see on a postcard!
We spent the two days we had relaxing on the beach, eating as much none costa rican food as possible and drinking by the beach. On Sunday we rented surf boards for two pounds an hour and Josh attempted to teach me to surf...it wasn´t easy, and i didn´t quite succeed but I did master body-boarding which was just as much fun!
We got back to Palmares yesterday afternoon and have been working this morning. Today we took loads and loads of work for the children to do as we were feeling so tired and both red from sunburn that we were hoping the children would sit and work rather than want to do physical activites. It worked...for the first couple of hours and we did some drawing and learning numbers but then they got restless and we ended up having to play games and chase them around! Grrrrr!
We have four shifts left at the Orphanage until we leave this friday for a little bit of travelling before we head to KeyWest for a Simmons reunion and more bumming around on the beach...its a hard life!
Hope all is well with everyone back home x
- comments
MB Where was the Orphanage? I would like your thoughts regarding volunteering at Orphanage in Costa Rica....Thanks