Well, things are winding up here. We only have three full days left, and then we will be back. So where have we spent the last week? At the beach, of course.
We picked out Playa Nosara on the Nicoya Peninsula for its relative seclusion and reputation as a swimming (rather than a surfing) beach. There is one direct bus out there that leaves at 6AM, so that's what we took. Thinking ahead, we called up a likely looking hotel that the guidebook said was on the beach, "Casa de los Vagabondos" to make a reservation. It turned out they were not really near the beach, but they grudgingly took our reservation after recommending another place, "Almost Paradise," to us. This should have been a tip off.
We got in to Nosara at around noon, or rather we got to the town of Nosara, which is 5km from the beach, and started to look for our hotel. We thought it was right in the center, but everyone we asked said it was 1km away, so we started walking through the rain. When we got to where we thought it should be, we asked around again, and noone had any idea what we were talking about.
There was one place that looked likely, but it was empty and had signs up saying that it had been seized by the government. Fortunately, we managed to catch a bus back into town. We checked in to a cheap hotel in town, ate lunch and decided to check out "Almost Paradise." It took about an hour to walk there, and we were directed to the owner's house down the road. It turned out she was full, but had a couple of guest rooms she used for overflow at her house, which had a pool. We must have looked more pathetic than usual, because she quickly gave in when we asked for a lower rate.
The unexpected bonuses of the house, besides the pool, were three very cute kittens and an unlimited supply of old Gourmet magazines, in English. We spent much of the next five days reading the magazines and playing with the kittens. And on the beach, of course.
The only moment of excitment, well terror, in all of this came one afternoon as we were walking on the beach. It was high tide and the water was pretty rough, so we had brought our blanket, walked a fair way down the beach and had planned to read. We watched as a family of three, two parents and a teenaged son, got in the water and splashed around. They went in a bit deeper.
We watched the for a little while longer, and suddenly they were fairly far out, and I went down to see if they were ok. As I approached, the son came running out of the water and ran back in with a tree branch to use for floatation. That clinched it. It took off running down the beach. I managed to get a group of about 6 teenagers with surfboards, and we took off back down towards where they had been. The son was back out, but the two adults were still floating, quite far out now, with the log. The surfers had clearly done this before, and it wasn't too long before everyone was back in and safe, but it was a scary thing.
After five days we had exhausted all of the restaurants in the area, and it was time to come back. As we paid for our hotel, the owner, a German woman named Gerlinde, told us she was looking for someone to house-sit for her for two months while she spent time back in Germany. It was very tempting.