Laid back paradise

Again I’m on a porch to catch the feeble signal from a router in an office. Last time I was freezing off a certain body part, this time I’m wiping the sweat off my brow.

We’ve left the lovely Capitan Suizo and moved less than a 100 km. south. Mind you, the journey took five hours… It’s much greener here, because they get more rain, but still the roads are so dusty that people wear dust masks when they ride their bikes, motorbikes and dirt-bikes on the roads – or what passes for roads around here.

This hotel – or lodge really – is very different from the Capitan, but also very nice. It consists of a number of small cabins or huts with little porches in front. Each cabin has a nice large room with a half partition, so the beds are separated. Centrally on the property is the open air restaurant (almost all restaurants here are open air – a steep roof on pillars and a kitchen in the back) and the swimming pool. We don’t use the pool as much here as in the other place, because this one is very deep and not as big. Besides, the sea is 25 meters from our cabin.

The Pacific is even wilder here than in Tamarindo. At high tide the waves are awesome! Which is why we only let Dane surf at low tide. The waves are still pretty wild then, but more manageable.

This is another surfer’s paradise, but these surfers are a lot different from the bums at Tamarindo. These guys – and some girls – live for surfing. Their lives revolve around that board. They are mostly young, but there are also quite a few in their thirties and maybe even older. They have lean, muscular bodies with tans worth dying for, big and generally very beautiful tattoos, long sun-bleached hair, wear long shorts and washed out t-shirts. It seems that the only things they spend money on is surf-gear and sunglasses. Very fashionable sunglasses they all have! They surf from the early morning just at sunrise, which is around 6:30 till they have to go to work. The good(looking) ones teach surfing school, the less fortunate tend bars and work in surf shops. The girls are almost all very, very pretty and the predominant fashion is tiny mini-shorts that almost cover their buttocks and skimpy little tank tops. They are also tattooed. The surfers come from all over the world to surf these fantastic waves.

Life is very laid back here. Apart from the surfers, there aren’t many tourists. And some of them are clearly parents, who’ve come to visit their straying offspring. You only have to walk a few steps along the beach to have it more or less to yourself. Only time you see crowds are the obligatory sunset half-hour. At 5:30 everybody is at his or her favoured spot on the beach (not too far down, because the tide comes in with surprising speed at this time) with drink in hand to watch the sun set over the Pacific. And what a sight it is!

More tropical pictures here, if you can bear to see them…