Montezuma and Pura Vida

I have returned from a fabulous weekend at the beach and I finally have a slight tan, lol! Brittney, Renee' and I left Heredia Friday morning in search of a relaxing, beautiful weekend, and we definitely found it. We first headed to the airport to take our plane and upon seeing it, immediately questioned why we chose to fly, lol. Little planes are a little scary...but, we arrived in Tambor after 25 minutes instead of 6 hours by bus, so we were pretty ecstatic. From the "airport" in Tambor, it was really just an airstrip but the locals seemed to think it was a pretty big deal, we headed to Paquera and our tour of Isla Tortuga. We hung out on the beach at the tour place for a while until our tour guide, Juan, took us out in the boat. The water was blue and clear, and we had an absolute blast snorkeling! I felt a little nervous at first, but after the first few minutes I had it down and we were swimming with the fishies! We did that for about an hour and then we headed to the main island. It turns out that Isla Tortuga isn't just one island. It's a bunch of islands that make up the shape of a turtle! It was amazing. Juan chopped up some pineapple, coconut, and watermelon for us and left us to explore for a few hours or so. We definitely enjoyed it even if we did have to pee behind a tree, lol...they were charging a dollar to use the port-o-potty!! We were on a budget so the tree worked just fine, lol. After a while, Juan came to pick us up and somewhere during this whole trip he found out that we were headed to Montezuma which he called Montefuma...fumar means to smoke in spanish and monte apparently means weed...more on this later...lol.

Well, after we got back, we had to go catch our bus to Montezuma. Juan told us that the bus left at 5:20...at 6:15, we were headed to Montezuma, lol. Needless to say, Juan was not on our good list after that. Standing on the side of the road in Costa Rica for an hour and a half with no bathrooms or a bench to sit on was not exactly our idea of fun, but we finally caught a bus and we were headed to Montezuma. Let me just say that it's probably the prettiest beach I've ever been to! We had planned on only staying there for one night and then heading to Mal Pais, but instead, we decided to just stay for the whole weekend! The town itself had 2 streets with lots of really great souvenir shops, restaurants, and...yes, weed, lol. The whole town appears to be caught in a time warp of hippies and happiness. Very chill, the epitome of the Costa Rican motto: Pura Vida. There were lots of tourists there from America, France, Canada...you name it, they were there. We spent two days basking in the sunshine on the beach. The water was crystal clear and blue and there were beautiful, but dangerous, rocks and boulders everywhere. Our hotel was only a 1/4 of a mile from the beach and we actually had A/C, which I definitely took for granted, lol!! Last night we ate at a restaurant called El Sano Banano(the Healthy Banana), and we got to watch a movie for free. Every night they show a different movie and last night it was Hairspray, very cute! It was a great ending to a great weekend. We absolutely loved Montezuma, and I hope we have a chance to go back. We were pretty sad to leave it this morning, and we wanted to prolong our weekend vacation as long as possible, so we hit up Burger King after we got back to Heredia, lol. I just never realized I could miss greasy hamburgers that are terrible for you, lol!

Wednesday my folks are heading down and I'm really excited to show them around! Costa Rica is celebrating Semana Santa right now so there are tons of religious processions going on all week. Hopefully we'll get a chance to catch some of them! Oh, and if anyone wants to check out some pics I took this weekend, here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045165&l=562fa&id=52702346

Enjoy! I wish I could bring everyone down here to experience this with me! Hope all is well in the States!

Mucho amor,
Amelia