Pura Vida

Have you ever watched The Smurfs and noticed that they use the word smurf for every adjective, noun, and verb? That´s sort of like how people use the phrase ´pura vida´in Costa Rica. It literally means ´pure life´ but people use it to describe their lifestyle, to say hello and goodbye, to say ´cool, great, thanks!´ etc. A jack of all trades type of phrase.

Warning - This is boring, just a log of our trip to Costa Rica. If you are not insanely interested in every moment of my vacation, feel free to stop reading now.

Day 1

Becca and I arrived in Costa Rica, grabbed our rental car and thank god, were able to procure the last available GPS, without which I would not be writing this post as I´m sure I´d be stuck in a ditch somewhere.

The drive from San Jose to Arenal was craziest drive I´ve ever experienced. The drive took about 3 hours, of which we only had about 30 minutes of daylight. The roads were windy and treacherous, the drivers around us were insane, and we could barely see 10 feet in front of us. Thanksfully, I never get car sick. Even more thankfully, with our GPS we could see where the road was curving, and it even alerted us to things like speedbumps, sunken roads, and dangerous bridges. Fun alerts, I know.

Anyway, we made it there in one piece, and neither of us vomited. Already a huge accomplishment.

Day 2

Wrote day 3 first and can´t think or concentrate anymore. There was hiking and erupting volcano spewing molten lava. It was pretty damn cool. There was also hot springs and crazy monkeys - my absolute all time favorite drink (even more than my grenadine concoction that some of you might recall).

I´ll come back to day 2 later.

Day 3

Sloths, Monkeys, Snakes, oh my!

We woke up early and headed out to hike around the ´hanging bridges´ which are a series of suspension bridges in Volcan Arenal National Park (not actually a national park, it´s privately owned, probably for the best). Our tour guide Jason was amazing and extremely knowledgeable about the flora and fauna. I could probably repeat some interesting facts like the fact that you can´t tell how old trees in Costa Rica are because they don´t have a cold season when the trees stop growing, so there are no rings in the trunks. But my main focus of this trip was to see a sloth (called perezosos in Spanish which also means lazy people). I don´t know why the obsessoin with sloths? Maybe because Ive never seen one in person? But that´s what I was looking for.

I´m happy to report that not only did we got to see a mother sloth and her baby (pictures to come) we also saw a bunch of howler monkeys, snakes, lizards, tons of butterfles, etc. It was a good day to be out in the rainforest.

After our trek, we went ´canyoning´. Ive never heard anything referred to as canyoning before, but it was basically rappelling and hiking down waterfalls. We met great people, excelled at rappelling (shockingly), and found that if we want to find really good-looking Costa Rican men, all we had to do was go on an adventure tour (did I mention that my Spanish has vastly improved in the last few days?).

Becca and I were so careful as to what we should pack and were positive that we had everything until after the trip we realized we were soaking wet and had no dry clothes. Minor oversight.

We got back to our hotel completely exhausted from the days activities and decided to get a massage and a Volcano Mud Mask (Becca is convinced that all they did was rub sand on our faces). Massages in other countries are always comical in some way or another. This one was amazing. They massaged us for 2 hours! But it was also really weird.

Becca was on a table just a curtain away and I really wish I knew another language besides English and Spanish at that moment so that we could talk to each other about how completely weird it was. I thought about mumbling in a fake southern acccent so that they masseuses wouldn´t understand, but decided that it was a bit too rude.

So what was weird about it? First they gave us our volcano mud mask where they put on rubber gloves to apply what seemed like sand to our faces. Rubber gloves?! Next they did reflexology which meant putting our feet in plastic bags full of lotion and mushing our feet around in the plastic bags. Next came the full body massage where they seemed to cover every inch of us (including an odd stomach massage) but seemed to neglect our backs and shoulders. I´m not even going to go into what they did to my hair.

Nevertheless, it was relaxing, fun, and funny, and caused Becca to pass out immediately, which is why I´m on the computer writing about our trip.

Well, we have to get up early to drive to Tamarindo for beach and surf lessons, and the storytelling part of my brain has ceased to function anyway, so goodnight and Merry Christmas!

xox
Lauren