Nosara II

Woke at 6am to the sound of Howler Monkeys in the banana trees (how many times in life can you say this?). I walked up to the pool and read the Times online/ updated the blog. By 7am Debbie's mom, Rosemary, walked out of the kitchen with breakfast. Sara emerged, then Debbie with a fruit plate the size of a sheet cake (pineapple, passion fruit, sweet orange, papaya, mango) all from her garden. Then asked, "What would you like for breakfast?" (Breakfast is included each morning, FYI.) We opted for the veggie omelet which appeared shortly with mushrooms, pepper jack, avocado, etc. and toast again on large platter. 

Plan for the day: 10:30am yoga at the Nosara Yoga Institute (world-renowned tropical yoga school - see link & pics), beach, lunch....

We talk with Debbie about what she's done to Green (v/t: to make environmentally friendly) Vista del Paraiso. Most of her produce is from the garden. What she can't grow, she buys organic in town. The lighting was replaced with LEDs/solar panels this year. Leftover food is composted either into the garden or given to the birds, dogs, monkeys. She says she's looking for a way to convert her car to run on vegetable oil (as she uses it for cooking in large quantities anyway). Sara said she's going to write up a piece for Ecofacbulous (see link). Costa Rica is a bellwether of an emergent trend in travel, Ecotourism: environmentally friendly, minimally invasive, sustainable travel. (We are staying at a bona-fide Eco resort in the mountains next week.)

Debbie drove us down the hill to rent bikes (10$/day ea.) which there are only 8 places in town to do this. Town is one gravel-road with several congregations of businesses, mostly surf shops, a couple grocery marts, restaurants, real estate, car rentals, in equal proportions: ice creamery (1), bank (1), tattoo parlor (1). You're out of luck, for example, if your TV breaks and you decide to purchase a flatscreen (Rick, welcome to the Big Boys Club!). Out of luck if you want to buy a book. The road is poor, to say the least, and dusty if you happen to share it with a car. 

We then biked through town on the footpaths to the Institute. Imagine a white-pebbled pathway through the jungle, then suddenly appears a wood-cathedral. Took a 90-minute Vinyasa yoga class with a woman who's been at the Institute for a year working towards a continued certification (Yoga instructors, like tattoo artists, like doctors take classes then are required to log hours. Sara's certification is a 200-hour certification. Next for her is the 500). The class was slow and focussed on a lot on breathing. I usually prefer them to have more movement, but S says no matter what the class, you emerge the same person. Nonetheless, yoga in the jungle, right? 

We wandered around some of the Institute's buildings, took pictures then biked down to the Oasis (see town map) for smoothies (2.000 colones, $4). Signed up for surf lessons for Sunday - if time permits I'll explain why surfing on Sundays is probably the most religious activity on the planet. Then we biked the block to Playa Guiones, stripped out of our gear and hopped into the ocean (Air temp: 80 degrees. Water temp: 75 degrees). We played. The travel books all say Guiones is one of, if not The best beach for beginner surfers in CR. The waves are medium-sized, they break consistently to the left. 

Then we biked back to VdP, up the gigantic hill (for the PNWers: Chuckanut Mountain; for everyone else: steep) about 2miles. Truth be told, we walked most of it. The bikes we rented are cruisers (fat tires, no gears) and best suited for the gravel roads in town. Best suited for PAVED roads, but ok. We saw a couple more EE-WHANAS, though too quick to get on camera. 

Back at VdP I grabbed sodas from the fridge & we plunged into the pool. Sara remained poolside, I napped at the cabina. On the way up to dinner we hear this sound like wind rustling through the trees, but when we look up a family of Howler Monkeys is leaping from branch to branch, knocking leaves onto the roof of the cabina. Howler Monkey: see, Costa Rica's largest primate, measuring 24". We watch as the family navigates un-jumpable distances on threadlike branches. Tonight I'm having the chicken. Sun is setting. 

Nosara III

We've got a surf lesson. No time to look around/comment on the beatific scenery here in paradise. We eat toast and our stopsign-sized platter of fruit, coffee then it's off to town. (Pictures are of us biking down the hill.) We arrive at the Oasis for our 9am lesson ($90, incl board for the day). What we have come to understand is that the best surfing is from 7 - 10am, then people retreat from the afternoon sun and return to the waves around 4 - 6pm, or until it is too dark to see. 

Peadro and Luigi are our surf instructors. Both are rail-thin local - Tico - boys in their late teens. A day in the life of Peadro: wake, surf, teach lesson, lunch, siesta, surf/lesson, surf, sleep. Threehundredandsixtyfivedays a year. We first go to the board shed behind the Oasis and Peadro gets our monstrous 9' boards, straps a leash to each then we are off to la playa, about a 4 minute walk. 

The lesson begins with Peadro drawing with his finger in the sand what his English vocabulary won't sustain. 3 basic rules. 1) Always keep your board perpendicular to the wave; 2) There are stingrays in the ocean so shuffle your feet to avoid stepping on one - this will clearly ruin your day; 3) When you come up from under the water put your hands over your head, just in case there is a board/other rider coming toward you. 

He then draws two longer lines in the sand and demonstrates how to "pop up" on the board. We practice. Think getting up from a push-up but at the speed you would if your toddler was about to put his gummy fingers into an electrical outlet. 

Then Luigi comes bounding out from the cemetery.... He is a local talent, rumored to be Professional caliber, but is choosing to stay in Nosara. He has long curly hair covered by a white hat which he wears even into the waves. (He is, however, the local dance champion. Apparently last night he won a dance contest at the discotheque, for which he received a pair of jeans and not the $40 he was promised. We check this with Debbie's son who was at the club with a Tica girl four years his senior and he confirms.) Luigi and I head into the water, Sara and Peadro head into the water. 

There is a nuance to surfing. Many nuances. The competing factors are balance, velocity, buoyancy, strength, knowledge, patience. When all of these sync together, you get a wave. Then long boards we are assigned, unlike the shorter, fierce incisor-shaped rockets the pros get, account for several of these factors we will not be able to assimilate out of the gates. The longboards, for example, displace more water (buoyancy) and cover more area of the wave (balance) and reach speed more quickly (strength). 

Which still doesn't help me. Well, sort of. The waves here come frequently - several a minute - and are medium-sized. Also, where you catch the waves is only about shoulder-deep water, so it's easy - as easy as one could hope - to learn here. I catch the first wave and ride it about 10 feet toward shore. 

Here is the order of operations in surfing: see wave, analyze where it is breaking, is this the wave for you? it will break in one consistent direction - left, right, not both, get yourself in a position to catch this wave, close but not too close, board turned around, hop onto the board, begin paddling, balance, when the wave begins to rear up under you pop up, position yourself on the board, ride.

Simple right? After the first wave it is another 20 minutes before I catch another. All the while Luigi is patiently reminding me to not be too far forward, too far back, to remain balanced, not too paddle too quickly, to push up evenly. Then another wave. Sara's success is similar. First wave, then a long dry spell (so to speak). Patience. Then the successful waves come more frequently. We are up and riding sometimes 10 sometimes 20 feet toward shore. 

This is tiring. Back at the cabina both S and I find bruises on our elbows, knees, ribs. Two hours of surfing and we head with Luigi and Peadro back to the Oasis for lunch (Asian rice, salad, rejuvenating smoothie, 11.000 colones). We lean the boards together with the thought that we will return to the waves after eating, but this doesn't happen.  

At lunch we run into the Berkeley hedgefund manager (T.) and her boyfriend the molecular biologist researcher (M.) and their 4 mo/old baby who we met at VdP at dinner last night. M tries to convince Luigi he's ready after four days for a shortboard, unsuccessfully. We talk with T about the financial collapse ("We, in the finance world, saw it coming a year and a half ago." "It's going to get much(!) worse before it gets better." "All along the interstate between San Fran and Sacramento there are communities of sprawl built for buyers at super-low rates - = subprime - and are going to sit there vacant until the price drops, which is, if you think about it, the case all over the country with foreclosed houses no one wants to buy." "But we're here, in Costa Rica!") Oh, and she thinks more regulation wouldn't have necessarily fixed any of this. Also the Auto Bailout give the Big 3 about 60 days. Then what....?

It's hot in the noon sun. We bike toward town for some gelato at Robin's. Robin is a 5-star chef who left the culinary world to make gelato in Nosara. We debate leaving the bikes in town and taking a cab up the hill, but S is able to convince me otherwise. We head for the hill. 

About 1/4 mi into the climb my petal snaps off the bike and punctures first my upper calf and then the bottom of my foot. Grueling climb complicated by having to walk, bleeding, pushing a bike. But the reward at the top of the hill - cool pool, shade - makes it almost worth while. Then both of us nap. Hard.

The restaurant is closed on Sundays but Debbie has decided to make coconut shrimp and Costa Rican style tamales (wrapped in banana leaves, not corn husks). We sit family style with Debbie, her mom, and the family from Boulder to eat. Talk ranges from education to war to the NFL, but altogether pleasant. Dinner is amazing - again. We sit poolside long into the dark, before retreating to the cabina where there is a massive bug!

Nosara IV

Woke, found string from Debbie's daughter, Molly, at VdP to tie the peddle on the Costa Rican Death Bike & peddled/limped/rode-the-brakes down to town for 10:30 yoga at the Nosara Yoga Institute (NYI). Yoga was good. Different style than the previous class. We dropped off the bikes back at the rental place. The agent, seeing me with peddle-in-hand says "Problemas?" "Si," I say, "mas problemas." He doesn't charge me for the second day of rental and we leave on peaceful terms. Then we walk.

On the path to the NYI we see some interesting vegetation (see photos; I know, not that cool: blog about vegetation), trees with thorns (giant thorns!), vines shaped like chains. We have lunch at Cafe Zen, run by former NYI students, all organic vegetarian fare. Then we head to Robin's ice cream for one of the two things she serves, and not the panini.

Then to get back up el hil to VdP w/o bikes. A cab is in order, but no cabs.

We walk to the Harbor Reef Hotel complex where friends of ours are supposed to be staying while they are here for a yoga retreat taught by a Renowned Yoga Guru from LA (RYGLA) who shall remain nameless….

They haven’t arrived yet, or we are unable to find them. We ask a Tica girl working at the resort if she can find us a cab. She spends 20 minutes calling, then says “let me ask if someone here wants to make some money.” Time passes. She returns and says in 15 minutes her friend will be arriving from the airport and he can take us. We wait. It’s siesta ahora, not only is nothing open but nothing is open. S reads a dated version of US WEEKLY WITH SHANNON DOUGHERTY OF BEVERLY HILLS 90210 FAME ON THE COVER AND THE STARLET STARING OFF INTO THE ETHER (DISPARATELY AT THE READER), THE TITLE OF THE STORY IS “HER TIME” and I open the DFW collection, “Consider the Lobster”.

We wait and wait. No friend from the airport, no RYGLA friends. So we walk, back toward the main drag. As we are walking I flag down a small Isuzu flatbed truck and ask the driver if he can Transport’e me e me esposa to VdP? He tells me, then S – whose Espanol is more fluente – that he’d be happy to but can we run some errands with him first? Hop in the bed of the truck I do, S climbs into the front and we escort our driver to first the ATM, then his house where he disappears and returns with a cousin/brother/son, mumbles something in Spanish and the cousin/brother/son appears to laugh, then we are on our way to VdP.

We resolve the next time we are here to A) not rent bikes and B) rent ATVs. Gunter, the German ex-pat, ex-German, ex-secret service half-time bartender at VdP owns an ATV rental Co. but says Zis iz zee high ceezon, you cannot get z ATV for two weekz ya? – but nexzt time.

A swim, nap, then Debbie comes screaming through the yard that her son Vincent has gone missing, Gunter cannot be found and she's just booked two large tables for tonight. Harry, of the other family staying at VdP, and I volunteer to help with service. I throw on a button-up shirt and jeans, he the same and we appear like some last-place duo in a Laurel & Hardy dress-off. I put out some chairs, clean off the bar and take up our posts. We wait for the first group to walk through the door, except it’s Vincent & Gunter….

S and I put in our dinner orders (Goat cheese salad, coconut prawns, chicken enchiladas with sour-cream chili) and our RYGLA friends arrive unexpectedly and join us for dinner. They are here also for Gabe & Meghan’s wedding, so they will be traveling with us later in the week. They are from Bellingham, Dan owns a POS software and equipment management company, Christy is an ex-teacher, ex-personal trainer, ex-herbologist. Their arrival to CR was decidedly more complicated than ours and includes first the hotel they had reserved in Liberia having been closed two months ago, taking the shuttle to Nosara and being put in a hotel the next town over after two missed attempts at the place they had booked, then a second possibility, being stranded out of town with no way to get into Nosara for the RYGLA retreat, beach etc. and having all the car rental companies have no cars, no ATVs and finally being consoled with an ATV from a local in Garza. But they are totally and completely “rolling with it” in a way that makes a person who had to take a cab out of town (once) feel really really petty for not doing the same. We talk into the night.

T and M, the Berkeley couple comes to the restaurant. Harry and his family are eating the next table over = the restaurant is almost half populated by people we know, people we’d met on this trip, people vacationing in CR.

On the walk to the cabina we see frogs (pictured). Giant frogs that will let you get right up in their placid faces and take their pictures with harboring no apparent discomfort.

M.