Hormigas en todas partes...

Hola amigos,

We are currently in San Jose, preparing to make the trip up to the Carribbean coast of Costa Rica.  We spent the past week moving south down the Pacific coast, stopping in Dominical and Puerto Jimenez.

Dominical was just a short ride from Quepos.  We arrived in the late afternoon, just in time to check into our hostel (that had hot water!!) and catch one of the most phenomenal sunsets.  Dominical is a small surfer town, which we think is a bit more "hopping" in the dry season.  However, since we are in the height of the rainy season, Dominical was pretty empty.  We kind of are expecting this emptiness of the rainy season to continue to the next places we visit as well.  We ended up spending just about 2 days there if you count the evening and morning of our travel days on either end. 

Wednesday was a long travel day to Puerto Jimenez, since it takes 2 buses and 5 hours to get from Dominical to the southeastern part of the Osa Peninsula. Puerto Jimenez is a little bigger than Dominical, but it was nearly as empty. In addition, it seems as though Puerto Jimenez is more of a hub for day trips and sport fishing, rather than an entertaining town in itself. So, we took two short day trips on Thursday and Friday. Thursday, we took the local bus to La Palma. Lonely Planet led us to believe that the beach La Playa Blanca was on the edge of town. However, it is a 3 km walk along the main road outside of town. That was our reason for visiting though, so we made the walk. The beach was very pleasant, yet deserted. It is a coral beach and seems to be a good local fishing spot (a few locals were wading out waist-deep to set their lines). After a visit to the beach, we walked back to the main road and ate some delicious and wicked cheap arroz con pollo/camarones while awaiting the bus back.



Playa Blanca

 Friday we woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to catch the colectivo (aka the smuggler's bus) to Cabo Matapalo. The ride was about 2 hours long and terribly bumpy, since the road was filled with pot holes and rivers to drive through. Although Matapalo is extremely isolated, it is stunning and should not be missed if given the chance. We were lucky enough to get some sun in the morning when we visited the most beautiful beach yet in Costa. When we left the beach as the rain approached, we were paid a visit by troop of squirrel monkeys, followed by a mom-baby pair of spider monkeys. We were very excited. The rain persisted and forced us to return early. While waiting for the colectivo to pick us up, just as we thought we had finished off a day filled with wonderful surprises, we spotted a number of colorful macaws. We finished the day with a break from the rain as the sun went down, and made a trip down to the beach nearby Puerto Jimenez.

Smuggler Bus Colectivo

Nice, eh?

This morning we woke up even earlier than the buttcrack of dawn, at 4am to catch our 10 hour bus ride(!) to San Jose. So here we are. Tomorrow we plan to make Cahuita our first stop on the Caribbean coast. We began our malaria medication yesterday, so we're good to go (moms!). We are really excited to get a new vibe and hopefully feel more at home than we did on the southern Pacific coast.

By the way, we found out that the wild cat is called a Jaguarundi (which makes Ju feel like less of a wuss) - yes Melendy, she was dancing around making silly noises :) In addition to having a Jaguarundi follow us around, it seems that we have an ant following. The title of this post is one of the first phrases/sentences we learned back in Montezuma. At the time, it seemed strange, but now we know, there really are ants EVERYWHERE.

Hope all is well back at home. Miss you and love you. Love,
Ty and Ju