Stop! Hammock time....

At the time of writing, I have to say it's been a good day, but also a challenging one. Firstly Woody and me awoke obscenely early to get the 4.45am bus from Montezuma back to San Jose. Which didn't arrive. A quick change of plans led us to a later bus at 5.30am, then a ferry, and another bus back to Costa Rica's capital. The journey was smooth - we didn't have to wait anywhere for more than 15 minutes and we seemed to have got over our initial bus-based speedbump with flying colours - arriving much earlier and much more cheaply than we'd anticipated...

We stepped off at the bus station to get a taxi to the hostel, and were immediately faced with various different scrappy young men trying to hail taxis for us and generally doing a lot of moving around behind us and in our peripherals. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but when you've got a heavy rucksack on your back, a bag on your front containing passport and tickets, and one hand on the wallet in your pocket it can be a frustrating experience. Especially when you've got both eyes on the wee Woodward (although she can probably handle this type of crowdy mess better than I can).

With the backpacks front and back, I imagine we're like beached turtles, and in this scenario the scruffy taxi men were like baying hounds. When we eventually got in a taxi, it was all I could do not to scream "DRIVE! DRIVE! DRIVE!" at the driver. Although this would have been completely useless as he spoke no english, and the drama of the situation would definitely have been lost as I rummaged for the Spanish-English dictionary.

Our lack of coherent Spanish led to the following: Despite being given an address which included the neccessary street number, avenue number, name of the place and surrounding landmarks (and at one point a fairly accurate compass bearing), our driver had no clue where he was going.

With our broken Spanish, and general lack of more information, he must've been tempted just to stop the cab, take our bags out of the boot and tell us to get another taxi. He must've been tempted, because that's exactly what he did... Papped out of a cab in the middle of San Jose. He's just lucky I don't know what the Spanish is for 'bawbag'. Yeah.

For two people who have only visited San Jose once before, we found our hostel with ease, before being told we hadn't paid when we already had. In addition to the taxi debacle, this confusion was just generally frustrating. And one of my flip flops is broken. Yeah, life's difficult Toddy.

Prior to today me and Woody have had a fantastic 3 days in the beach town of Montezuma. Our room was at the front of a beach hut, and the only thing between us and the Pacific was a row of palm trees with hammocks swinging in the breeze. Every night we sat in the hammocks with a few beers watching the electrical storms out at sea, until last night we were hit by one. It caused a powercut along the whole beach, but it was cool to sit in a hammock in the complete darkness watching the lightning flicker all over the place as the winds raged and the warm rain splashed down.

Yesterday we trekked up to a waterfall for a wee swim and a wee jump-off-the-rocks which was brilliant. The highlight of the trek was on the way back down, we looked into the trees and were met with the cheeky face of a 'Caro Blanco' (whiteface) monkey... not just one, but a whole family including one with a monkey child clinging to it's back as it jumped from tree to tree. Amazing. That trek is also how I broke one of my flip flops....