I finally seem to have escaped the rainy season, apparently the weather just had to get really bad before the sun returned for good. So Panama City was still quite rainy but I managed to see a few rays of sun at my visit of the Panama Canal and of the Casco Viejo - the old part of town which consists of (what a surprise) colonial buildings. The Casco Viejo is being renovated, so some houses are really nice while others are still in a process of total decay, a very strange contrast but certainly appealing.
I did not spend too much time in the city, because I could not wait to hit the beaches of Costa Rica. First I went to a really remote place on the pensinula of Nicoya, the Playa Pelada near Nosara, where friends of a friend of mine from Berlin run the hostel "Almost Paradise". The place has a great location and is really peaceful. It was so quiet that even the main surf beach was almost empty most of the time, plus it rained heavily during the few days I was there. I decided I needed more surfing company and headed to the most touristy place I could find nearby - Tamarindo, a few hours north.
Tamarindo, also called "Tamagringo", has certainly been sold out to the Americans. High-ride condos around the beaches, astronomic real estate prices and all the facilities you want. It is full of foreigners but there are not too many backpackers around (I had my dorm room to myself for 5 days). It's seems to be a favorite retirement place for aged surfers, which made the line-up quite an interesting place. But the main attraction that kept me there for longer than I had stayed anywhere else on my trip were the waves! They were so much fun, gentle and the perfect size for me, I could not get enough of them. Also I found some local friends to party with, and there were plenty of parties, great fun (apart from being too hungover to surf in the mornings...).
My next destination was the exact opposite: Isla de Ometepe in the lake Nicaragua. I arrived with some Argentinian girls and their friend from Belgium in the village of Merida and since we were almost the only guests there we went on our excursions together. There was the idea of climbing one of the volcanoes but after an extremely exhausting hike to the waterfall of San Ramon, not even half-way up the mountain, we decided to skip that - it would have been pure torture, the heat was just insupportable. On my second day I visited the Ojo de Agua, a natural pool with supposedly healing water from the volcano. It was such a chilled-out place and I finally managed to do all the reading to plan the rest of my trip.
The 2 days of pure nature and dirt roads were enough, I needed to get back to the beaches and traveled over to San Juan del Sur. It has the reputation of being the Tamarindo on the Nicaraguan side but it is much less developed and therefore also much more authentic. Anyway, it is THE place where all surfers meet, and of course a great party place. There are several beaches nearby, but unlike Tamarindo San Juan does not have its own surf beach, the village beach is rather ugly. So every morning all the surfers piled onto a truck that took us to the surf beaches. It felt quite like a school trip, great fun! The hostal, Casa de Oro, was the center of activities and would be recommendable except for a very ugly trait: bed-bugs. I was nearly eaten alive at my first night there and had to wash and desinfect all my belongings. Not fun at all, and I was not the only one.
Apart from surfing I went on a really memorable excursion: the arrival of the turtles at the nature reserve La Flor. Only every few months there is a big arrival at night for a week or two and we were lucky to have one happening just at full moon. It was a such a sight: thousands of turtles on the beach and coming out of the water. According to the guards around 16.000 turtles arrive every night to lay their eggs. They were huge, longer than 1 m, and so many of them, you had to be careful not to step on them (luckily they moved extremely slowly). Visitors cannot use white lights, because it would stress out the turtles, and we were given weak red lamps whose light cannot be seen by the turtles, so the pictures did not turn out great. But it was definitely a sight I will never forget!
Today I arrived in Granada, a nice enough colonial town, unfortunately the weather was not that nice. Tomorrow I'll head on to Honduras to spend a few last days at the sea, at the Bay Islands. No more surfing though, but I had an epic last day in San Juan, first catching the biggest and then the longest wave I´ve ever had in my very last session!
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| Panama - Costa Rica - Nicaragua |
