2022-02-10 — Consequences of a Red Tide

If I get to bed in the next 14 minutes, I’ll get almost 5 hours of sleep tonight. 🙃

Been a crazy day today, definitely not according to planned. Started at the normalish time for me, about 7:30 (since I’m not sleeping so well).

We went to breakfast, and it was good. It was, however… Portions you’d expect for a child in… France.

I guess that sort of balances out the massive amounts I was eating at La Montaña De Fuego with the all-you-can-eat breakfast. 🙃 No all you can eat here.

So from the hotel, we went to the Rich Coast diving shop to see about buying snorkel gear/find out if it would be better to buy or rent (the answer was to rent. Would have been $100 each to buy, and it was… 15? each to rent.

So we rented the gear, bought diving shirts to help protect against the sun, a headed over to the beach we’d learned was a fabulous one for snorkeling, paid for parking, looked out at the water, and… ugh.

Red tide.

Lovely.

Well, yesterday was fabulous. Can’t expect every day to be amazing in that kind of way, right?

So we looked at each other and were like, what now? We had no additional plans for the day, and with our main excursion now canceled… what to do? What to do…

One option was to go back to the hotel and relax a bit after a tiring day yesterday. I’m… not a beach person. I enjoy the ocean, but to just sit and “soak up the sun”… uh… no. Too hot. Too… boring. 🙃

It’s the same with swimming. Why swim at the hotel? We can swim just about anywhere in the world, so… I thought, and shared with John, I’m going to hop back to the hotel, use the bathroom, and then I’m just gonna drive somewhere until I find something interesting.

He agreed. 😊

While we were at the dive shop, 😖 I’d spoken with one of the women who worked there, asking about her favorite places to go as a local person, but just where tourists go. She

She suggested a few places, all at least an hour away (I’m not a club person, but a party person, but a kick back and tan in the sun person, so if the water ain’t usable… for me, the beach is pretty much useless 🙃

So we decided to head toward one of the places the woman recommended. It was a little over an hour away, back inland; and instead of going all the way back to the hotel to use the bathroom, we found a large supermarket, used the bathroom, bought some water and other things for the trip, and headed out. It was at some point into the trip, that we realized that two of the places she had recommended were very close to each other, within 15 minutes of each other.

One of them was La Leona waterfall, and the other was Las posas de Los Coyotes. Feel free to Google both. Very very beautiful. 😊

Gosh, I’m out of time. I’ve got to get to bed because I need to get up at 5:30. So this isn’t going to be as detailed as I wanted to make it for you, but I need to get my sleep.

Suffice it to say, Las posas De Los Coyotes closed at 5:00, and we heard that the waterfall closed at 4:00, so we decided to go to the waterfall first to give us time to get back to the other place.

Google maps got us turned around on the way to the waterfall, but we finally did manage to make it to the place where the guides and their locations are found. It’s sort of a family run operation. Not big companies. The waterfall is in the national park. The river itself is the border between the park and private property, and to get to where the waterfall is, you have to pass through private property, so the owners of the property have set up their little tour trips.

The falls and the trip through the canyon was absolutely gorgeous. Turquoise water, mini slot canyons to swim through, and an absolutely gorgeous waterfall coming through a huge slot canyon that basically felt like a cave. It was absolutely beautiful. We did a little bit of cliff jumping and whatnot. It was simply gorgeous. Our guide was a 17 year old young man, and we had some fun conversations with him about life in Costa Rica and what he was doing.

After we left the falls area, we were going to go over to the Pozas De Los Coyotes, but as we were driving down the road, we ran into the people who were in charge of the waterfall tour we just been on, and one of the guys who worked there said that instead of going to the more famous Pozas De Los Coyotes, he recommended a different one, one where the locals go instead.

So we went over there, and there were a handful of local youth and families there enjoying the turquoise pools of water, and jumping off the small cliffs into the pools of water. One of the kids was really good at doing tricks as he jumped off the mini cliffs into the water. We got some pictures and video, and it was super fun playing around with the family and goofing off in the water.

As we were winding up our activities, one of the young men with us asked us if we wanted to go to the beach. It was already starting to get dark, so we were surprised by the invitation, but they were excited and wanted to show us a beach they liked, so we drove 2 hours Southwest to El Tamarindo Beach, following them in their car all the way. We probably spent maybe 45 minutes out in the water body surfing as the waves came in.

Yes, there were crocodiles in the area, but we didn’t see any, and they said it wasn’t really too much of a risk. 🙃

As we wound up at the activities on the beach, they suggested we go to another Beach that was even better, and we said to ourselves, what the heck, let’s go. By that point it was I think maybe 8:30.

So we started driving toward the other beach, but about 5 or 10 minutes into the drive they pulled over in front of us, and the young man ran back and said, hey, the other Beach were going to is like an hour away, why don’t you just come back to our house in Filadelfia, and will buy a bunch of food, and make dinner.

I was a little hesitant, because they were so far away, another hour and 20 minutes or so back east inland, so we have been going back and forth yet again, so I suggested we go to a restaurant instead. The young man said he would check with his family, but instead of coming back to tell us what they decided, they just drove off.

John and I followed them for probably 40 minutes, Southeast, which was exactly opposite direction from our hotel, and we were already over an hour away from our hotel. After about 40 minutes, I was starting to get a little wary of what was going on as it seemed a little weird, so I flashed my brights several times and pulled over, and they pulled over as well, and they let us know that they were taking us to a restaurant that was just a little bit further down the road. It was funny because we had just left a place with like 80,000 restaurants, and ended up driving 45 minutes Southeast from there to another restaurant. 🙃

It was actually really fun, though! We had an absolute blast chatting with them and eating with them, and when we were done, the young man of the family suggested that he join us for snorkeling in the morning, as we were going to try to wake up early and go to a different part of Costa Rica where the red tide supposedly wasn’t a problem. So when all was said and done, we ended up driving back by their house in Filadelfia, so they could show us where they lived, and so we could pick up the young man in the morning.

Even though we just eaten dinner, they fed us ceviche, and we chatted more before heading back to the hotel, getting back to the hotel about midnight or so. It’s almost 1:00, and I’m just finishing this journal entry, and I’m really tired.

I’m not doing the day Justice with the description, but it was a really beautiful, fun, interesting, eventful, very worthwhile day. 😊

Better than planned–today’s consequences of a Red Tide.

Hopefully tomorrow to go snorkeling in some clean ocean water. 🙂

Until tomorrow… Loves and hugs.

Lift the World.

~ stephen