The Agony and Ecstacy

This is the peak of the rainy season but it is also the mid term school holiday. So we decided to go to a beach hotel, the closest to us is on the pacific coast and the place is a surfing mecca, so i wasn't to keen to go but it is close and the road is OK, so we set off and it rained constantly and the traffic was slow and we set off late and i hate driving in the dark here, can be dangerous. So we arrive at about 6pm and found the hotel completely empty, the hotel was OK and the room was big and a nice bathroom which is uncommon for the cheap hotels i normally use. We went out for dinner that night and found this little town just a small collection of houses in a small swampy flat area, the road to the restaurant was alive with frogs and toads hopping around the roads. we could identify 5 different frog calls amongst them, just croaking heaven plus a few fireflies. It rained like heaven had opened all night long and the next morning i had expected a miserable grey sky but it was a blue and warm and very nice, I took and early morning walk around the gardens and found a tiny owl, called a pygmy owl sat looking at me as i wandered about the waterlogged gardens. we played all day in the wonderful jacuzzi and swimming pool, and thinking i had developed some sort of immunity to sunburn i refused to put on cream, i spent a good deal of time in the shade but i spent hours in the pool with Emma throwing her around as she is getting very confident in the water.



The day was fantastic and sunny all day long and we went for a walk to the beach and found absolutely no holiday makers at all, it was really outside of the real resort area, it shows how small the resort industry is in Costa Rica, we had to walk along a dirt road to get to the beach and there were ruins of buildings that had gone bankrupt along the beach. But there were bird filled marshy areas and some very large trees which had 5 pairs of Scarlet Macaws feeding in during the day,



It was fantastic to see these huge birds, far bigger than the common Turkey Vulture, but they were making the most incredible din, whenever a vulture came near it reached a fantastic climax and was directly above a poor house, i couldn't live with that noise, it makes me wonder why anyone would ever think of having a parrot not even a Macaw as a pet, they are insane or deaf.

I felt a little burnt from the sun when i went to bed and i was showing some red skin, when i got up the next morning i was looking like a lobster, i was scarlet from head to toe,and my skin was delicate and painful, I had refused sun block as i thought i was tan enough from my time in Australia, but i was mistaken and i have to be reminded from time to time that i am a white boy from the land of rain and i need to keep out of the sun or get on the sun block.