Of Costa Rica, walking, talking and eating raw fish

I found myself at 7.30 am getting to know the wonderful Catalina in the garden of Txarlie’s office/house. The sun was out and she was working on her winter tan while chatting away. The others awoke from their alcohol induced slumber several hours later and we worked hard at a post-party breakfast. After some singsongs, and a breakfast of clams and mussels imported by our missionary to Santiago del Chile, we packed the Naughty and turned up the music.

Breakfast on grass, Manet - 1863

We left San Jose and set out to Malpais, by driving across to catch a ferry in Puntarenas.

The trip was really fantastic, we played backgammon and palas whilst waiting for the ferry. We then sailed across the straight whilst watching the sun set against a beautiful landscape.

After about an hour we arrive to the other side of the bay, drove for about 45 minutes and arrived in Malpais. Here we settled down for the night in a hostel where we paid 40 dollars for a 4 bed room and had to listen to the bitchy landlady complain all night about the fact that 2 of us were sleeping in the van. We ate a late pizza and toasted for the second time to Maria’s 27th birthday since Roque admitted not remembering the we had celebrated her birthday the night before.

We hit the sack and headed out the next day to some waterfalls next to Malpais. It was a sight for sore eyes and an interesting and cheap way to shower salt water off.
On the way back to the Naughty from the waterfalls we found that it was feeding time at the zoo as the caretaker of the waterfall was feeding a dozen white faced monkeys.

The waterfall, nature's shower for the homeless

We headed out to an adjacent beach about 4 km from Malpais and we relaxed for the rest of the day, cooking, drinking and then drinking some more.

Me exposing my scultured body, Natxo as usual with his tongue out and Maria just looking...well... quite good actually...

As the sun set at 6 we were well on the way and by 10pm the bbq was over as were the bottles of rhum so as some of us fell asleep others dug into the beer.

I awoke in an extremely humid 6 person tent to discover that Maria and Natxo had joined me and Roque had opted to sleep across Catalina in the 2 man tent with David retiring to the sanctity of the steel walls of the Naughty.
It was quite an awkward feeling to discover traces of birds around the tent and to realize that it could easily have been the howling monkeys with a bad attitude that were singing us to sleep in the nearby trees the night before.

Roque was cleaning up so I helped him out and then we sat down to watch sunrise. Once we realized that the sun had risen several hours earlier and we were actually still quite drunk and staring at a cloudy sky.

We set out for breakfast and were joined by Natxo, who failed to understand that the likelihood of finding food next to an isolated beach are little to none. He therefore started walking down the beach barefooted.

Mmm... sun setting and still standing... gotta work on that!

Once the beach was finished and no food was found, we started walking down the gravel road, and decided that since we had 2 sets of sandals and Natxo has flat feet, we would share the pain by each walking with one of Roque’s sandals whilst being barefooted on the other, and the third used my super comfy Nike’s!

After a terribly long time we arrived in town, we settled down for some terrible breakfast and showered again in the waterfall. We found on the beach another set of sandals much to Natxos joy and met the girls half way back to the Naughty.

We left the beach of perdition and headed out to Santa Teresa.

After a couple of rivers and some very vicious roads, we arrived on a strip of dust with a couple of buildings and checked into a small house with 6 beds.

Here we met up with Dani, Elena and the lovely aussie Margot. We spent a couple of days surfing, messing around on the beach, and watching some great football in the local bar.

Before arriving Cata declared that she was more interested in the local produce than in surfing and her wish was made true by a local harmless stalker who kept inviting himself to anything we did.

The highlight of the stay was the sushi adventure. Elena turned out to be an excellent cook and quite obsessed with sushi. Naturally in us she found great apostles for her credo.

We spent Sunday evening from 7 to 8 in the dock waiting for the fishing boat to arrive and then we bought 2kgs of the finest tuna money can buy.

Back at the flat we make some 150 pieces of sushi and ate until the word sushi was associated with digestives systems exploding.

Better and more addictive than any drug, thanks Elena!!!

The next morning the adventure finished and we set out to the Miguel Antonio National Park, some dodgy guides and finally Porto Viejo.

Of Costa Rica, where few became many

Ok, so I m in Panama, still trying to catch up with all that I haven't written and that I really should have :P

I'm off tomorrow but my trip is far from over. Although I'll be leaving the Three Musketeers and the Naughty, the adventure is just beginning. I'm heading to Rio de Janeiro for the Carnival and there's a good chance that I will stay there to live when it's over. But more about that when I know more about it.

So, where were we? We left Nicaragua and headed to Playa Tamarindo in Costa Rica. here we met up with the unlikely brothers Steven and Max, surfer dudes that were parked beside us on the beach. Max is short, pale and blondish, Steven is tall, black and build like a brickhouse, but aparently they share a father...


The unlikely, yet extremely funny, brothers

So we settled down for another couple of days of surf waiting for Natxo, Maria and Cata to arrive.

This lead to a quiet night out on the drink which led to sushi cooked by the wonderful and extremely silent Gregory. We sat down to enjoy the music of a completely insane musician called Jose which had a laugh that would made Eddie Murphy fade into the wilderness.

The night kind of evolved from a quiet night of music to a smallmobile party by the van, where we enjoyed the taste of the lasting Nicaragua's finest rhum, Flor de Cana. The night quickly degenerated into what proved to be one of the most fun and distructive nights of the trip. We slept in the Naughty and imagine our suprise when we awoke to find blood all over the van.

Turns out it was just a minor scratch on the hand but moving around and leaning of various surfaces had turned it into a scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

So off we went, several bottles of water later we hit the road and headed to Punta Islita, a tiny and completely unknown location on the Nicoya Peninsula where rich Yankees go to escape from the all seeing eye.

"Hello Sir, have you seen a tall Pakistani guy that looks like Bin Laden but speaks in English?"

Roque had a friend that was staying there in a rented villa and we fancied ourselves in a huge bed being massaged by beautiful women. Unfortunately it didn't quite turn out that way, in fact we spend two days driving around and couldn't find him anywhere.

2 Howling Monkeys and one on the tree

The alpha male obviously felt threatened by my manliness...Hear him roar!

On the plusside we did get to see a tree full of very pissed off Howler Monkeys and a beach covered with lobsters, which of couse we quite fancied in a pot with spaghetti, but who were way to quick for our reflexes slowed by age and the harsh life of the road.

For rent: beachside compact mobile room with great sea view. price: free

The Naughty in sleeping mode on the beach of Punta Islita

So we headed out of Punta Islita and headed towards San Jose, where Txarlie had kindly offered his humble house as a checkpoint for our weary souls.

The Naughty learns to swim! Its now a car, a hotel, a nightclub and a boat

1 hour from Punta Islita we got an sms from Roque's friend telling us how to find him... doh...

We arrived in San Jose and the van regained its ancient mojo when the number of member reelevated from 3 to a much more chaos inducing 6 with the arrival within a few minutes of Natxo and Maria. Naturally by the time Maria had stepped out of the taxi we were through our second bottle of celebratory wine! Later that night we went to pick up Catalina at the airport and by the time she joined the ranks the atmosphere was hot and begging for a party!

We scoured the city looking for Txarlie's secretary's house as the keys she had previously given us weren't working and had called her, very suspiciously to ask her where she lived :P

After finding her in a dark corner of San Jose and her realizing that we weren't out to assault her, we stopped off at a supermarket, and let Natxo's exuberance loose in the lanes. What resulted was a meal and a quantity of alcohol fit for the finest Sorority initiation, I hit the kitchen and cooked up some fine spaghetti al salmone and then we danced like fools all night in the sittingroom of Txarlie's house whilst celebrating Maria's turning 27!

This may seem wierd, but the simple idea of having walls, enough beds for all and the prospect of a hot shower the next morning made us forget about hitting the town.

So next morning we hit the road again and head back to the Nicoya peninsula for another few days of beach and an interesting walk to town!

Of Nicaragua, New Year's and the IQ of surfers

It comes as no great suprise to me that the return of Natxo marked the end in what would have been semi-regular updating of the blog.

I left off in the days following xmas and the whole trauma of sexual harassment.

We crossed over to Nicaragua and spend a night in Leon and a few days of delirium in the beautiful Granada where we met some really funky people, including a couple of great colombian engineers (finally some brains ;)), called Santiago & Daniel and the great Bernardo.

The friendly locals welcome us to Nicaragua

Bernardo is a 70 something year old spanish man that fleed Spain during the dictatorship and has spent most of his life sailing around the world from which he has gained a knowledge of... well, pretty much everything. He lives in a small room in a Hostel in Granada and has been there for the last 3 years. His hobby is to paint horseshoes with the flags of countries, which he does at the amazing rate of 1 a day. This is somewhat suprising since from the amount of paintdrop that end up on his belly you'd guess he was ravishing a canvass with incredible intensity and speed.

Bernardo has been elevated to the man of the trip so far, due to his prodigous memory. There is not one place he has not been to or does not know about. Upon telling him that I was from Genova he started telling about a bar in Via Pre that was owned by a Mr.Arturo in 1976 who's son called Stefano was probably now running it, all this concluded with his signature word "amigo!".

All you had to do was name something, like a tiny town in chile and this is what he would say:

"In 1687 that town was founded by a Sr.Marquez Velasquez del Rio Gomez who sailed from Sevilla in 1686 leaving behind a wife called Sr.a Filippa Castillo Suarez, a daughter called Nadia and a dog called Roberto. This man was actually looking for land for his cocoa plantation and discovered instead that the soil, due to its high content in phosphorous, was perfectly suited for the cultivation of the rare Turkish springroot, which we grew there and sold for 2 doblons per pount until he returned to Spain a rich man and was killed in Vico del Colon in Murcia by Don Sergio Gimenez de Gotardo who was sleeping with his wife, amigo!"

After saying all that in one breath, he'd get up, walk out the door, and come back to sit down 5 minutes later after ensuring that nothing was happening in the roads outside.

He found a place in our hearts by naming Roque "il Basko", David "il Moro" and myself "Genoves".

Two of Colombia's finest on he right and The Great Bernardo on the left

We spent the following days partying in the town, with a highlight on the second night when we picked up some random friends in a bar and decided to hit a late night bar on the beach. Once we discovered that the price was fixed no matter how many people we managed to fit 9 people into a normal 5 person taxi, including a very large man from el Salvador, David, a 1.80m+ Dutch guy, Roque, also 1.80+ and myself at 1.97. We hit the bar and watched the sun come up over the lake while happily chatting and laughing till 8am.

We headed out the next day for a devastating New Year's followed by some incredibly relaxing days along the south coast and San Juan del Sur. The town itself is a little packed with tourists but there are some of the most amazing beaches I have ever seen, just a few miles north and south, particularly Playa de la Flor and Playa del Coco.

Playa del Coco, what a sight!

We decided to spend New Year´s in the town and it was a blast. We ended up staying in the house of the most boring man in the planet, sleeping on a double bed which seemed to be made out of steel and hatred.

In good European tradition David, Roque, The Naughty and I headed out to San Juan to plan and enjoy the end of year meal. We parked the Naughty on the side of the road in the middle of the town, turned up the funky music and decide that there is no better end of year meal than one that leaves more time for drinking and the rhum started flowing.

We met up with an Argentinian girl and her boyfriend. The girl is the sister of a guy that was living in with Natcho in Genevra, and we ignored the official coundown as we decided that the coming of the new year should be officially based on the time given by the Naughty´s clock.

Looking smashing for the ladies on new year's night, also featuring the lovely Naughty + Violetta & boyfriend

As midnight struck we all toasted and shared some of the rhum around by getting the parking official drunk, a guy that was just walking by and by spraying the front of the Naughty with a water gun specially filled for the occasion with Nicaragua´s finest rhum.

The rest of the evening was an inebriated laugh of music on the beach which lead to very sleepy faces the next day and a horrible hangover for what would be an even more horrible trip.

We decided to go to playa Madeira, a surfer´s paradise, but the road to get there was a 10 mile strech of hidious stones and potholes that would put the moon´s craters to shame.

Fine sewing in Playa Madeira

We finally arrived however, we parked the van facing the ocean, pulled up the roof and settled down for 4 days of surfing, eating with a fire on the beach and simply not showering.

When the sun sets at 5:30 on an isolated beach there s not much to do, and after three days of cooking pasta on a fire in sea water, I was tired of cooking and wanted to be served, so we head down along the beach looking for some kind of hostel that allegedly was there and served food and drinks.

When we arrived we found that owner to be the biggest rascist-prick in the world, and the hostel to be in complete darkness and packed with surfer dudes that were wondering how to extend a bbq made for 8 people to 15. Now surfer dudes are wierd creates, almost completely unable to talk and walk fully erect in their natural condition, when their environment becomes polluted by alcohol, their vocabulary shrinks from the full 50 words to a simple "dude", "yeah!" "rocks" and "surf". They also tend to venerate the biggest idiot of the bunch, probably because he's sense of balance has developed sufficiently to allow him to stand up on a moving plank of wood...

Anyway the Dicklord (aka the owner) told us that he was pissed and couldn t be bothered cooking so if we wanted food we d have to make it, oh and we´d have to pay full price.

We thought of leaving initially, but then we realised that we could simply cook, eat and walk out afterwards considering how drunk the idiot was. So I ended up cooking again, only this time, when the guys saw that I was making pasta, everyone wanted some, so I ended up making pasta for 15 people, and this is how you do it:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pasta a la Paul for 15 drunk stupid surfers

You will need:

1.4 Kgs of pasta

300 gr bacon

2 onions

1 garlic

4 tomatos

15 drunken stupid surfers

Cook as follows:

Chop & fry the bacon
Chop and fry the garlic and onion

Add the bacon to the onions and let it cook with the chopped tomatoes for a while until you have a decent sauce. Add pepper (non was available), any kind of seasoning and salt.

Once the sauce is ready let it cool and HIDE 1/3 of the sauce.

Cook the pasta in a pot the size of a house which takes 45 minutes to boil.

Serve as follows:

Take the pasta, mix it in with 2/3 of the sauce and tell the drunk sufers that there weren´t enough ingredients to feed everyone and tha pasta is a little tasteless.

Pinch some bbq before they get to it, fill your plate with pasta and add the hidden sauce, without being seen by the surfers, repeat for your friends.

Listen to the owner thank you and tell you that you eat for free and that the pasta tastes great, pay for 2 people, stick 3 bottles of beer in you pockets, leave the den of perdition.

Of Honduras, la Ensenada and more crazynes

There is a place in the wold where people drive terribly, that place is called Honduras.

Here is the proof:

Driving suited to the greatness of Honduras

It is also gifted with Tegucigalpa, an unpronounceable name which has won a special place in our hearts as the ugliest city on the planet!

I've already been through this, but let me pick up on the latest news.

We decided to test the extent of the hidious city and we hit the Dunkan Maya to watch some local footie and test the local brew.

The 3 greatest and 3 newest supporters of Municipal

So where did we decide to spend Christmas if not Honduras!

We bit the departing Natxo farewell (boy do we miss you!!), as he was going to Santiago del Chile to spent xmas with his family, and off we went to the north of the country with a rattling Naughtie Hottie, searching for a little corner of Carribean paradise to chill for a few days on white sand beaches.

Adios Ignacio, we'll miss you a lot and your hair a lot more!

Being the Naughties the adventuress that she is, she appeared bored by the unchallenging roads that the main route to Tela was presenting us, so she lead us on to the way more uneccessible Ensenada.

Ensenada is a road really, calling it a town is a bit much, there are 2 hotels, 5 shacks that sell water in bags and 3 or 4 huts along the beach that roast fish and sell it to the very rare foreigner and pretty scarse local tourists that makes it to a beach which is lost in space and time.

We decided to Splurge as the Lonely would call it and checked into a majestic hotel with 2 rooms which contained 2 double beds and were spotless. The best 12 dollars ever spent.

We then got to know the extremely effeminate Jerry or Gary, we never figured it out, and from there there things started to get extremely surreal.

First of all a brief description: Jerry of Gary is 43, tall, thin, black, 3 children and is completely and utterly gay, which he displays with a very un-heterosexual mustache and by a flamboyant behavior.

So, we left the hotel and went to the went to the beach and sat in the shade waiting for the food to arrive.

So cute you can eat them, but on the menu there was only fish

Gary appear and asks us if the van parked down the road is ours, yep we say and he starts telling us that leaving it there is not a good idea as someone might steal all out beloved belongings. We inform him that we no longer have any beloved belongings after Mexico and Guatemala, but he suggests that we move the van anyway into the parking of the Hotel, which his uncle owns.

So we got to the Van and a tire was flat.
What followed cannot really be described with words, but taking a photo of it would have been considered impolite. I´ll make a long story short:
* The spare wheel is released with a spanner we didn´t have
* The wheel nuts are released with a spanner which is millimetric in a country of inches, which is different from the above one, and which of course we didn´t have...

So Gary started stopping every single car driving by, which of course were all of his family members.
After 15 minutes there were 13 people trying to get the wheel off our van, of which several arguing about which was the best method and several about who owned which land.

Eventually, when so many cars had stopped that people could no longer drive through the town, the town members were racing to see who had the best spanner set that could solve the problem. Finally a mechanic arrived to the rescue with a single tyre iron and changed the wheel in 3 minutes flat.

Changing the tyre took the best part of an hour, and by the time we returned to David and Victoria they were pretty sure we had been killed.

The day continued pretty uneventfully on the beach playing Petanca or how do you spell it, and finally Roque and I decided to head out in search of some Xmas eve fun.

Not all is rotten in Denmark...

What we found was a ridiculously drunk Jerry who's sex drive and flamboyancy had been exulted to the extreme!

We needed to get money to pay for the hotel and for some evening fun, so Roque, Gary and I drove to Tela (the town 3km and 20 minutes away), on the way back we stopped off at a Garifuna variation of a Voodoo ritual where the people dance in memory of the dead and some say the dead dance with them. It was a musically wonderful, but for some reason I just couldn´t bring myself to enter the room where the ritual was in act...

We continued along the deserted and dark dust road and Jerry started telling us about where people were buried, how they´re spirits would jump on his bycicle when he was riding by and make it suddenly very heavy. Not the kind of stuff that would scare someone who loves horror stories, movies and books, but in a pitch black night, with no ligts and a small wooden cross lit up by the lights of a van, it does have some punch to it.

We sat down in a dark hut on the beach listening to him first describe his family and life choices, then his loves, and in what seemed like a descent into madness, eventually describe the surgery he received on his anus and finally listen to him offer sexual favors.

We kindly denied and tried to steer the conversation towards music in the area and the Garifuna way of celebrating Xmas eve. We then met some people who told us that David and Victoria had finally emerged from their cove and had gone for a walk with Karim, one of the spiritual, musical and financial leaders of the community.

So we decided to follow their trail, waling to Triunfo a town 5km away.
The walk was amazing, in the jungle, unlit and untouched except for the light of the full moon shining down past an infinity of stars. Unfortunately the discussion we had had with Gary had opened his flood valves and he was more than a little insistent about the fact that unless you´re been with a black gay man, you can t be sure that you´re not going to like it. In particular he seemed to take a real liking to tall white guys and at every corner, he wanted to please me sexually.

Roque was enjoying in quiet silence the fact that he was not the victim of such terrorism and did everything in his power not to draw attention to himself, although it became quite difficult when he went for a pee and Gary went running towards him offering to get down on his knees.

The walk turned out to be harmless and our heterosexuality made it out untarnished, when we finally arrived in Triunfo, met with David, Victoria and Karim and spent the night dancing Punta in a shack with 6 other people amongst which an amazonian black girl and the wife of the hut's owner who didn´t seem to mind young tourists dancing the night away with his wife.

We returned home listening to Karim talk about the Garifuna rhythms and it was a wonderful experience all together. The next day we just relaxed for Christmas and left early the morning of the 26th to head back to Tegucigalpa.

Naturally the shit Honduras roads wanted to bid us their personal farewell, just 150 kms after we had repaired our spare tyre, they punctured another hole in the Naughty's pained tyres and we were once again forced to stop at a Llantero.

The Honduras death-tracks claim another rubber victim

We bid Victoria farewell at the airport and head east towards our next stop: Nicaragua, new year´s and our first surfing experiences!

We´re going to have to write you a little esquelita ...

(Translated from Carretera y Manta)
Verbatim transcript of our dialogue with a police man on the roads of Honduras, on Christmas Eve:

(Imagine the voice of Mr. Agent as that of Hugo Chavez and his face as that of an intoxicated Chavez)

-- Good morning, Mr Agent, and Merry Christmas, by the Grace of God
-- Good morning, gentlemen. I please provide your driver's license and permit for the vehicle
-- Here are, sir Agent, by the grace of God we have all the documentation in order
-- You do not have a front number plate
-- No sir, this is a motor vehicle of Californian origin, and therefore has only a number plate on the back
-- Agreed. Do you have the relevant safety triangles?
-- Well, look, Mr Agent, we do not have the aforementioned triangles
-- You are aware that this is a serious violation, eh?
-- Very serious, Mr Agent?
-- Yeeeesssss! Very serious ... I am going to have to write a little esquelita (*)...
-- You see you, Mr. Agent, all our stuff was stolen in El Salvador, and we had the triangle in our bags when it got stolen...

(Pause dramatic, slow and intense observation of each of our stunned faces)

-- Ah, yes? And why didn´t you buy a new one?
-- You see you, Mr.Agent ... they stole our passports, credit cards, telephones, and the last thing on our mind was to buy triangles
-- Aaay ... Well, I fear that the infringement is going to cost around 1500 lempiras ... (75$)
-- Look, we can show that we have a police report of the theft
-- But this claim is from Mexico, not El Salvador!
-- Yes, sir, in the city of El Salvador, Mexico ... (doesn´t exist...)
-- And where are you all from ?
-- Two Spaniards, an Italian and an American, Mr Agent, by the grace of God

(Pause dramatic, slow and intense observation of each of our stunned faces)

-- Aha ... I do not know if you have seen ... but while we spoke, I have been watching you... I work for the Honduran intelligence, and I was surprised to see that you are so diverse and colorful
-- Yes, sir, we are, we are friends from the university, each from a different country

(Pause dramatic, slow and intense observation of each of our stunned faces)

-- Fancy that on a day such as today, I met a group of four Europeans also ...
-- A day such as today Mr Agent?
-- Yes, sir, one day 24 December a year ago. They were a Norwegian, a Chinese and an Australian. And I told them that I have a collection of foreign currencies, that I am compiling for my daughters when they are older. The save them in a box ... Maybe you have some foreign money you could give me to add to my collection...
-- Mr agent, we do not have coins because they stole all our euros, as you can read in the police report...

(Pause dramatic, slow and intense observation of each of our stunned faces)

-- Ah, well ... Well, you Spanish right? Well I have a group of friends that are Spanish engineers who were building a dam in Choluteca, and I remember that they were very good people, and they love the drink! They would call me so that we would go out and drink occasionally, very good people ...

(Pause dramatic, slow and intense observation of each of our stunned faces)

-- Aaaah, Mr Agent, I bet you would also like to drink, eh?
-- Suuuuuurrre, friends ... always appreciates a little liquor in the body, no? And today, being Christmas Eve, we must celebrate!
-- Well, we also intend to celebrate tonight, God willing, Mr Agent, and by shear coincidence carry two bottles of French champagne in the refrigerator of our vehicle ... maybe you would like if we gave one to you as a gift?
-- Well suuuurrreee! A bottle for tonight would be very good!

(We hand over a bottle of shit champagne wrapped in newspaper, under the watchful eye of and intelligence agent with slight alcoholic deviations)

-- Mr Agent, we promise we´ll buy a triangle at the first petrol station, and with this bottle we can forget the fine, right?
-- Yes, of course, my friends, you can now continue your journey, but with caution, eh?
-- Yes Mr Agent, with caution and always accompanied by the grace of God, and specially on a day like today that Jesus Christ is reborn in the hearts of every one of us!

(Mr Integrity taps with his fingers three times on the bonnet of the van)

-- Off you go and Merry Christmas!

* esquelita = fine