Monkey Business

We spent the past four days in Nosara covered in dust or salt water. Nosara is a small town in Guanacaste on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We rented a stylish glass house called "monkey business" and true to its word we saw a flock of howler monkeys in the trees right outside our house every day. In the afternoon they would migrate across the trees, swinging and climbing.In the evening they would howl which was pretty cool and sounds like a deep manly dog bark. The sound of the howler monkeys, however, was nothing compared to the cicadas which right at dusk began screeching. It sounded something like a high-pitch electrical hum.


The water was wonderfully warm, and though the beach attracts many surfers, the waves weren't too big so swimming in the water was nice. Abba and I threw Frisbee and though we were on the shore the wind wasn't too strong. Of course, we also took long walks on the beach both midday and at sunset. Mom and I even got the courage to ask about taking surf lessons, but they were all booked. After we asked at the next surf school and got turned down because the instructor was on holiday, we decided it was a sign we weren't meant to surf. We did some body surfing, which I am pretty abysmal at. Uncle Walt will have to show me and mom some techniques...We also ate at a delicious sandwich/ice cream shop that seemed to be transplanted to Costa Rica right out of Berkeley!

On another day we rode bikes out to Playa Ostional (a beach in the other direction). We started the bike ride early (at like 7am) and were still dripping buckets of sweat a couple minutes into it. Biking was fun even though my bike had no brakes and broken gears. The bumpy dirt roads vibrated like crazy; it made me feel all shook up for the rest of the day. Luckily there were not that many cars so we didn't have to inhale their clouds of dust that billow up behind them.

On Thursday we walked around this biological reserve that flanked the shores of Nosara River. Again we kept most of our activity early in the morning and took a nice long siesta midday. I got a lot of reading done. I started and finished reading the Reader a book by some German guy that Alexis just saw the movie in German. It was a sort of strange book, but a good break from the other book I am reading, Hot, Flat and Crowded, which is a pretty disturbing book about the environmental/political global crisis we are in.
In the evening I took a short run on the beach in the sunset and then dove in the water to cool off. It was as amazing as it was cliche.

Tonight we are at the Arenal Volcano and I eagerly await Emily's arrival tomorrow evening.