PURA VIDA

After Tamarindo we had to head to the capital, San Jose, in order to get anywhere else, so spent a day there enjoying the standard dirty, smelly, polluted and scary capital common (it seems) to all Central American countries. We did manage to arrange one of the things top of my (Matt) wishlist....

The following day we were picked up bright and early and driven to the the start of a section of the Pacuare river towards the carribean coast. We were fed a huge breakfast and given our safety information and instructions for White Water Rafting. The Pacuare apparently ranks as the 5th best river in the world for rapids, and with this exciting news, along with what to do incase you have to swim with the snakes and other exotic wildlife, we arrived at the bank with one very excited Matt, and one rather green and shaky looking Kate.

The nerves soon melted away though, as the beginning of the river was fairly mellow, and the mixture of Brazilian and Polish raft members meant we were certainly not the most incompetent members of the team! (Back paddle to a brazilian apparently means paddle forwards as fast as you can).

After about half an hour of easy-ish rapids, the guide decided now was the time to explain in detail how to rescue a crew member and literally threw a mortified Kate in at the deep end. For practice. Well and truly initiated we were ready for the proper rapids, and soon hit the massive Class 4 sections (the bits that make it one of the best rivers in the world). They were so much fun!! It was hard work, obviously very wet, cramped legs, Kate got a black eye from the woman in fronts helmet, but after every wave, hole or drop we both had enourmous grins spread wide across our faces! The scenery, although not taken into account for the river ranking system, must easily have pushed it higher up the list. The river run through a national park of primary rainforest, it would be impossible to create a more scenic backdrop for a days adventure. Although moving rather quickly to really spot anything big we did see plenty of cool birds, a couple of rare blue Morpho butterflies, and just at the end of the day a massive green Iguana with an orange and black stripy tail just chilling hanging on a branch over the river.

Our guide made us stick our paddles in the air and cheer PURA VIDA! after the end of big sections, and whilst usually this kind of cheesiness can be annoying it actually just made us realise what an amazing time we were having. Pura Vida is the ubiquitous phrase in Costa Rica to denote that everything is great, a latin american ´good times´.

One of the collest moments was when our guide insitsed we get out of the boat and swim in a section with no rapids, through a canyon with great rock overhangs on either side of the river. It really made us appreciate jsut how fast the river was going, but you did have to block out the thoughts of what exactly it might be that just brushed past your leg! All in all we were rafting for over 30 kilometres and through 38 sections of rapids, so we were pretty tired at the end of the day, but amazingly the rafting company took us in the opposite direction to which we had come, giving us a free lift to Puerto Viejo; the carribean coast of Costa Rica. We toasted the day with a couple of Imperials and some carribean chicken served by a man with the coolest accent of all time, mon, and found a nice little hotel on the edge of the rainforest.

For the past couple of days we have been beah bums, renting cruiser bikes (one gear, no brakes, perhaps ideal for california but not really for hills and more-potholes-than-tarmac roads in CR) and snorkelling in the Carribean. Kates bike was awful and the chain kept coming off and getting jammed but it made us appreciate just how friendly and nice Tico´s are; at least five cars pulled over to try and fix the piece of junk it was amazing! Our hotels location proved ideal, our foray into a nature trail yielded little more than a lot of ants and a lot of sweat (and the inevitable outburst of "Í wanna be a man like man-cub" when we found some enourmous palm leaves), but our hotel was bursting with life - not even the bad kind. A green and black poison arrow tree frog greeted us one morning, and we saw many lizards and this mega blue crab.

Yesterday we tried the local speciality cuisine - Ron Don. It had the strangest stuff floating in it, it atsted nice but only if you closed your eyes! It was a spicy coconut stew with all manner of seafood thrown in, a whole crab, definetely some verterbral column of something large, lots of skin, gristle and other assorted oddbits accompanied by large floating chunks of yucca. We still arent sure if you njoyed it, but it was certainly an experience we wont forget, especially when the waiter insisted ´you just sorta bide id a bid and suck it oot´ whilst gesturing to the mangled crab.

We have now made it to David, Panama and will spend the next few days travelling south before the next leg of our adventure begins; South America.