Turrialba
Trip Start
Oct 22, 2006
1
18
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Turrialba, Costa Rica
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Well, we finally made it down to Bocas Del Toro, Panama, where you have to pay 5 dollars to cross the border, 5 dollars per person for a taxi, and 5 dollars per person for the boat (an oven was our co-pilot) in order to arrive. The country is a pit hole for 5 dollar bills.
The hostel we ended up staying at (the spot Mr. Bloom is chilling) was run by 3 guys from the Bay Area whose final business project in college had been "Running a hostel in Central America." It's a good thing ours was a trout farm on Eddie's Ranch huh guys? Anyway, beers at this place were 50 cents and the bar was inhabited by two Canadian Loggers/Hunting Guides who were doing the "100 beer challenge." It's pretty safe to say that we hung around for awhile.
We did, however, get out to an island to The Pickled Parrot - a bar on the end of a pier that exclusively played the Jimmy Buffett live at Wrigley DVD. There was a bit of variety though; when Disc 1 ended, they would pop in Disc 2. No sense in just playing one Buffett disc.
The next day just happened to be Bocas Del Toro Day, the celebration of the independence from someone or other. Bottom line...there was a ten hour parade of people walking very slow and drumming. Slow walking drummers. Surprisingly enough, 10 hours of such a thing is pretty entertaining, with the right company and the right amount of beer. We did skip out for a bit to play some carnival games (the reject games from any normal such celebration). You could shoot a BB gun at barely inflated balloons with a busted sight for a buck (Emmett managed to hit nothing every time) or kick a soccer ball at a stack of milk bottles (Rory managed to whiff on this one on his first attempt). All in all Bocas day rocks. If you happen upon a random festival in a tiny group of islands at any point in your life, we highly recommend you stick around.
From Bocas we cruised back up to Puerto Viejo for what will go down in history as Scooter Day. Passing through on the way to Panama we had seen a 3 pack of liter bottles with one coozie for sale oddly close to a scooter rental shop. It seemed like the perfect combination, so we recruited Bobby and Kirk (the Canadians from earlier stages in the trip) and we celebrated our own little independence day. No drumming, just scooter and liters. Pretty much all we would do was scooter to a beach, drink a liter, scooter to the next beach and repeat. It was an amazing day.
But, like so many other adventures on this trip the tail end of an excursion was met with rain. Rain on a scooter hurts, but it couldn't hurt as bad as when Kirk laid out on a dirt road after getting a little fish tail action. The stud just bounced back up and got on his hog. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I would have laid there for awhile, maybe accepted death, before realizing I was ok and making a scene about getting back on the scooter.
All in all though, scooter day was a huge success. Another recommendation. Although watch out, because your coozies could just be plastic pieces of crap just like ours. Just a little heads up.
On our rafting trip the first week of the trip Emmett had noticed that all the guides had these kick ass river sandals. We assumed we could just pick them up at any shoe store in San Jose, but upon further investigation found out that we had to go to Turrialba and find a guy named Olman. Seemed simple enough. And after getting into town and asking around a little bit we found out all we had to do was find the house with the "crappy concrete ducks in the front yard, watch out for Olman's grumpy father" and walk around to the back once we had found said ducks. Seemed simple enough. It wasn't quite going to a shoe store, but we were sure we could manage the journey.
Luckily, after half a mile of walking a guy on a bike showed up and told us someone had called him and told him to look for 2 gringos. We were those gringo. Olman had found us and taken us to the house with the crappy concrete ducks in the front yard. A lawn gnome might have spruced it up a bit, but you can only ask for so much.
Two hours later we each had a pair of customized sandals and a business idea. If we can't run a hostel in Central America then we might just have to mooch Olman's sandals and start a little business in Seattle. Ohh...it's feasible.
And that's pretty much our trip. Thanks for hanging out through all the hiccups along the way. In about 3 weeks Rory heads off to Thailand to meet up with Triolo so there's something to look forward to as we all endure the winter in the States. Has anyone seen the month Seattle has had? Crap!
Comments
good choice of tunes
dudes-
cant go wrong with Buffett. be it disk one or two.
cooking appliances
damn rory. brockton 109's (was that our #?) oven is now well traveled.