Author: Sarah Northway

Bike to the beach
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Colin has always wanted to learn to surf, but I gather the few trips to Tofino with his friend James weren’t particularly fruitful. I guess the waves that habitual surfers like aren’t so good for first timers. But Playa Samara seems to be perfect for beginners, that is, the waves are relatively small. :)

On our second afternoon, we walked the length of the beach and talked to all the surf schools. We went with Choco Surf School because they seemed cool and laid back, and were able to give us an on the spot deal for a month of board rentals. We took our first lesson right there and then from Shaggy who made the whole thing so much easier than I’d imagined. I got up on my very first try and on nearly every attempt that day thanks to his well timed shouts of “get on! paddle! get up!” and gentle shoves at the back of the board. I actually did better than Colin on that first day, which Shaggy was sure to mention.

But if you know Colin, you know that won’t last long. He goes at everything with such focus, that before the end of the day we were practicing pops on the floor and watching Youtube videos on paddling tips. I would have been happy to call it a successful one time experience and leave it at that, but Colin’s determined that we’ll both be proper surfers before the month is out.

So the next day did not go so well for me; I gave myself a number of accidental Costa Rican Neti Pots (as we call it) and got tumbled more times than I got up on my board. The most frustrating, exhausting part of surfing as I see it is just getting back out into the water, through waves that are constantly crashing over you and trying to wash you and your board back in to shore. Carefully angling your board straight at the wave and upwards is important here, but even when I get that right the wave sometimes just sweeps me off my feet. For the biggest waves you need to lay on the board and duck under, which we haven’t done yet and looks frightening and difficult to me. Most of real surfing looks frightening and difficult to me. I’m still waiting for it to become fun. :(

Since then things have gotten better, in part because the waves have gotten smaller, but in part because I am in fact learning. We started by surfing white water, where the waves break before they reach you and are much easier to ride, although it’s not really considered surfing. Colin almost immediately switched to blue water waves and today I joined him. Blue water – actual waves that don’t break until after you stand up – require extra timing to make sure you’re going the right speed in the right place and that the wave doesn’t break too early and force you under. There are so many variables to remember that inevitably when I get all the hard ones right I’ll forget one of the basics. Colin’s been reading about hind-brain vs fore-brain thinking, and that what we’re doing is training our hind-brain to handle most of it for us because it would be impossible to hold all the variables in your fore-brain at the same time. He thinks the reason I did well on my first day was because I was focused and doing all the calculations in my fore-brain, but I did so poorly on my second day was because I’d started relying on my hind-brain to remember where to put my feet and so on, but it didn’t have enough practice yet. This is a theory for why people have beginner’s luck.

So we’ve tried to get out there for at least an hour every day to practice surfing. The rest of the time we’ve been laying the hammoc, walking along the beach, working, or a combination thereof. I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my game Rebuild which is set to be released on Monday, and prodding at my next game “Word Up Dog”: a game of digging and word building. Today our fellow Casa Coba-mates took us out to see their property, which they’ve been slowly turning into a home away from home over the last few years. They come every January to escape the Ottawa winter and work on the place which is now raised, drained, watered, and mostly walled. We’re taking notes, although I think this particular beach town moved past our price range around the same time it got a bank and grocery store. I suppose the trick is to find somewhere that will have ammenities five years down the road and wait.

Writing a blog post
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Sarah and I are sitting outside our new place a couple of blocks from the beach in Costa Rica (our next place is right on the beach). Sarah is in a hammock and I my laptop is on a table made a of a big vanished cross-section of tree. We just got our first decent night’s sleep in a couple of days since we were in Vancouver.

Vancouver was really nice. It was increidbly whirlwind but for the breif time we were there we had a great time! We got into Commercial drive around 6 and hung out with Lindsay until dinner and drinks with almost all of our Vancouver friends (Dannah were absent due to illness :/ It was great. We had some good indian food and the last taste of Canadian beer for three months (Howe Sound’s Black IPA was a fitting sendoff).

After drinks we stumbled toward a hotel near the airport to await our early-morning flight. We were having a bad navigation day in general and got off at (arguably) the wrong Skytrain station. Amazinglly though, on the way up the escelator we ran into Alex Vostrov (he’s a Vancouver indie dev who’s working on a game I’m really looking forward to)! We chatted for a while and then finished our trip to the hotel.

The next day we sat in aluminum tubes all day. I hate sitting in aluminum tubes. One of them stopped off in Houston and we got to walk around a bland airconditioned building for three hours (actually Houston airport gets top marks in my book: 6$ pulled pork sandwiches!). When we arrived in Costa Rica it was so late we had organised to sleep at an airport hotel before starting our journey to Samara the next day. This airport hotel strategy is one we started in Paris. If you have an early or late flight it’s often worth staying at a cheap hotel in/near the airport instead of wrestling with transit at 5 in the morning.

We met a fellow traveler named Rae on the way to the hotel. She was also heading to the coast the next day and we agreed to meet the next morning and figure out our transit options. After firing off a facebook message assuring everyone we were still alive we fell asleep.

The next morning we got to mentaly wrestle with the taxi and tour operator. Actually, hold on a minute. I have to punish the hotel for how awful this guy was.. hold on, this is just for google:

I would not recomend staying at The Hilton Garden Inn Liberia Airport Hotel. Our stay was dominated by an agressive and annoying taxi agent who hounded us literally from the very moment we got to the hotel. He was incredibly pushy that we book a taxi for 150$ instead of pay 10$ in bus fare to our destination. He lied to us about how long the bus would take. Unsurprisingly, when it took time to get a taxi to the bus terminal he quoted us a price (instead of using the meter) that was twice what it should have been. Unfortunately the hotel is isolated enough that we had no choice. I do not recommend The Hilton Garden Inn Liberia Airport Hotel.

Alright, sorry about that. But it’s true. If we hadn’t done a bunch of research about how to get from a to b we’d have been stuck in a cab all day. As it was the bus system was great! We bussed from Liberia to Nicoya (2 hour trip) and then from Nicoya to Samara (1 hour) and Rae bussed from Nicoya to Nosara which is up the road from Samara. While we were waiting in line in Liberia to buy tickets some guy came up to me with some typical shyster patter about where I’m going and would I like a taxi or mabey something more illicit. I blew him off but one of the locals in line turned and suggested “don’t trust everyone here”. Which was nice of him. We ended up chatting with him and made fast friends. He was heading to work as an ATM repairman. He works long hours but was seemed pretty cheery about it in general. He wanted to assure us that the people in Costa Rica are nice and honest but a few places can be sketchy. Just like anywhere. He said he liked video games so I wrote down the Contraption URL for him and we exchanged email adresses.

The bus ride to Nicoya was really nice. The roads are relaxed and we spent the whole trip cruising down a wide firtile valley filled with sugar plantations and grazing cattle. In the distance we could see the green hills rising up. The bus was full but not crowded, the seats where comfy and we spent the trip making faces at the three-year old beside us. Everyone on the bus seemed to be in a good mood, we were in a new land with new sights and smells. Moments like those are a hilight of life.

The transfer at Nicoya was a little sketchy. Turns out we had to change bus companies and therefore bus stations. But no one spoke english so getting directions to the new station was looking to be difficult. Luckily Rae speaks a fair amount of spanish! She got directions from the ticket seller and we wandered off into Nicoya. Nicoya is a small pleasent town with small pleasent roads and small pleasent houses. Which is nice since we spent the next half hour wandering aroWund it looking for the bus station. We would wander around in the direction we’d been shown until it started to look like the wrong way. Then we’d ask directions and start off in a new direction. A few loops through this and we found our bus station. It was very quiet, there were no signs saying what busses left for where (unlike the other stations we’d seen) and it was hard to find anyone to pay for tickets. Eventually we got on our nearly-empty bus to Samara and Rae got on her nearly-empty bus to Nosara. First stop both busses made: the actual bus station. We had gotten on at the service yard. Which is just as well since the actual bus station was very crowded, very loud, and had very long lines. Viva being lost and finding the secret bus station!

Another very pleasent bus ride later we arrived at Samara. Samara is your typical holiday beach-town. I’m sure Santa Cruz CA looked exactly like this in the… 20s? And so did Newport beach in LA. Lots of Costa Rican holiday makers (kids get a really long christmas break here) buying kitch and playing in the perfect long stretch of sand. It’s more touristy than we usually like but it’s a lot better than Newport beach. And if we can spend the month surfing so much the better!

Our digs here were easy to find and pretty unique. Casa Coba is a couple blocks from both the beach and ‘downtown’ Samara, a large lot with main house and two rental houses, a beautiful garden filled with fruit and flowers, and not one, not two, but seven cats! The owner Karina explained that most were hungry strays that she didn’t have the heart to turn away, who are fed but left to come and go through the garden as they please. Our casita is a one-room building made of tile and large chunks of beautiful wood, with drifting mosquito nets across the windows and doors and a patio looking out onto palms, banana trees, vines and flowers. Karina also runs a yoga class at the back of the garden several times a week.

We shed our bagage, wrote another quick facebook update and bee-lined it for the beach! It is a pretty spectacular beach. It stretches in a several kilometer-long crescent of sand dead-ending in rocky headlands which aparently have good snorkling. The waves were breaking and there were a lot of surfers bobbing in the waves. We walked down the beach and it thinned out the farther we walked. Eventually we threw asside our sandles and collapsed into the warm Pacific Ocean. We played in the waves and watched local boys catch waves while the sun set turned the few tufts of clouds crimson. It was a perfect evening.

We bought a bottle of Chilean wine on the way home and shared it with Karina and a couple of Canadians who summer here every year. So far Cost Rica has been splendid.

Lunch
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

So, I’ve never really cooked before. I’ll occasionally throw things together in a pan and put the result over rice, but I have trouble following recipes or keeping ingredients in the fridge and it never turns out too well. However, the last two months in Honduras I’ve made an effort to cook dinner nearly every night and many of the results have been pretty darn tasty! I had help from Supercook.com which scrapes recipe sites and lets you match against the ingredients you have. I’ve kept links to some of the recipes I used, although to be honest I don’t think I followed a single one exactly.

Drum roll please…

Shrimp wraps with papaya and whatever veggies we had. These were one of our staples since Marcia kept us in good shrimp supply. The price of shrimp fell here recently so there are boats all around with hulls full of frozen shrimp, just sitting and waiting for the price to go back up.

Blaff (Caribbean lime poached fish) with boiled plantain and salsa. We had some hot sauce with sweet chillies in it which was just the right thing for the salsa, which was so good I tried to recreate it twice more but it wasn’t the same.

Piononos (plantains stuffed with black beans and cheese). Fried Puerto Rico street food, probably the least healthy thing I made the whole time. But they were delicious and held together surprisingly well.

Stuffed green peppers were almost a disaster. The recipe I used (I can’t find it now) baked them with uncooked long grain rice for an hour. After that hour the rice was barely cooked at all and I couldn’t figure out what on earth I did wrong. I had to pull all the stuffing out, cook it on the stove, then restuff them and finish them again in the oven. But they turned out well.

Goulash which was too tomatoey but good comfort food on a night when I needed some.

Grouper in banana crust. I’d bought a bag of yucca chips which were disappointingly crushed nearly to dust, so I found this recipe to use them in. It was a huge success.

Baleadas stuffed with refried beans, egg and stinky cheese. I had these first in Guanaja and tried to recreate them afterwards. I haven’t tried making the tortillas from scratch but bought excellent fresh baked ones from Pookie’s restaurant in Jonesville.

South Carolina Red Rice with sausage. Like anything with cooked tomato in it, I thought it was too tomato-ey.

Egg tomato leftover rice. With shrimp, trying to recreate the fried rice we loved in Thailand. A good way to use up extra rice from the night before.

Baked penne with sausage. What can I say, I bought a lot of pasta, canned tomatoes, and ground beef for some reason.

Coconut and shrimp rice bowl was so-so. The carrots I bought from Eldon’s were atrocious. Their veggies were definitely hit and miss, probably depending on how long ago the last shipment was. Some days they were just about cleaned out so I just had to buy whatever they had.

Shrimp and tomato quiche so good I made it twice, though I used sausage meat the second time instead which was better.

Picadillo de Plantano (plantain hash) with super ripe plantains was soooo good.

Shrimp braised in coconut milk over rice was kind of watery and the shrimps were a bit overcooked, but Colin went back for seconds of the sauce just to pour over rice.

And for desert…

Fudgy brownies, Colin’s favorite desert, were so thick they were a bugger to get out of the pan but we had fun doing it. I was horrified at how much sugar and butter went into them, but I guess that’s a good lesson to learn about desserts.

First blood
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We had about a week of stormy and overcast weather, which was good timing as I was finishing up my game Rebuild and Colin was just starting a new game (Clutter has been put on hold). I put Rebuild up for bid on FlashGameLicense.com, not expecting a lot of action at first, but action and excitement there has been! After just two days I had three bids of $5000 (the contract terms vary), and it’s likely to keep going up. The average game on there sells for 2k after about a month so this is very good! We treated Marcia and Dennis to drinks at Hole in the Wall to celebrate.

Just as we were leaving Dennis pointed out a baby Boa Constrictor sunning himself on the driveway, and we had a chance to pick him up and get to know him for a minute. They’ve got a rare subspecies on Roatan with pink bellies, they’re such pretty creatures.

Dennis lent us his Hawaiian sling, so today we went lionfish hunting. We started with a little guy we’d seen from the deck, who’s size made him a difficult target so it took Colin a few tries to hit. It was kind of sad killing such a beautiful creature but if people don’t do something they’re going to every other beautiful fish in the Caribbean. So we brought the sling out to our usual snorkeling spot and hunted around for more of them where coral clumps sprout out of the sand. I think we killed ten and badly wounded a couple others, all much bigger that the little guy under the dock. I messed the first couple up but was a perfect shot on the next four. It was surprisingly easy to hit them as you could get right up and shoot from an inch or two away, they were so unafraid. But some were very hard to finish once they’d been skewered and we had to bash them repeatedly against rocks which was gross and sad. Colin speared the largest of them perfectly but it wiggled off the prongs and darted into a crevice. It was a fun game and we felt like we made a little difference to the diversity of our favorite snorkeling spot.

After the hunt we swam with the purple schools, waved to the Hello Fish, poked gently at a lobster, nodded to the shrimp in the cinderblock then sunned ourselves with a picnic lunch at the tiki hut. It was a perfect day!

Diving in
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday we got a break from the rain. The night before Julie and Ed had sent us an email asking if we wanted to go on an impromptu cruise on Spirit of Free Radical early the next morning. We are all about spontaneous decisions so of course we jumped all over the chance. How could you not?

The next morning we got Charleston to water-taxi us over to their bight and hopped aboard. Today was going to be sort of a shake-out cruise. They have new engines so they’re still breaking and tuning them in and they also wanted to check out some mooring spots and check transit times for some potential charter and day-trip destinations. It was to be Melanie and Brent (the house sitters) and Sarah and me joining them.

We cast off at about 11:00am after wrapping some sails Julie was working on (she is an excelent sailing seamstress and has written a highly regarded book on the subject called Canvas for Cruisers). It was a _perfect_ day for snorkling. Bright, hot, and dead calm. We first tripped east to the Cow and Calf again and moored to a buoy that had been recently installed. Ed and Julie wanted to make sure it was close to the islands so people could leap off the boat and be right in the thick of it, but not so close that they ran aground.

As they moored up and started to spin towards the islands I thought it looked _way_ too close for comfort. But with years of experience they weren’t nervous at all and it turned out to be perfectly placed.

From there we headed towards the Pidgeon Cayes. Holy smokes. Pidgeon Cayes. They are two tiny litte sandy cayes that are the embodyment of the one-palm tropical island. Garly Larson’s name comes up a lot when you see the cayes. We had seen them when we cruised to Guanaja on Larry’s boat and they looked very inviting. But as we got closer my mind exploded in wonder.

As the bottom of the ocean comes up to meet the cayes you could suddenly see that the water was _incredbly_ clear. We could see at least 50 feet down. As I mentioned, they day was also very still and the water was like glass, not a ripple on the surface. This conspired to make it feel like we were flying above some other-worldly tropical garden of fish and coral. It was stupifying. My brain could not take it all in. We were all leaning over the side pointing out schools of fish and particularly impressive heads of stag-head coral. Brent spotted a big black ray that lazily flew a few centimeters from the bottom. It was like diving with no tanks or snorkling with no mask. It was a life experience. It was something I will never forget.

We took the Spirit of Free Radical’s little rigid infaltable into one of the cayes and played around in it’s perfect untouched powder sand. We walked around the whole island in about 5 minutes treading on sand the whole way.

From there we waded into the water and did some snorkling. It was obviously fantastic. Diving down and chasing after fish and swiming through big schools. I dove down really deep to grab some big urchin skeletons (20 cm across) and the first sun-bleached sand-dollars we’ve found here.

We eventually swam back to the boat, watched the anchor pull up (we could easily see it burried in the sand and watch it pull all the way up from the bottom) and Julie and Ed topped off the perfect day by making us dinner.

Massive massive thanks to Julie and Ed of Sprit of Free Radical for the best snorkling trip ever!

They also keep a faaascinating blog of their life on the island and their trip around the world.

Actually yesterday had one more amazement in store. Charelston, the local guy who is a little younger than us who ferries us around took us on a _ride_!

You know the mangrove tunnels right? They are about two meters wide, a kilometer long, and have a closed-in canopy of mangroves. So Charelston blows through them in his little skiff at full bore, which is like… I dunno.. 40kph or something. Which is pretty fun. Earlier he had bragged that he could do the same thing by moonlight. Well by the time we got back it was dark and there wasn’t exactly a full moon. But Chareston put on a show anyway.

As we aproached the entrance he put on speed and I looked back and gave him a big grin. We blew under the bridge that marks the entrance and things got very dark. I could sort of see the sky through the canopy but not really and I certainly couldn’t see the walls of the tunnel much less the water. Ocasionally a lit opening would blow by where someone had cut an entrance for their dock. There’s a large brackish pool in the middle of the tunnels and the light from the exit to the pool apeared as salvation. We shot through the exit at full speed into the wide moonlit pool.

That was cool. But what was comming was… pretty terrifying. There is an entrance to the other half of the tunnel on the other side of the pool. And sometimes I have trouble seeing it during the day because it’s kind of camoflauged. But at night? We were now barreling at full speed towards a wall of black. You could see _no hint_ of the entrance. For all Sarah and I could tell we were speeding towards a solid wall of mangroves. We started getting audibly nervous. With comments like “Holy shit this is a bad idea” and “Oh my god oh my god”. Charleston did briefly slow down just before we got to the edge, but only a tick, and then whoosh, we were back into the world of black with the outline of vines and branches wizzing by overhead.

He did actually bump the side of the tunnel once and as we exited the tunnels alive and exhilerated he explained it was a little harder than usual with us sitting in front of him blocking his view.

So that was a pretty good day. Perhapse one of the best days ever actually.