Montezuma: Where you get crabs!

Sunday 1-7-12 Day 5 FELIZ CUMPLEANOS a mi hermana, se llama, Aleasha! I´m sorry I couldn´t be there for your birthday, but, hey, at least you got a shout out in my blog. :o) Last night wa by far the worst sleep yet. Sarah, if you´re out there, I may have to purchase you a new sleep sack when this is all over with. The slight opening endured some rippin´and tearin´last night. Sleep sacks were not designed for people that flip flop around all night. I.E. me. We were leery of sleeping last night considering the conditions and the fact that the bedroom door not only lacked a lock on the door, but lacked a door handle entirely. I´m not sure if Kangaroo just opened or what, but it was weird, every time we returned after having left for some time, furniture would be moved, or rearranged, or somehow different from the state we left it in. Very odd. It was also approximately 85 degree Celsius (which I´m guessing is somewhere around 200 degree Fahrenheit)in our room. At first, I laid quite comfortably but after about five minutes my legs were on fire and a nice sheen of sweat was forming on my face. I decided to listen to some music to soothe me to sleep. The problem is I had such problems loading music onto my iPod last week, I didn´t really know what was on my iPod. I found out, it´s an ecclectic mix for sure ranging from the Beatles, to Sarah MacLachlan, to Nickel Creek, to Madonna, to Keith Urban to Sugar Ray to Smashing Pumpkins. Ay yay yay! I found a few soothing songs and just as I was about to drift off...finally...the door burst open and a guy stormed through heading into our bathroom. Apparently, to brush his teeth. This was confusing to me because we were told we had a private bathroom. From that point on, Jason said every time he heard a sound his eyes shot open in search of what was going on. Needless to say, he didn´t have a great sleep either. After consulting with Jason about the night´s activities, we were both planning to catch up on some shut eye on the shuttle to Montezuma. Unfortunately, that didn´t happen. First of all, the actual shuttle part is only about 20 minutes and I spent most of that time talking to my new friends, Karen and Gar. Karen, it turns out is from the UK and Gar is from Norway, but now lives in Gibraltar. He was clear about saying that he lives in Gibraltar. I didn´t know what that was supposed to mean so I just kept saying cool a lot. Karen, though, poked fun at him and said, ¨Quit telling people that, no one ëven knows where that is.¨I do know where it is, I´m just still unclear of it´s significance. Anyway, Karen is a younger, maybe early 30´s, petite blonde with a friendly laugh. She works in IT security. Gar, on the other hand, looks like a character straight out of the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo Series. He also works in the IT business. They were very nice and we had a great little chat with them. After the very brief shuttle ride, I stayed awake the whole time I´ll have you know, we got to a beach where the water taxi was to pick us up. We had a short wait where a man selling hats approached our group selling them for two dollars each...a special deal. Minutes later, he approached us again, this time, saying he was selling the hats for twenty dollars a piece! Wow, that was a special deal! I mean, we´re tourists but we´re not dumb. We didn´t buy any hats. Finally, the boat arrives, mind you there are no docks, and so we sort of have to wait for the waves to wash the boat ashore. We are all sitting there with our hug backpacks thinking well this is going to be interesting. Somehow we all managed to get to the boat without losing or damaging anything. The began the 70 minute ride across the gulf to Montezuma. Anyone who knows me, knows my sea legs are a little shaky these days, so as we were waiting for everyone to board, I began getting a little nervous. There was no cabin and I kept my eyes trained on the horizon. I never got seasick. Success! On our way, we saw spotted dolphins and about a million brown pelicans. Those dudes were everywhere. It´s kind of fun to watch them fish though. They are awesome divers. Montezuma is a really quaint little village. The people seem friendly and helpful, but not pushy or overbearing. The beach is okay but the tide was very aggressive, the waves big, and the sand kind of rocky. Some parts, coincidentally, down where we are staying in the beautiful Hostel El Parque. Apparently, El Parque has a bit of a higher crime rate. I´m so glad my family, mom especially, won´t be reading this until I´ve survived the night in this place. You know, it´s funny, with every hostel, I think, ¨It couldn´t get worse.¨ And, yet, somehow it does. The good thing about the place is, they provide pillows, there are safety lockers, and all doors appear to be locked. The bad parts are that although a pillow has been provided, it feels more like balled up socks stuffed in a pillow case. The doors may be locked but the windows are covered in high-tech, state of the art lattice. I´m thrilled that the girl staying in here with us has her bed against the lattice work. The other bad part, specifically for me, is that it is teeming with wildlife and it isn´t that clean. The bedding is clean (allegedly) but the walls are disgusting. The bathroom shower head does not exist. It literally is a PVC pipe, and yet, somehow still, the water pressure is better than at Jeanine´s. (Hmm, will that motivate Andy to get that pipe laid before I return? haha) The floors are clean, and perhaps that is why there is so much life crawling around. There are spiders, ¨ants¨which I´m pretty sure are termites, possibly tics, crabs, and geckos climbing the walls. Ay yay yay! How do people seriously get sleep in these conditions? Today while we were waiting for our water taxi a hermit crab strolled across my foot - little did I know this would be a recurring theme in my day. The entire village of Montezuma is supported by tourism. But, by the time we got settled into our posh accommodations we didn´t have much time for anything besides the beach. We had planned on going to the candlelight yoga at 6 pm. Had we more time, I would have liked to do a beach tour by horseback, next time...next time...We had lunch at The Bakery Cafe, which was pretty good. The highlight there was the little kid that was running around saying stuff in Spanish to all the Americans. We thought he was pretty entertaining. We also heard tons of howler monkeys, and eventually saw three up in a tree, fairly close to our hostel. We also saw more white face running around in the trees, and on top of restaurants. Definitely a few moments of, ¨i´m in costa rica!¨ I´m not sure I´ll ever get over it. The highlight of our Montezuma stay was definitely the candlelight yoga. The studio sits high enough so that you can see and hear the ocean as well as all the jungle wildlife that surrounds it. It was a pretty intense class, though. Bikram ain´t got nothin on yoga in Costa Rica. Within the first half hour, Jason and I were sweating our weight in water. Jason later said, ¨If that were to have kept up, I´m pretty sure I would have died because of all the water leaving my body.¨ Truly, I´ve never sweated like that in any exercise class ever. The class was wonderful though. The teacher, Dagma, pronounced Dogma, did a great job. I felt so wonderful after the class, I wanted to hold onto that feeling forever! As of today, I have sustained my first sunburn and the even the tops of my hands burned. I´ve never heard, or seen, that happen, so I´m hoping it really is a sunburn and not a rash from poisonous bites on the top of my hand incurred at Hotel Kangaroo. I also noticed I acquired three mosquito bites today. My 3 to Jason´s 18. The condition of this hostel make me think I´m not cut out for traveling abroad. But, perhaps, I just need more money with which to travel. I haven´t seen a creature in quite some time, so I guess I shall try to sleep. I hope my head hits the ¨pillow¨and morning comes quickly. Monteverde manaña.... Buenas Noches, Crabs!