Doing Costa Rica ...right....

(..OK Lucky...here is the rest of the story....)

Let’s pick up from where I left off … Michelle returned back to the spot where I was waiting at the beach. She cries out to me, “I found it!” What do you mean I ask? She told me about the pictures she had seen, with a small peninsula jutting out of the ocean causing the natural phenomenon that looked like a whales tale. She coerced me back to the spot, about a mile down the beach to the point of Uvita, and I got to see it too. It was truly amazing; the sand is the perfect outline of a humpback’s whale tail breaching. Pretty cool stuff.

We were able to walk all the way out to where the tail would seemingly meet the whales body as the two parts of the ocean tides converged onto the land forming the whales tale.
We enjoyed Dominical but wanted to be closer to the beach at Manuel Ballena so we left Dominical to stay in Uvita.

While there, we decided to spend a day exploring what it would be like to live here, and what it would cost to uproot our lives. We took a day to look at property that was for sale. We found that most of the West coast of Costa Rica was for sale. With the promise that the road connecting Dominical to Quepos would be paved soon, Real Estate seemed like a good idea. After spending the day with a realtor, we decided a move like that is wrong for us at this time, even if property values did sky rocket. We were back to the beach and ready to travel down the road again… next stop Drakes Bay.

We loved the ride. We were almost the only people on the road and the views were incredible. Finding the turn off for this desolate bay was a challenge. Just by chance we found a couple of farmers looking for a ride towards Drakes, so we offered them a ride. Neither spoke English, but with Michelle’s improving Spanish, we found our way with in a couple of hours.

Michelle had checked the Internet for places to stay (we used it at all times, it helps so much and also trip advisor) and we ended up staying at a bungalow/hotel owned by a retired American and his Costa Rican family. They set us up in the honeymoon suite way above the town. We had to climb a good many stairs. We had a huge front porch that had us looking out over the bay below, so pretty.

Each morning we’d have breakfast with the pet friends of the wild. A scarlet macaw by the name of Judy, and two green parrots that would hang on the branches as we ate. After breakfast it was time to explore and look into the dive shops. What we found out… we had been spoiled with our previous dive places. The water on the Pacific side has a very strong current and really mixes up the surf so visibility was a mere 20 feet. So diving at this time and place was not at it’s best. We did run across several big underwater creatures, but at times it was difficult to tell where you were. But… We did have a great experience boating next to a school of dolphins. We stayed with them for a while watching the young ones play around with each other jumping, twirling, and doing mid air somersaults.

Later on we met up with a group of girls who were from Great Britain. We ended up having drinks that night with them and planned on doing a canopy tour the following day with them as well. Things didn’t work out the next day. We woke up late, and figured they too over slept. We decided to take in a late hike. Later on we saw them. They went ahead and did the canopy tour which they said is a must do! We apologized for not making it and said our good byes. The following day we took off to do some zip line canopy fun. What a rush. We felt like birds in the jungle. One zip line was over 300 feet and on the guides own property. Safety was their main concern, as we hoped, but for me, just flying thru the jungle at such heights made me understand why we came here. WOW….what a wonderful world we live in. The next day we continued our travels down the coast to Port Jimenez to catch up with a friend of Michelle’s.

We found our way further south on the dirt/paved road that just goes on for ever. We tried to locate Michelle’s friend Lynn by email/ phone calls but we were unable to get in touch. We spent the night at Puerto Jimenez, a quite town with many beaches, and again many developments.

It would have been nice to spend more time there, but we were looking for Caribbean waters… and so the question was …should we go to Panama, which was right below us …. Or ……