Puerto Viejo: The gringos on the bus go round and round, round and round

Hola!

This past weekend I traveled to Puerto Viejo in Limon. Limon is in the South of Costa Rica on the Caribbean coast and is completely different than central Costa Rica where I am staying. Puerto Viejo is made up of mostly black Costa Ricans many of whom are Rastafarian. It is also a big surfing spot and is known for the Salsa Brava, the biggest wave ever surfed in Costa Rica!

To get to Puerto Viejo we had to take a bus from San Joaquin to San Jose and then take a cab to the bus station. From there it was about a 5 hour bus ride to Puerto Viejo and once we got into Puerto Viejo it was dark out so we took another cab to our hostel. The bus ride there was quite interesting. In Costa Rica they always sell more tickets than seats on the bus and these extra tickets are called tickets "de pie", or standing. Interestingly enough, these standing tickets costs the same as a regular seat! So every seat on our bus was filled, as well as the aisles but there was only about 5 Spanish speakers on the entire bus, everyone else was a gringo. So someone on the bus started singing the wheels on the bus go round and round but substituted gringos for wheels!

The bus ride was really fun because it was all people under the age of about 25 from everywhere in the U.S., Canada, Australia, there was even a guy from Israel.The majority of the bus was staying at the same hostel as my group. We stayed in hammocks for $5 a night at a place called Rocking J's. I put in a picture of my bed for the night:

The hammock was actually surprisingly comfy and I got a great night's sleep on it. When we got there on Friday night the hostel was having live music so we stayed there and watched that which was fun and then we went out on the beach and looked at the millions of stars.

The next morning on Saturday we woke up very early because it was basically like you were camping so you woke up when the sun came out. A few of us rented bikes from the store across the street for $5 and rode about 30 minutes to a place called Punta Uva. The ride was a little interesting because it was full of potholes but it was also beautiful because you were basically riding down the rode with the jungle on one side of you and a view of the ocean on the other. When we got to Punta Uva the beach was breathtakingly beautiful even though it was a bit cloudy and rainy out. The waves were somewhat rough but considered calm for the Caribbean Coast. After a few hours we rode our bikes back to the hostel in the pouring rain and got cleaned up. That night we hung around a bonfire on the beach for awhile and then went to a bar called Johnny's in town. This place was really crowded inside with a strange mix of locals and then people from our hostel but if you went outside they had chairs and tables set up right on the water and it was gorgeous.

Sunday morning we got up early once again and some of our group caught a bus back to San Jose at 11. I didn't need to catch a bus until 4 so I got to spend more time at the beach! On Sunday we walked about twenty minutes on a little jungle path to a beach where there were big waves and lots of surfers. The walk there was beautiful and we stopped at lots of little tide pools along the way. It was fun to watch the people surfing but that must be a workout! I tried swimming a little far out and it was hard work just to get 20 feet offshore because the waves were so strong. The beach had a bunch of red flags on it to warn you about the strong riptides but also so that you didn't swim in the area that the surfers would be riding waves in.

On the way to the bus to go back home that afternoon I got to see a sloth just hanging out in a tree above a roadside stand which was great. The bus ride home was pretty uneventful except that we got stopped by the police and we all had to file off the bus and show either our passports or copies of them. I showed mine to the first police man and was fine and then as I walked to get back on the bus the other one stopped me and looked at my papers again and then asked me what my name was. Apparently, if you have a fake passport you only need to memorize the name on it and you're good to go! We got back to San Jose around 8 and took a cab back to San Joaquin where I fell, exhausted but happy into my bed...