dear blog, I’m writing this on Sunday morning, December 13th. its 7:30 and I’m the only one awake so far on this raining morning. jessica and chris showed up last night and shultzman left yesterday morning. kellie and tommy will be here tomorrow. a lot has happened since the last time I wrote, we had many more adventures with shultzman.

we had a plan to swap out rental cars that wednesday, so shultzman and i spent some time at the internet cafe while we waited for the replacment. we thought we rented a bigger suv and then when he arrived with the same exact car we realized that was the largest one they offer. it can sit five so so, and this week there will be 7 of us! anyway we swapped cars and the new one only had a quarter tank and i just filled up the one he’s taking back, that means we have to head back out towards cahuita for gas. we decided that we’d check out the national park they have and get some more beach time in on the same trip. the beach was beautiful and we had to walk quite a ways to get to the safe swimming area, plus it was nice and sunny down that way. we spent a couple hours there and took off as it got dark.

the next day we decided to check out the ATV tour. dawn and i shared one and paul and shultzman had their own plus the guide. we took off on our quads and drove through puerto viejo, into cocles, and just passed our street where we make a left to the beach, we made a right and started the tour into the jungle. we took many back roads that led us through a couple of rivers before we parked and hiked down to the base of a beautiful waterfall. we spent about a half hour there swimming in the fresh water and under the powerful falling water.

after the waterfall we drove deeper into the jungle and into the town called bribi where about 20,000 native indians still live off the land. we stopped at a little shack where they sold hand carved and painted items as well as little balls of fresh chocolate that they make from scratch. the guide showed us a cacao fruit and we tasted it as he told us the pocess they use to create such delicious and strong flavored goodies. we bought a little baggie and headed out to finish the tour. the rest of the drive completed a huge circle and it started to downpour. we were all still wet from the swim so it was a bit exhilarating to be driving on some main roads up to 50kph while getting completely drenched. i loved every minute of it plus we shot an episode of D&Dtv while we were out. check it out…

we saw a bunch of animals while were out cruising around. we saw a few tucans, a sloth, a bunch of iguanas, a huge pig, a few cows, some tiny bright red dart frogs, and a parrot.

shultzman left on saturday morning and i had to drive him to a hotel to get picked up for his bus ride back to san jose. it’s always sad saying goodbye to friends but we’ll be seeing him again for sure. after i dropped him off I stopped off at the beach since it was so sunny and took some photos of some vultures I saw sunning their wings in the sun. a pretty surreal experience. i also took a pretty awesome panorama photo of playa cocles. it’s so beautiful out here.

i’m at an internet cafe now, to be continued…