Costa Rica Round One
October 2006
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Our time in Costa Rica started out with a bang. On the day that we planned on crossing the border, we were confident and prepared having crossed 3 previous borders and being totally prepared. However, the “guides” on the Costa Rica side had another plan, to get money from us. We ended up spending about five hours wrangling with the crooked “guides” eventually meeting a very nice Argentinean surfer named Juan from Tamarindo who helped us finally find the proper official who promptly told us we had everything in order and that there was no problem. When we pulled away from the border we were so happy to finally be in Costa Rica. We gave Juan a ride to his Mom’s hostel, La Botella De Leche, in Tamarindo. Juan had been on an annual 3 month trip to Puerto Escondido where he is legendary for pulling into massive barrels and his Mom was so happy to see him again that she treated us like family for having delivered him home
We hung out a bit in Tamarindo even though it is totally blown out in a very strange Orange County sort of way. As always, we met some very nice people including a friend Jarod who let us use his Wi-Fi and a nice couple from Santa Cruz who we surfed with. After quickly getting our fix of the glossy Tamarindo, we followed local advice and headed to Playa Avellanas and a neat little surf hostel called Azul Escondido where we camped for the next week or so. The rain came on strong and really never let up making all of the bad dirt roads into impossible mud tracks. The rain was too much to surf so we just hunkered down with the hostel’s manager Lukus and tried our best to stay dry. With Noah’s pending arrival and no sign of the rains letting up, we realized were going to have to bog some seriously bad roads in horrible weather to meet up with him. We crossed our fingers and plowed through the mud on the Guanacaste coast arriving at the San Jose airport just in time to pick up Noah.
Noah’s arrival lifted our spirits and his energy was much appreciated. We headed to Boca Barranca and camped in front of the Hotel Boca Barranca thanks to the incredibely kind family who runs it. The next morning, we awoke to no rain and perfectly peeling lefts, something Boca Barranca is famous for. Noah is a shaper of surfboards and made each of us a custom surfboard. Sarah got a custom 8’10” performance longboard and Eric got a 6’3” standard squashtail shortboard. We all had such a blast surfing together that first day that we decided to stay and see if it got better. Noah had 10 days to travel with us and was leaving out of Panama City so we quickly hit the road when we saw the surf wasn’t going to stick around. We made a short stop in Dominical on our way to Pavones and Punta Burica. Pavones treated us really well and we got to surf large, clean waves in a jungle environment. After our incredible luck at Pavones, we decided to push south into Panama. Although it was short and pretty wet, we had a great time passing through Costa Rica on our way south and we looked forward to the return trip.