Whole Lotta Up and Down

I considered a horse at first. Fancy visions of trotting into Antigua at dusk, spitting tobacco beneath a sun-bleached Panama hat. A bike seemed more feasable. You have to peddle the thing, sure - but its efficient and it doesn´t poop. All I knew was that I had to go.

I was sad to leave them, my TEFL classmate come roommates at Cristina's ranch by Pablitos. We had become like family over the weeks and I became suddenly nostalgic for our breif household as began peddling my black two-wheeled stallion south. The familiar stretch to Playa Carillo and onwards to Estrada demanded a new effort with the mid-sized Australian millitary pack on my shoulders and a searing Guanacaste sun above. The first few kilometers are always the most difficult. After that, sweet endorphines shower over crucial connections in the brain, lending a strange sort of elation at that place where exhaustion and ecstacy meet.

The coastal mountain range proved to be a difficult route. A seemingly endless uphill trudge finally gave way to a few kilometers of blissful, breezy down, delivering my steed and I to the quirky upper-crust resort town of Punta Islita. Sweating and thirsty, I promptly found a large, green pipa on the beach sand. I hacked the unripe coconut open with my red-handled swashbuckler Machete and slurped down its cool, nutrient-filled milk. Then I scooped out the tender coconut meat and ate watching, entertained, as a coati meandered down the road. A unique enterprise of nature, the coati most resembles an anteater, enxcept that it is about the size of a racoon, tailed, and pigeon-toed.

Another exhaustive uphill climb opened up to an awesome ocean view from the single-lane dirt road far above on the cliffs. This led to an especially redeeming downhill ride into a vast expanse of quiet, sparsely populated cow country. The silence was broken by the occasional motorbike wizzing by, the forlorn BUUUH of a cow, and the ever-unseen howler monkeys. The terrain continued in this manner - up,down, pasture - all the way to Playa San Miguel, where I strung-up my hammock between two palms and drank a few slow cervesas in an empty beachfront cantina at sunset.

written by  chaddeal on January 2, 2009 from Jabilla, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited
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