Playa Samara feels better

Jan 13: 88 degrees

First off, Happy birthday Dusty Sadowski!  We love you.

Again, we awake without an alarm clock.  It is great, yet surprising, that we still get up around 7:00am everyday.  I think this is now our new body alarm clock.  Today,  we wake up in our studio apartment at the Tico Adventure Lodge.  We love the room as it is spacious, quaint and serves all of our basic needs; bathroom, shower, bed, mosquito net, fans, stovetop and utensils.  We also have a big beautiful window that opens and has a screen.  When we open the windows, we have a view of the treetops and a few iguanas in the trees and we invite a small breeze into our room.

Today,  we have three agenda items:  groceries, surfing and exploring parts of Samara that we have never seen before.  Mandy takes a surf lesson because it allows her to rent the board for free for the rest of the week.  Again, upon her return, she looks defeated by the waves but determined to get better at surfing.  She is slightly more excited today by her lesson.  The instructor was much more specific with his instructions about her technique and this helped her to recognize what she may be doing wrong or how she can get better.  I can already tell the excitement for her next attempt.  Mañana.

This is a good beach to learn to surf, but it's very, very basic because the waves are small.  The waves were bigger when we visited in March 2012, but the Sept 2012 earthquake here elevated the beach and changed/lessened the waves a bit.  

Later, we begin our exploration by heading into the main part of town.  We notice a few new shops and restaurants and we remind ourselves where the groceries and pharmacies are located.  We decide to head down a road we have never been down before.  Almost instantly, the mood changes.  We see far fewer gringos and we just happen upon a young girl on a horse.  Our curiosity took us a couple of miles off the beaten path.  Here, we discovered a small bakery,  a couple of lodges, a bike repair shop, and a bus stop with a drunk Tico lying on the bench who later stumbles off of the bench and onto the grass a couple of feet away.  When we turned the other direction, there was an open field with horses, palm trees and an amazing view of the ocean.  About here is where we were accompanied by a couple of Canadians walking to the beach.  We shared stories and survival tips on our way to the beach.  If you run out of bug spray, you can use Listerine for the same purpose (not that we have any).

Ah yes, it is time for sunset on the beach again!  Knowing that we will be changing our lodging (moving from Tico Lodge to LazDivaz) in a couple of days,  we decide to walk along the road to see what the trek will be like with our bags.  About half way there and dodging traffic, we notice something in the tree just ahead.  As we get closer, we notice monkeys in the trees.  These monkeys were so close and didn't seem to be bothered by our presence.  It felt as though we could have reached out and touched them.  We stood and just watched as we were joined by an Australian man who also stopped to watch.  We talked about the very tiny baby monkey who was holding onto its mothers back for its dear life.  They are so cool to watch.  We all enjoyed a couple of moments in awe and regretful that we didn't have a camera or phone to capture this moment.  Again.

Sunset again on the beach. Awesome.

Sunset in Samara