We woke up early to the meowing of a cat…. Like 5am early. Later on we found out she had kittens and just wanted to get inside to get some food and peace from her kids… We tried to go back to sleep with limited success. Manja gave up before me, getting up at 6, and I half-slept until around 7.
The Airbnb wasn’t great, but the view was!
We packed our stuff and had breakfast, cooked by the help of the guy running the Airbnb. It was okay – fruit, French toast and terrible coffee. To make me more cheerful, the host chatted to me the whole time about his expansion ideas, and his thoughts on life. He basically seems to be a multicultural trump-loving republican. Besides conspiracy theories he also had “immigrants are bad” (being an immigrant, married to a local) and “people have to be self sufficient” (while employing an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua to “support her and her disabled kid”. Oh, also, the right to bear arms is an important right, even though he never needed a gun while living in “Some of the worst parts of New York” all his life. Make of all that what you will, but we didn’t feel super comfortable with his views – more specifically for me the problem was the inconsistencies and contradictions which you only get when living in an echo chamber. Regardless, we headed out reasonably quickly, and chose to ignore the local advice he gave us about the area, which included “Ignore the roped-off areas of the active Volcano, just step around them and enjoy the spectacle”.
Today drive was part two of the adventurous drive we had to do to cross from the pacific to the Caribbean side of the country. It was fine, with mostly good roads along the whole way. Turns out that the super bad coffee from this morning also gave me a caffeine high for most of the day – appears to have been strong! One of the disturbing things was a cow transport truck, which was taking the corners so quickly that you saw the cows bouncing from one side of the truck to the other 🥺. I know animal rights are not great all over the place, but this just seemed needlessly careless to me.
We arrived at our next accommodation in the late afternoon. Given the semi disaster of the eco lodge of the 24 hours we were a touch apprehensive, but arrived in a paradise like oasis, which is super well run. They even offered really well priced tours, which we booked two of – a night walk tonight and a full day in the National Park tomorrow. To make sure we could pay for all that, we decided to walk to town to get to some more cash out, which was a 45 minute walk along the beach each way. The hotel dog decided to show us the way, and the front desk advised us that he used to be a stray and we can just ignore him. So we did, and he abandoned us shortly before town, only to join us again on the way back. Super friendly animal!
After a short drive to a restaurant for dinner, we had a nice meal at the beach.
When we returned we relaxed a bit before heading back out at 8pm to meet our guide, doing an absolutely wonderful night walk. It was MEANT to be 1.5 hours, and we got back 2.5 hours later, with a camera full of pictures and even more memories. Knowing that tomorrow would be a full day of walking, along with an early start and the bad nights sleep last night, we dropped into bed exhausted but happy. Check out all these awesome pictures!
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