Blog entry, November 25th 2003

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  Playa Samara, Province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica
Saturday, November 22, 2003

Time goes fast, as we all know, and I'll finish my fourth week in Costa Rica today already! I'm gonna transfer to another school for four weeks tomorrow. That place is called Playa Samara and apparently it's a pretty quiet spot, good for swimming and snorkelling. I hope that there will be some waves though, so that I could start learning how to surf, yeah!!

A few things worth mentioning happened since the last time I wrote everyone. Two weeks ago we went on a trip to visit the volcano Arenal, which is still active. We didn't see any outbreaks or lavastreams (actually we didn't even catch a glimpse of the top, since it was always cloudy), but we heard it rumbling a few times. We hiked through some rainforest for about 1,5 hours too, seeing some monkeys, tucans and a sloth. After the hike we relaxed and recuperated at the hotsprings (www.tabacon.com) and this was great! The water flows through man-made channels and pools, reaching a temperature of about 40 degrees Celsius (probably a bit more than your average hot-tub). While we were chilling out at the poolbar it started to rain pretty hard, hence we had a nice contrast being covered half in hot, half in cold water. Sunday morning we visited a 15 meter high waterfall, but the weather was bad and most of us declined the change to take a swim. It was also very touristic (ie lots of people around), as was the hike in the forest, so that was a bit annoying.

Last week then I had an encounter with a turtle at the local beach. My friend and I were walking home in the dark at around 9pm, when we came across some weird tracks in the sand. We decided to follow 'em and to our suprise there was a huge leatherback turtle (about 1,5m long) digging out a hole! We stayed and watched for a while, checking out how it dug the nest for its eggs (60cm deep) by using its hind legs or flippers. After 45 minutes I returned to see how far things are and the turtle was already finishing up by covering up a big area around the nest (to make it harder of finding it). Unfortunately it didn't work out as planned, because the next morning somebody had already dug out all the eggs.

Last weekend we hung out mostly at the beach, watching American Football Sunday afternoon at the local bar. I'm quite happy to leave Flamingo, since it started to get a bit boring after 3 weeks of staying here. And most of my friends are leaving anyway, one by one, so there's nothing to hold me back and I'm up for a new challenge and new people down in Samara.

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