Hag lady to secluded beaches

So the next morning we woke up in Cahuita and decided to head to a black sand beach on the other side of town. We were greeted by a lost soul, wide smiling white matted dread lock lady from Austria. She haggled us for money to buy milk and butter, and we went onwards.

The black sand beach was trashy, smelled like dead things and had an apocalyptic quantity of dead washed up insects on its shore.

We liked the white-sand beach much more, so we didn't take any pictures of the black one:

Disappointed with the beach, we headed back into town and re-encountered our hag lady. She was surprised we couldn't get breakfast at the black sand beach and then insisted she bring us somewhere for "ze nice breakfast, myes?" with another one of her trademark wide tooth missing smiles. I felt pitty for her, but mostly concern when she reappeared out of the shadows of the forest randomly next to our breakfast table to ask the café to give her some kind of compensation for bringing us "good customers" to the restaurant. Our guess was she was smoking dank and had been living in a tree for at least 5 years. Broke and begging as much as she could to survive on crumbs...

Later Laura told me that Cahuita was famous as a place where single white/foreign women come for sex... was she such a woman? How many of the local men had she eaten?

To sum: Cahuita looked today like it was stapled together and falling apart. A rasta junk yard of sorts. We made a b-line to exit after the illusion was broken and headed to see sloths at the sloth hospital / sanctuary.

The sloth sanctuary was really nice, especially the guided boat tour by an elderly black gentleman dressed all in white.

Sloths are adorable, and I had no idea that they only came out of the trees once a week to poo and pee, and that they buried it in a hole to avoid detection. They live mainly upside down, and along with dolphins are the only two species that have a permanent smile across their faces.

They are the kinds of animals you want to cuddle to death. Unfortunately the closet we got to a death grip of love was a mild petting. Their fur feels thick and very dry to the touch; like hard carpet.

Let's no even talk about the babies themselves... adorable cuddle magnets times 10, it's no wonder these creatures are having a hard time surviving...

So far the main thing we took from Costa Rica is that it is endless lost jungle with poor villages all asking US/EU prices... 3$ drinks, 30$ bungalows, 10 to 15$ meals... at these prices we decided that we should keep moving onwards in a good timely fashion. Between San Jose and the Caribbean coast we didn't see anything that would tempt us to stay long term.

Then we arrived in Puerto Viejo

Puerto Viejo

This place reminded me of Thailand: Chang Mai in particular. A party town, a bubble. A place you come to feel like you are still home, get drunk, maybe meet someone for a nice night, and bike around the good beaches in the morning.

We weren't that interested in the party scene, nor in the 40$ dinner price for Italian food, but we did appreciate the Rastafarian bicycle rentals. With our bikes we were able to explore stretches of jungle-beaches, some with nice bars on them, others with beautiful water features, wild monkeys and horses.

Here is a picture of our bikes: pink bike for seb and blue bike for laura... naturally!

The beaches were stunning... now if only the prices were too!!

One of those magic moments that seems so normal after a while, here we see a man who walks out onto the sandy beach to wash his horse: