Cahuita, Spanish, Nicaragua

So this past week has been a blur. This connection is extremely finicky, and I don't really know why it's working, so this will be brief.


Last weekend eight of us went to Cahuita, a town on the Caribbean that is next to the Cahuita National Park. It's a sweet little Caribbean-influenced "getaway," with a much larger number of people of African descent than elsewhere in Costa Rica, some fantastic food (the jerk chicken was absolutely worth the 5,000 colones...mmm), and a laid-back reggae style that everyone should experience at least once.

The Spanish spoken there had a very cool Jamaican feel to it, and it was nice to get away from the city. On Saturday we took some lunch and went to a beach in the national park, and then on Sunday some of us hung around a black sand beach (la Playa Negra) before we came back to San José. I didn't take many pictures, but here are a couple.

Where we stayed. For $10/night each, we got a big beach-style house with a stove and a refridgerator and a locked gate. It was nice.




In other news, Spanish classes are over. I'm not too sad. On one of the last days we went to the zoo, so here are a few pictures. The only animals in the zoo that weren't from Costa Rica were the two lions they had.

There were lots of birds with lots of colors.

A pile of turtles.

Scarlet macaws. They're endangerd, and they are (almost) always in pairs. I saw two fly overhead twice in Palo Verde.

The jaguar was sleepy, as were the other big cats.

All of the white-nosed coatis were sleeping too.

Tomorrow I'm going zip lining through the canopy with a couple of people. We get back in the afternoon, relax/get things together, stay in a hostel close to the bus station, then at 6:30 on Sunday morning we go catch the bus to Nicaragua, where we'll be for the week. We're spending a few days on the Isla de Ometepe, the island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua that has two volcanoes on it, and then a few days in Granada. Should be fun! The bus ride to Nicaragua is only 8 hours; it was 4 to Cahuita on the coast. Gotta love small countries.

I'll be back on the 4th of April, and then we head to Monte Verde, then Cabo Blanco, then La Selva. Whoa.