Monday Feb. 12, 2007
I've been wanting to finish this update for my site for quite some time now, but not surprisingly I couldn't get it done while at Darryl's place (or sooner) - there's just been too much going on. So I decided to take a small trip back out to the Pacific ocean, where I'd been invited to stay with a fellow traveller and writer near the small town of Nosara on a beautiful beach. As hard as it may be for you to envision in a setting like this, I looked forward to (and needed to) spend some quiet time working on my laptop, as these updates typically take 3-4 full days to complete. I never realized the effort required to keep a website up-to-date while traveling for extended periods, and now appreciate even more those excellent sites of fellow travellers that I visited while still at home planning my trip. A typical day of traveling doesn't allow me the time to update my site, so I force myself to stop somewhere quiet for a few days and work on it without distraction.
This ended up being a good place for me to stop and organize hundreds of pictures while writing these pages. Although no place is perfect and it did take me a little while to adjust. I had to ride on the beach a short ways (only during low tide) just like Mazatlan, the nearby howler monkeys would often wake me with their loud and eerily deep, howl-bark sounds at 4:30 AM, there were plenty of large insects which could make amazing amounts of noise when they all contributed, and the high daytime temperatures made it hard to sit in front of my computer. But the beautiful beaches and sunsets along with the very peaceful paths and roads throughout the jungle with it's brightly colored trees and glamorous palms more than made up for it.
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One thing I've noticed while traveling in a foreign country is that it's hard to shake the stereotype of distrust that we've been brainwashed with by the news media. In reality, I'm finding that the average person here (just like at home) is good and they will go out of their way to help you. Of course there are still a few bad apples out there that always seem to end up as the day's top news stories making people believe they should be scared to go out of their house, but if you can get past the fears (and use common sense), then you'll see that there are still allot of good people in this world. I have been shown a sense of honesty and integrity more than once by people who have far less luxuries in their life than I do. It says allot. Unfortunately, I occasionally still have to remind myself to let go of the stereotypes.
Costa Rica allowed me to regroup myself, and repack Buzz into a much lighter and more manageable kit in preparation for our upcoming passage over the Darien Gap to South America - bring it on!
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