Adios Costa Rica

Buenas! A quick last word from costa rica, pacific coast again. I'm in Jaco, a beachplace, after visiting Samara. The finest beaches ever seen, huge waves that I barely survive during my swims. Travelled with guys and girl I already knew, met eachother in the bus in San Jose. Over here the atmosphere is really cool, a nice hostel where we made a huge bbq last night. I'm preparing for my back home a bit now, especially mentally for it could be tough.. I don't feel any urge to leave this 'sweet' life. So I'm pretending not to hear or see anything, and don't talk about it too much. .

From up here I wanna give you all the best wishes for 2007 and the nicest christmasdays. Thank you for reading my weblog, it has been a pleasure to do it and to get the nice reactions.

Hasta luego! Big kiss,
Jantine

Nicaragua's South Pacific

San Juan del Sur.

I’ll ride the wave…

Some other Pearl Jam lovers (or maybe just Nienke T?) know how to finish this sentence, and more importantly what it means: freedom, action, no fear, surrender. The surfing environment San Juan del Sur at the pacific coast of Nicaragua seems to connect well with this mentality. For some reason, the music I travels with me so these days on the pacific coast I listen a lot to American rockmusic. Rough, lyrical, dynamic, extreme, just like the beachlife here. I’m totally into the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

And yes, I tried surfing on Playa Madera, the ultimate surfingbeach in this area.. on this very day, the waves were 100 meters high and I saw the real good surfers disappearing into this wave-curls… incredible.. like I know it from videos. Next beside me. I can totally understand people make surfing their way of life. It’s mystical, looking over these little black puppets on the horizon, sitting on their surfboards, waiting for the waves in this silvergrey sparkling water. I could stay forever just watching this.

I’ve been about a week in San Juan del Sur, a nice fishingplace in a bay with the most beautiful beach reached in 40minutes by bus through the jungle. I met a lot of people here that I already knew, so that gave my stay a big ‘cosy’ idea. Have been there on the beach quite a while, for it was the first time I saw the Ocean Pacific in real... amazing, I loved it here.

With two friends from the US, Shawn and Brent, I stayed a night on Playa Madera, the beach next to San Juan del Sur. Quite an adventure. We saw the sunset, collected wood, made a fire to keep the bugs away, ate fruit and cookies, heated cans on the fire, did some nice storytelling – just the way it should be. While being asleep, it started to rain, so we had to pack and hide under the rocks. Later it got dry and I suddenly woke up at four, seeing an amazingly clear sky with all the stars you can dream off, hearing the fire behind and the sea in front off me.

At the moment I write this, I’m still at the pacific coast but then in Costa Rica, and will stay here this week, heading more southwards tomorrow already towards Jaco and Manuel Antonia.

La Luna Llena de Nicaragua

New stories, new stories! And a big tanx to all your nice remarks that I read on my weblog, you don´t know how fun it is to read these warm words!

Costa Rica is the place where I am right now, to be more precise: San Pedro, a suburb of San Jose which is the capital. Stefany, my travelfriend, works here in a radio-educational project from Liechtenstein and I was invited to come over for a few days. We were so happy to see eachother again! She works at this very moment and I explore the town and shoppingmalls :) Quite fun to be in ´normal´ shops after some months. It´s really obvious for me that I´m in a better developed, richer environment now, for the western-classy clothes people wear, the enormous amounts of christmaslights and the wellfunctioning internet.

Let me tell you about the first place I visited in Nicaragua after my delightful weekend in Antigua, which was Granada (pic at right, you see they build the christmas tree at the left, a happening that gathered the whole town for two days in the central parque). I was quite happy to be there after a two day busride through El Salvador and Honduras, although I had good fun with some people there. It´s funny how it works travelling alone, cause you never really are. On the one hand, there are the other backpackers with who you get in contact very easily because you have the same interests and problems (exchanging money at the border, find a good place to sleep, a safe bus etc etc), on the other hand you have the native people who usually are quite interested in who you are and where you´re from and with whom I can practice Spanish conversation. So, after talking two days I was quite exhausted ;)

Granada is a beautiful colonial town, with a nice church and processions of the a statue of the virgen Mary every night (a ´costum´ carried out by the churches in town), quite a big happening with fireworks and music. Baby´s, pubers, mothers, grandfathers with walkingsticks, the whole family is present. Fireworks are all around every place I visit and OH the noice it makes. People would laugh very loudly about tvspots like ¨Je bent een rund als je met vuurwerk stunt¨ because you can get it as easy as candybars and do anything you want with it. I visited a museum, walked around and had fun with other travellers in the hostel, watched somes movies. Quite relaxed.. So it was time for a bit of workout.. that I found on Isla de Ometepe, a gorgeous wild natural island in the Lake of Nicaragua, consisting of two vulcanos. In Hacienda Merida, the hostel, I found a nice bunch of people that I did a mountainbike tour with, hiked the vulcano, played cards with and watched la Luna Llena at the dock on the lakeside. These sporty things were quite challenging for me. That´s got probably to do with the fact that we started too late mountainbiking to a spring, so we had to return in the dark. There´s hardly any light on the island, and the track was only uphill-downhill ´on the rocks´.. Fortunately the fireflies led the way but could not prevend some crashes with blooded knees. As for the vulcano-hike (which was supposed to be ´good fun´, thanx Brent and Shawn): 9 hours of climbing, crawling through the mud, over and under trees (see green pic left), 7 degrees, rainy, no view and an immensely steep descend to the foggy craterlake - it was only later that I found out people died here - with TOO SMALL shoes... is not really my thing.. Ofcourse I was very proud I climbed this 1500 m steep high vulcano (see pic right down). And I didn´t know how soon I´d pack my backpack to head towards San Juan del Sur, at the south of Nicaragua.