After a very relaxed border crossing, the first town we hit in Costa Rica was Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. The only really remarkable thing about Puerto Viejo was the "Thursday night all-you-can-eat sushi for $10" at a place called Chile Rojo. Fortunately we arrived on a Thursday night. The sushi, suffice to say, was amazing, and has since made its way into our "Top Meals" chart. On the menu was tuna nigiri, salmon and cream cheese rolls, prawn and avocado, tuna and jalapeno, and my all time favourite: marlin and mango. Mmmm. We stayed for over 3 hours and ate 5 rounds of sushi between us.
The next morning, nursing large overfed sushi bellies, we made our way a few miles down the road to a one street beach town called Manzanillo. A real end-of-the-road destination, Manzanillo consists of a couple of bar/restaurants, a few "cabinas" to sleep in and a small sand football pitch, all just yards from the beach. It was pretty much paradise. Hardly any travellers spend the night in Manzanillo, so each day we only had to walk just 10 minutes down the beach to find a near deserted section. We spent the next few days chilling out in the sun, and eating scandalously good seafood at Maxi's - one of our two restaurant choices.
Now, I know that everyone reading this who has a job, work, deadlines, projects, targets, etc. will have a fit when I say this, but ... it was really nice to just relax and so nothing for a few days. "What!" I hear the workers amoung you cry, "But you relax and do nothing all the time anyway!" Not so. I'm not about to pretend that the past 5 months have been the most strenuous of my life, but long distance travelling can, at times, be quite stressful. This is particularly true when you have a deadline (e.g. meeting Liz's parents in Belize) and then get caught up in some kind of ridiculous "having to see/do everything a country/continent has to offer" notion in the meantime.
This happened to us in Bolivia and Panama, and we spent our time in these countries tearing around the place, never staying in any one region for more than a couple of days, and trying to see and experience everything available. When the inevitable happened - illness, travel delays, blockades, bus cancellations, etc. - we became even more upset and stressed because we were forced to miss something that we had planned to do. It also meant that we were spending a couple of hours a day packing/unpacking, and the most of the rest of our time ... as always ... on busses.
Not that I'm complaining too much. This speed tourism was great fun and allowed us to jump from one great experience to the next, but there comes a time when you really do need to take a break and lie on the beach for a few days. Costa Rica provided us with that opportunity. We had 12 days there, and decided to spend those days exclusively on the Carribean coast, doing very little at each destination. At Manzanillo, this plan went off without a hitch.
At the risk of spoiling an upbeat ending, I feel I must relate a rather shocking event that occured on our last night in Manzanillo. Wanting a low-key kick-about with the locals, I grabbed my football and jogged down to the sand pitch to see if anyone was up for a game. When I got there I found pretty much the entire town clustered in a tight group down by the beach. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I pushed my way through the crowds right to the front. There on the ground, in the middle of everyone, was a lifeless man in swimming trunks. He was Costa Rican, probably in his thirties, and was a very unnatural looking blue colour. The locals did their best to ressussitate him, but unfortunately all in vain.
We learned later from one of the barmen in Maxi's that he had come to Manzanillo with a couple of work mates, drunk a little too much at lunch, and then disappeared for a few hours in the afternoon. The body had then been seen floating near the beach shortly before I arrived. Apparently it was only the second death by drowning that Manzanillo had ever witnessed. It caused quite a fervour in the town, but we were quite happy to leave for Cahuita the next day, and put that macabre incident behind us.
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