Nate and Kia: Sámara and Manuel Antonio

On Monday Kia and I left Monteverde, and headed west to Playa Sámara on the Nicoya Peninsula. It's a quiet beach town, and a favorite among vacationing Ticos. Rumor has it that even ex-president and Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias owns a vacation house in the area. It's no rumor that Mel Gibson has a house nearby. That's a fact. There's a stretch of beach nearby that the locals call "Playa Gibson." Although we didn't run into the star of Mad Max and Lethal Weapon 1-4, we did enjoy ourselves.

Here's Kia hanging out in our new hammock,

and here I am covered in bed bug bites. They were our only company. Turns out nobody (besides us, I guess) gets all the way out to Sámara in the low season, and there's not too much to do except hang out at the beach. Sure, it sounds great -- and it was pretty great, come to think of it -- but the water was too full of gross runoff from the rain to snorkel or anything. We spent a lot of time walking around, and when it got too rainy to do that, we hung out with Bambi, the perpetually shirtless, perpetually stoned dude who was in charge of the hostel. We spent two nights and a full day there before deciding to head out.

The trip down to Quepos and Manuel Antonio was a pretty long one. We had to take two buses, a ferry and two more buses to get here, but it was worth it.

This morning we woke up early and went to the national park with our new, Swedish buddy, Gustav. This is one end of Playa Manuel Antonio. We were the second group on it this morning. The only other tracks down this far were from animals.

There are about a million hermit crabs everywhere in the park. This is one of the smallest ones we could find. Last year my friend Todd and I built a huge maze out of sand for them. Kia, Gustav and I tried to recreate that today, but we weren't as dedicate as Todd and didn't do as elaborate of a job.