The main Spanish vocabulary that the girls have learned involves ice cream flavors.

We’re here in the Caribbean lowlands, and boy has the weather changed.  It is HUMID here, as well as hot.  Most of the other places we’ve been so far have been only one or the other (apart from Arenal, but we had air conditioning there so we didn’t notice so much).  We hang our damp bathing suits up to dry, and the next morning they don’t feel any different.

We have a great little house here in Cahuita, tucked away into the jungle but just a short walk from the beach, town, and national park.  Bob and I, at any rate, are happy to be rid of the car.

Cahuita is a tiny town, but with a very cool vibe that’s different from anywhere else we’ve been.  It’s our first trip to the Caribbean, and the influence of the early immigrants from Jamaica and the other West Indies is obvious.  Brightly colored shacks and stands line the roads and reggae music blasts from the bars and shops.  White sand beaches curve away from town in both directions, with the beautiful blue/green hue of the Caribbean just beyond.

Catching up on some homework

We’ve had a pretty relaxing time here, catching up on schoolwork and strolling the beaches and town streets — and running to the little local market approximately 6 times a day.  (You don’t have to plan well when the market is a five-minute walk.)  Apart from snorkeling, our big outing was to Cahuita National Park, which was created to preserve the offshore reef as well as the beach and rainforest.  (As an aside, there are a lot of national parks in Costa Rica, but they are not remotely on the same scale as what you would see in a US park.  Cahuita, for example, consists of a single trail in the jungle that runs parallel and just next to the beach.)

Snake eating a lizard! Kind of hard to see but theres a tail sticking out of his mouth.

We hiked along the trail, jungle to one side of us and gorgeous beaches to the other.  There was plenty of wildlife to be seen.  Most notable were the Capuchin monkeys, which became increasingly populous as we got further from the entrance.  By the time we got to our endpoint, Punta Cahuita, they were all over the place, scurrying through the trees and eyeing our lunches.

There were also a huge number of horseshoe crabs in all shapes and sizes.  The girls spent a substantial amount of time rounding these up into sandy pens and looking around for larger, empty shells to try to entice them to upgrade.  We determined that there’s a bit of a hermit crab housing crisis, though, because we couldn’t find anything.  Punta Cahuita is entirely composed of bits of different corals and shells, which made for hurting feet but was also beautiful and fascinating to comb through.

Monkey scheming to get our lunch.

The coral and shell beach at Punta Cahuita

Other than that trip, we’ve been taking a cue from our surroundings and taking it easy.  We go swimming in the warm blue waters, browse through the shops in town, or hang out in the yard of our house.  (The other day we saw a sloth fall out of a tree just outside our yard.  It seemed to recover.)  Bob and I even walked down to the nearby Reggae Bar one night after getting the kids to bed.  (It took three nights for us to work up the energy for this, even though we started talking about it the first day.)

Crowded beaches

It’s just as well we don’t have a strict agenda, because things are a bit crazy here this week.  Semana Santa (Holy Week) is a big deal here, with the whole country on break and flocking to the beaches.  The usually deserted beaches and sleepy town were thronged with locals.  At one point we looked around the crowded beach and concluded that we were the only obviously international tourists in sight.

On our last night we decided to have a roving dinner of all the delicious-looking street food that we’ve seen being cooked up, and it did not disappoint.  Pura vida!

I don’t know exactly what this thing was, but it was delicious.