Well last weekend was an absolutely amazing time. I am quickly falling in love with the beaches of Costa Rica. Greg (another new Canadian addition to Bagaces), Asaph and I headed to Tamarindo for a weekend of sun and surfing. We left on Friday night to maximize the time we’d get to spend there. The travel time is approximately two hours from Bagaces. The tricky part is that there is no way to find out bus information aside from word of mouth. Emer told us that six months ago she took a bus to Tamarindo from Liberia at about 7:00pm on a Friday.

At about 9:00pm we were reading to call it quits, assuming we had missed the bus, but it pulled up just in time. The trip only took about an hour and a half which passed by quickly since I had loaded up my iPod with episodes of “Entourage”. We found a hostel quickly and set about exploring the town. The night guard at the hostel recommended a bar to us called “The Crazy Monkey”.

This bar turned out to be really cool, set back from the road about 20 feet and up a steep staircase. There were two main bars, a swimming pool, several dance areas and a live salsa band. Drinks were reasonably priced at about 75 cents Canadian, but we were charged cover when we got in the bar. The night was a lot of fun, we had drinks a plenty and met a whole bunch of girls from Texas. Coincidentally Greg mentioned just before we got to the bar how much he disliked the Texan accent.

The bar shut down around 3 in the morning. Walking back to the hostel we decided to stop by the beach first to scope it out. The sky was perfectly clear and the tide was low. I walked right down to the water. This was actually the first time I had actually been in the ocean since coming to Costa Rica. The water was nice and warm, the waves were big and loud.

The next morning we woke up early and rented surfboards. The guy at the shop recommended we take a teacher with us, but we wanted to wing it for ourselves. We found an uncrowded portion of the beach and jumped in.

If you’ve never surfed before I will explain the basic concept using my limited experience. The basic idea is to get the wave to push your surfboard forward with you standing on it. Really it’s all about timing. A wave will only push you when it is breaking, otherwise it will just roll right through you. So you position yourself with a good view of the ocean, either lying on the board facing out, or hanging in the water beside the board. When you see a wave that looks like it will break near you, you hop on the board and start paddling as fast as you can away from it. The idea here is to make sure that you’ll get in front of the wave after its broken and not before, and to pick up a bit of momentum. As you start to hear the wave crash behind you and feel it begin to push you, you place your hands on each side of the board and hop up onto your feet. Now once you’re balanced you ride out the wave until it dies out. On the beach we were at this could be anywhere between 5 and 10 seconds of riding. This type of surfing is referred to as riding “White Wash” because you are just getting pushed by the foamy rush of water that forms when a wave breaks. This is different (and a lot easier) then the style surfing you see on TV when the surfer is riding across a wave that is breaking over top of him.

We surfed from 9 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon breaking for about an hour for lunch. After about 20 minutes of surfing in the morning we all realized that the rental guy wasn’t advising us to bring a teacher, but rather to wear a “T-shirt”. This unfortunate miscommunication was responsible for turning my chest into one giant scab. The friction between the wet board and your body is really brutal, and you can imagine how painful it is to slide up and down this board over and over again. It is now four days later and I still have giant scabs the size of fists on my stomach. So if you’re going to be surfing, grab a neoprene shirt, wetsuit or at least a t-shirt.

That night we grabbed some sushi at a beach side restaurant. We we’re all pretty wiped but fully intended to make the most of our weekend. We had a nap for about 2 hours after dinner to get ready for the evening. Greg never recovered from his nap so Asaph and I hit the bars ourselves. The first bar we went to was called “La Barra” it was an outdoor bar with a dance floor and an ape of a woman who guarded the washrooms and banged her giant “tips” jar violently as you waited for the washroom to become free (Tipping in Costa Rica is entirely unnecessary). We met up with the girls wet met from Texas, and went to another bar called “Mambo”. Our night ended with a crowded cab ride to a bar called “Babylon” which was my favorite of the trip. It had a mini ramp out back, where locals were skating bare-foot. Most people were drunk so nothing huge was coming out but there were some really entertaining attempts.

I started bonking pretty quick once we go to “Babylon”, but we stuck it out to the end. The next morning Asaph and I slept in until checkout. Greg woke up early and tried out the surfboard he bought the day earlier. We had a quick lunch at an Italian cafe and hit the bus home, eager for our next surfing excursion.