Surf is Always Up

There's something so poetic about surfing.  

It's such a perfect sport.  Ugh, I can't even really call it a sport with a straight face.  Professional surfers are amazing athletes, but it's so far away from a competitive activity as most people can get from.  It's a zen activity, right up there with yoga.  It's meditative and quiet and rhythmic and  really quite spiritual.  It's also incredibly hard.  I suck at it, but I love doing it.  I'll get out there and get spanked by waves for two hours before hobbling in looking like a prune with my sinuses as clear as they could get and some nice abrasion from the multiple sweeps of the ocean floor that I've felt necessary.   

I know of no other sport that requires so little:  a board.  Some wax.  A rash guard.  Sigh, if you must insist on cold-water surfing, then yes, you need a thick wetsuit and boots and gloves and a hood, but, ugh, who would want to do that.

And also....you need a perfect wave.  Which, the beaches in Costa Rica are full of.

Nosara, where all the lovely yoga retreats are, has some great beaches.  We went from Nosara to Playa Negra and never saw a bad break.  The roads were amusingly poor to get from one beach to the other...they are more like trails and impassible during the rainy season.  Still, we had to cross three or four streams that crossed the road.  As much as I hate the idea of an SUV, it's a good idea to have something with 4 wheel drive and probably one of the very few places on earth where an SUV is actually useful.  

Nosara is a little crowded, but mostly with ultra-wealthy people there for a yoga retreat and a cleanse.  We found places to do walk-in classes and spent an afternoon breathing and stretching in the sea breeze.    

Oddly...I ran up to a beach vendor at Nosara thinking he would have ices or Popsicles or something in his cooler.  Nope.   Ceviche.  As much as I love raw seafood, I just am not craving it while sitting in the hot sun.

The most consistently amazing breaks are at Tamarindo, aka Tamagringo.  While most of the beaches here are secluded with rustic, washed-out roads, the streets were paved over here, leading to a huge influx of tourism and condos and dance clubs and pizza joints, and a nice man on a bicycle offered to sell me pot while he was cruising the beach.  Surf school and adventure camps line the strip, and the crowds that flock there have taken inspiration from the sloth.   Ahem, included lovelies like these:

Ignore the trash on the beach.  Or better yet, throw it out.  Walk down to the far end of the beach where the estuary is, and the thumping bass of the DJ starts to fade and you once again get a perfectly surfable beach.   

It's truly a gorgeous place, but one of the few spots where you will have to fight for a wave.

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Oh~  I almost forgot.  I found the most perfect beach bar in the world, I swear- Lola's at tiny Playa Avellanas.  It was perfect- comfy solid wooden chairs, hammocks and loungers all angled to take in the sunset while sipping your margarita and eating your ceviche (which is pretty much sashimi!) under the shade of mangrove trees and giant umbrellas.  Aas soon as the first mosquito bites, the bar closes down for the night.  It's one of the most blissful spots I've found.  

la playa

Oh, damn I love the beach so much.

I'm always kind of hesitant to actually go as I know I will lose the willpower to get anything done at all.  I become sloth-like, barely able to move from one spot, occasionally raising my head to sleepily smile and attempt to get a straw into my mouth so I can have a hands-free sip.  Mind you, mid-days are usually way too hot for me to be at the beach, as I am slightly darker than ghostly pale even in August and I just don't tolerate hot sun that well.

On these near-private black-sand beaches, there is very little shade.  Locals hang up sheets and towels to create shade in the trees high up on the beach, but I found the ants to be a bit too aggressive.  So i wait patiently for 3pm, and have a good couple hours to bask and swim before watching an amazing sunset.  Or, because I've felt so lazy that I've needed to get up at sunrise, I will head out for an early-morning swim on a section of the beach where, let's say that the privacy dictates that clothing might just be optional.

The most zen-like experience for me is to let the waves wash over my feet until I'm forced to move due to the eroded pit I'm in.  I love the tides, the water, the sand.

I sit or walk the beach until the mosquitoes drive me in.  It doesn't take long.  I got fairly covered with bites pretty much every evening.  I just wasn't fast enough.

I found a totally charming and welcoming place to call home for a few days.  Open-air dining, good fresh seafood, a lovely room,  and the surf crashing in the distance.  It was secluded- the nearest town was quite small, and rutted dusty dirt roads would take you from one beach to the next.  But why would you want to leave this one?

Munda Millo eco lodge is really one of the nicest places I've stayed in.  It's run by a Dutch couple who lovingly build and decorate gorgeous private cabinas in an eccentric, world-traveler style.