the other beaches (more photos)

so here are a bunch of photos from the beaches we traveled through and to after the course ended. (when in theory i should have been looking for a job).

somehow this is the only picture i have of our house in quepos... i thought about taking some pictures when we first moved in, but never did. this is me the morning of our departure from quepos, still dressed from the night before, packing my bag and preparing to run to the bus station.

our first beach destination: montezuma. the building you can see (yes, the one right on the beach) is the hostel we stayed at. downstairs there was a restaurant and upstairs were the rooms. there was also a balcony area where we could sit and stare out at the ocean. before we found out that we could light fires on the beach.

this is the waterfall we hiked out to see in montezuma. hike is maybe too strong of a word... there was a short path and then we were pretty much walking along the edge of this river/stream and climbing all over the rocks. eventually we came to this waterfall - which was beautiful and spent some time there diving off the rocks into the pool and just kind of chilling.

here we all are, camped out on the beach in front of our fire one night. this was before we had the brilliant idea to dig out these little recliner shapes in the sand and cover them with the sarongs. we also had progressively bigger fires. as you do.

it may not look like much, but this was our super great snorkeling spot at playa ocotal. there was one beach (play ocotal) and another nearby beach (the name of which escapes me now) and between them was this rocky bit sort of jutting out into the ocean. there was this little sort of sheltered area where we got in. we saw a blowfish, some other crazy fish i don't know the names of, some stingrays... all very cool.

our last beach destination. since we didn't really spend that much time lying on the beach while we were at playa del coco (we were snorkeling and tooling around on the scooter), i spent a good deal of time in tamarindo trying to top off my tan. and here is one of the fabulous sunsets that finished off a day at the beach.

so very soon i'll be headed back to costa rica. though i'll be living in san jose and might not be able to get to the beach as often as last time, i'm still looking forward to it. i know everyone's been saying how mild the winter has been here in the northeast, but i've been freezing since i got back. in fact i'm shivering as i type. looking forward to more temperate climates. i may put up one more set of photos before i go... the couple days in the mountains and the volcano. but we'll see how the rest of my to do list goes...