Monteverde - Easy Come, Easy Go

After Ometepe Island it was time to move on to Costa Rica and Monteverde where I intended to test my boundaries. I ended up testing even more than that.

We left early, as we always seem to do, from Ometepe Island in order to catch a ferry and then a bus or two to the Costa Rican border. The trip was painless enough, though getting through Nicaraguan immigration was a little bit of a pain in the butt. To counter that, getting into Costa Rica was pretty freaking easy. It was so easy, in fact, that one of the people in our group got in without even getting her passport stamped. About thirty minutes after we left the border towards Monteverde, we were stopped by police who wanted to check our passports. The person in our group who didn’t have a Costa Rican entry stamp and a few random Dutch were forced off the bus in order to return to the border and go through the immigration process. Over the next half-hour, we ended up getting stopped two more times by the Costa Rican police for passport checks. It seems to me that they could save a lot of money and just check people’s passports at the border like every other country does, but who am I to say?

We arrived in Monteverde late in the afternoon and just hung around until it was time for dinner. We took cabs to a restaurant in a nearby town and I had a steak with chimichuri that just made me miss Argentina that much more. I also had my first Pilsen, which has turned out to be my favorite Costa Rican beer. After dinner, we went back to the hotel to drink because we still had quite a bit Flora de Caña rum leftover from Ometepe.

There was a table and some chairs outside of my room at the hotel, and it was still quite early, so the usual suspects gathered outside of my room to drink. At around 10:15 pm, one of my roommates, the Englishman – it’s ALWAYS the fucking Englishmen – came out to shout at us that we were too noisy and he was trying to sleep. Then he slammed the door. It didn’t quite close, so he had to come back to close it again. It didn’t help that he came out in his underwear and he is about 60 years old and 70 pounds overweight. This produced images that none of us will forget no matter how hard we try.

Being the nice people that we are, we moved the party into the girls’ room next door. Eventually, the “bad kids” left in the order in which they traditionally leave and two of us were left outside drinking and smoking cigarettes. As she was passing out, I saw one of my friends in an unconventional way (don’t worry that you don’t understand the reference – this is just to remind myself of the incident in the future) and the two remaining characters in this drama spent a few hours outside enjoying the rum and each other’s company.

Afterwards, instead of facing the wrath of my overweight-scantily clad-anger management needing roommate, I crashed in the girls’ room since they had an extra bed in there. After seeing some other things that I won’t soon forget and a quick game of Easy Come, Easy Go (again, probably not what you’re thinking but it’s still a reference I’ll remember in the future), I fell asleep around 3 am. We had a big day of ziplining the next day, so I had to get up at six and head over to my room to shower and get ready for that. That’s what I really wanted to write about regarding Monteverde, anyway, so I’ll get to that in the next post.

(It occurs to me as I write this that I probably have no photos to go along with this article. I’ll go ahead and apologize now and maybe I’ll just throw up some random photos from the trip to make up for it.)