bahia drake.

This place is stunning! It beats P.to Jimenez hands down! I wish we had come straight here! Well, the place we're staying helps too! It's up on a hill overlooking the Pacific ocean, and it's surrounded by lush vegetation...at night between the birds, the ocean waves, and dogs barking, one may think it's hard to sleep! But I love it here...I don't remember ever seeing a sky with so many stars...I love staring at it at night...also, just by being here you can spot animals everywhere...today we went on a 9 hour hike crossing several rivers (we even swam in one!) till we finally ended up by the beach...there we started making our way back to town, and stopped in the most beautiful place to swim for a bit! Then while we were on a beach we spotted several scarlet macaws! Beautiful birds! Then at another beach we spotted two monkeys! It was so cool how they were going from branch to branch! It was awesome! We started following them like paparazzi trying to take a picture of them, it was ridiculous! Then we saw a big woodpecker, but no way to take a picture of it!
Bahia Drake is a town on a bay (duh) which was first found by James Drake, the British pirate, back in the day...I can tell he has good taste, because this place is charming, although very small! I love it though, it's basic and it can do for a few days, plus it's surrounded by wonderful nature and it's a great place to start trips to the Parque Corcovado, which is where we're going tomorrow on a day tour!
How we got here was an adventure of its own...we took a bus to La Palma, from where we thought there was a bus taking us here...except there was no bus! So our bus left us off at the crossroad, and then we hitchhiked...the first car that stopped was driven by a couple of European tourists...the guy brought up some lame excuses and drove off...a taxi asked us for 40.000 colones (almost 80$!!!) for 35 km of dirt roads...then another taxi asked for 25.000 colones (almost 50$) to take us almost to town, stopping at the big river before town...then a pickup truck pulled over, there was a little kid driving...I bargained with the person in the passenger seat, probably his uncle or dad or something...and I got them to take the three of us all the way here for 15.000 colones total (almost 30$)...which is a lot of money for them, but only about twice as much as the bus, which didn't exist! ahha So we jumped in the back of the pickup and there we went, for almost 2 hours on this very rough road, crossing at least 3-4 rivers! It was an awesome journey, the weather was great and the scenery beautiful! The little kid driving turned out to be 14, the road was super bumpy, dirty, and steep...he did an excellent job with a manual transmission! We were bouncing up and down in the bed of the pickup, sitting next to a tank of gasoline, so our food and clothes ended up smelling like gasoline! haha But the trip was awesome! It made it all better!