La Playa Loca

So this past weekend was spent on a trip to a beach, Playa Brasilito, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica. While I honestly expected the whole weekend to be extremely low-key and uneventful, a series of events beyond our control definitely made it a weekend adventure that I am note likely to soon forget.

The trip was officially set to begin on Friday at noon, when the private bus was scheduled to pick us up from the Institute. But noon turned into one, and one eventually turned into two, and still no bus. After some exasperated phone calls to the agency--all in Spanish, of course-- (exasperation is hard to express in a second language!) we were on our way. Until the bus blew out a tire in a tiny pueblo in the middle of nowhere. Another two hours and much swearing later, we were again in transit.

We arrived to our campsite after dark (ick) only to discover that our site was literally located next to a raw human sewage lagoon. Needless to say, we were not happy campers (haha, I'm so punny). Thankfully, we all managed to go to sleep and hope for the best in the morning.

And better it was! We spent the next two days at the nearby Playa Conchal, thus named because the "sand" is composed entirely of tiny little seashells! The water was warm, clear, and absolutely beautiful. And our adventure back to the beach at night (to skinny-dip, of course) revealed that the water was FILLED with glowing, bioluminescent algae, invisible during the day, that made the water appear to be filled with little glowing stars which would cling to your skin and hair as you moved.

While this picture isn't mine, as I didn't bring my camera along camping, this
is the beautiful Playa Conchal, complete with coral reef on the lower right!

While some of the poverty surrounding the big resorts was scary (hence the open sewage lagoons) and very eye-opening, I think I now finally understand just why it is that people love beaches so very much. Although I doubt the east coast of the states will ever quite be able to live up to this...