Our plan to get our circadian rhythm aligned with the daylight hours seems to be working. We are having no trouble getting out of bed when the sky lightens at 5:45AM and we’ve been in bed reading by 8:30PM each night with lights out by 9PM. We don’t have WiFi coverage in the bedroom, which is turning out to be a hidden benefit. My habit in Austin is to spend an hour or so in bed at night digesting the news of the day and the Internet in general before I switch to reading a book. Without the Internet rabbit hole available to me in bed I’m having an easier time getting to sleep and my brain is not churning on whatever topic I just read about.
Day two of Spanish class was todo bien! Maria, who is our profesora on Tuesdays and Thursdays, does not speak to us in English at all, but she is quite patient with us. Today we got started on learning the masculine feminine rules and exceptions and also got into some adjectives. We were a little more spent at the end of this class than we were yesterday with Ana.
All in all, from the time we woke up until the end of Spanish class felt well choreographed and we think it will be easy to keep our routine Monday through Thursday.
We stopped at Maxi Pali on the way home to buy a cookie sheet, which will double as a serving tray, some index cards to make Spanish flash cards, and a bag of ice. I was particularly pleased with my checkout experience because I indicated that I wanted to add a bag of ice onto my purchase… “y una bolsa de hielo, por favor.” The lady nodded and I got my ice. Chalk up another victoria pequena!
Jill and I decided we were ready to make our first foray into one of Costa Rica’s natural areas after Spanish class. We are going to try to hit as many of the waterfalls as we can during our stay. Today’s destination was Los Chorros Cataratas (waterfalls). We popped by the house, scarfed down some lunch, filled our water bottles, threw some sunscreen and towels into our day pack and we were off! Los Charros is about 15 miles from our house, but the Waze lady was telling us it was a 45 minute drive. We now know why it’s a 45 minute drive. We traversed an area where there are lots of sugar cane fields and there were probably only about 15 minutes out of the 45 that we were not on narrow roads behind a tractor pulling trailers full of freshly harvested sugar cane to the processing facility. The roads were in good shape and the only dirt road we were on was the last quarter mile to the Los Charros trailhead. An interesting phenomenon we’ve noticed in Costa Rica is that the fence posts tend to be living plants. There’s a common houseplant in the US that apparently is native to this area and grows dead straight and is perfect for fence posts. I’ll have to figure out what they’re called.
I’d like to take a moment and heap praise on my wife. If you’ve ever driven in a foreign country it can be a little tense. Jill has been the perfect co-pilot. We are communicating exceptionally well in the car, which is super important in Costa Rica because none of the roads are labeled and some of the turns indicated in Waze are suprise on 270-degree hairpins with no shoulder on one side and a precipitous dropoffs on the other side that you need to take at about 5 mph to avoid dying. Jill gives me a running commentary of what’s coming up and she also helps me figure out when the coast is clear to swing around the sugar cane tractor trailers. She’s killing it! We only had one near catastrophe today and it was my fault. I was busy backing up down a tight street to allow a Mack truck swing onto the same street from a right turn. I was so proud of myself for executing that maneuver flawlessly that I got a little cocky pulling across the intersection afterward and cut it a little close on the cross traffic. Disculpe!
When we got to Los Charros we were met by a nice man named Luis at the trailhead. Luis guided us to our parking spot and pointed us to the trailhead. We were a little perplexed as to Luis’ role in this enterprise, but we just went with it – more on that later. We locked our car following the golden rule of not leaving anything in our car worth stealing. This was also our first outing leaving our passports behind (we haven’t gotten clarity on whether we really need them with us, but we both have pictures of our passports and immigration stamps on our phones and I have a hard time believing we are going to get thrown in the slammer for not having them).
The hike into Los Charros was about 20 minutes on a good trail. Going in was easy, mostly because we descended about 700 feet. There were two fantastic waterfalls. This was the first time I’ve taken Jill on a hike where she needed to get her feet wet. I’ve been drawn to splashing through mountain streams since I was about 14 years old . I was secretly hoping Jill would be game for tromping up the stream to get to the waterfalls and she came through like a champ 🙂 She also got to cross a hanging bridge today!
The two waterfalls were fantastic and even though it’s a popular tourist destination there was not one spec of litter anywhere.
We spent about 30 minutes looking at the falls and started our trek back up the canyon. Not nearly as easy as the descent, but the temperature was nice and we weren’t any hurry.
When we got back to our car, I asked Luis where we pay the access fee for the park and he said there was no fee, but he accepted donations. We gave Luis 10,000 Colones (about $16) and he was delighted. When we got home, Jill researched a little further and here’s the story on Luis. There used to be a government owned and maintained road to Los Chorros park, but it was wiped out in a landslide and the government hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. The only available ingress/egress is now through Luis’ property. He has generously allowed the Los Churros visitors to park on his land and transit by foot to the trailhead. Luis doesn’t charge anything, but is happy to accept donations as you leave. We think the world needs more people like Luis.
We made it back to our shanty by 3PM and I made Jill a well earned cup of afternoon coffee and sat down to type this update. Tonight we are going to go to Pizzeria Finca for dinner. According to TripAdvisor Pizzeria Finca is the number one rated of 22 restaurants in Atenas. It has 3 parking spots. We will report back on our experience.
Tomorrow morning at 8AM we are going with Magda, our landlord, to the feria (weekly farmer’s market). We are both looking forward to that.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 
This is more than a vicarious experience for us. Your sugar cane driving is akin to D winding up in a vineyard behind a tractor at dusk. One of the biggest wins of my life was keeping him in the box as darkness fell and we had no idea where our tiny hotel was.
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