And away we go...
The air-train to Newark Intl. Airport.
Killing time in Newark. Sadly no pictures of one of the many TGI Friday's we hung out in along the way. I got some awesome fairy drink and Kyle got pancakes, as it was around 10am.
These next few pictures are just me enjoying Kyle enjoying the flying experience. He hadn't flown in forever and so it was more or less all new to him. Which made that part of the trip way more fun for me because flying sucks. Though I do like hanging out in airports. The nice ones are just like weird malls that you can't leave. And because I'm stuck there I can justify the absurd prices at airport bars.
Because we got to San Jose so late (flights delayed), we couldn't find a hostel and ended up in what turned out to be a really nice hotel, and still only $20/person. This towel swan was pretty awesome. I'm trying to figure out how to do this at home but make it a big weiner with a set of balls.
The next few are from various parts of our 5 and a half hour bus ride from San Jose to the border. The bus was oversold so we spent the first three hours sitting on the floor, which kind of blew, mostly because the driver alternated between hauling ass on the paved roads to creeping over the dirt roads, which is kind of jostling if you're sitting on the floor. But as a plus, you're allowed to drink on the bus down there, which is something they need to work on in America. I've been thrown out of bus STATIONS for drinking, nevermind the bus itself.
This is the dock in Changuinola where we got our boat out to the bocas. Other than little kids trying to talk me into buying them sodas for their "help" (read: following me around and trying to carry my bag) this was a nice relaxing stop on a long day. The rest are from that boat trip.
The man of the day. When we finally met up with him at the hostel, he was eating a giant shitty tuna sub he made himself, and some kind of bug juice. That's only funny for people who know Greg, so all the imaginary people who read this that aren't from Albany, sorry.
The next day we went on a "tour" lead by some girl from our hostel. Part way we all started to suspect that she wasn't as qualified as she made herself out to be. This REALLY bothered Greg, and he would start ranting about it out of nowhere for the rest of the trip. I mean don't get me wrong, he was right, she didn't know shit, but for a few bucks gas money we got to swim with Dolphins, snorkle around, and hang out on an awesome beach. Could be worse.
These are mangrove trees, which grow all over the water down there. They're really awesome and remind me of the trees in that Dr. Seuss book with Bartholomew and the stilts and whatnot. Yeah, that's all.
I could have sworn I took a picture of Greg doing his patented "look at me holding a ____ (insert weird creature here)" pose with a starfish, but no dice I guess. Bummer.
The following are from the walk to Red Frog beach/hanging out on Red Frog beach. Awesome beach that we went back to later in the week.
Hammock roof deck was probably my single favorite thing about Heike. I'd be pretty content living up there.
Some kind of bullshit homemade sunburn remedy that was suggested to Greg. Just baking soda and water. Shockingly it just dried on him and made him itchy as shit. But it did make for a fairly comical five minutes for Kyle and I.
One of the many stray dogs on the island. Unlike other places with lots of strays, most of these were pretty well fed and friendly. The second picture is of a dog that was so well fed, that he turned down my little raisin sandwich thing I offered him. Which was a serious burn because a) he's a fucking stray dog, who is he to turn his nose up at ANY free food and b) Greg and Kyle were making fun of my raisin sandwiches as just another bootleg vegan non-real-people-food snack, and the dog turning it down didn't help my case any.
Greg's dorky sport sandals.
This girl who was on our fake tour tipped us off about these. They were little plastic bags full of frozen coconut milk with cinnamon mixed in. I know that doesn't sound like a great combination, but they were really awesome. And since some lady sold them out of the back of her house for $0.15, Greg was good enough to stock up on them for the both of us. (Kyle was too wary to try one. His loss.)
My bed/our room @ Heike.
The next day Greg tricked me into going on a goddamned THREE HOUR fishing trip. He and Kyle really wanted to go because apparently it's a good spot to catch barracuda, and since I didn't have anything else to do, I decided to go with them. But that was when Greg was saying ONE hour, not THREE. It ended up being an alright time, even though the guy they rented poles and lures from kind of screwed them and gave them the wrong equipment. The big fisherman Greg managed to catch a hearty branch with seaweed, and they both caught some weird fish, in the pictures below, which got thrown back, much to the delight of the shitty vegan taking pictures. Kyle ended up catching a barracuda, but it was too small to keep as well. It was strong enough to break his pole though. We were kind of worried he might have to pay for it, but our boat driver guy, Fransisco just pulled up to the pole rental guy's shack, threw the shit up on the dock and bounced, because he knew the guy screwed us in the first place. Solid dude. He ended up becoming Greg's surrogate Panamanian dad, as the two of them went on an all day excursion a few days later, and they really bonded. As much as they could neither speaking the others language at least.
This particular frog can only be found on this one tiny island we stopped on. As in that's the only place in the entire world where they live. And the island was about the size of Crossgates, which is this mall back home. Which is to say, not very big. So even though I'm generally not that interested in Greg's frog shenanigans, it was pretty cool knowing I saw something most of the rest of the world will never ever see.
These are all from that same island where Kyle and I hung out and swam around while Greg went searching for more frogs.
Hammock deck round two.
The one thing that was a pretty big let down about the trip was the food. And it wasn't just because I was vegan, most of the local food was pretty shitty across the board. This was the one place we ate at that was any good, and this was Kyle's chili type thing, which he said was awesome. And then may or may not have given him diarrhea.
I think this was the town hall. Maybe.
Streetview of Hostel Heike, our home for the majority of our trip. That's Moon Man's van parked out front. He's a story unto himself, which I'll write about later.
These are from our aborted trip to Elmirante, that ended in quasi disaster after not meeting up with Greg. That too will be another story later on.
After that didn't work out, we ended up back at...
One of the bars we ended up hanging out at a few times in the second half of the week was build out onto the water, and had a big circular deck built around a small wrecked ship. There were signs saying swim at your own risk, which we all did, despite the fact that no one else did. Few things sweeter than diving into the ocean and then climbing out to awesome cheap beer on the deck. Our initiative lead to a ton of people diving in the next night, to the point that the owner bugged out because our cannonballs were soaking the lamer customers. Boo hoo. And my night was made complete by a barfight breaking out that ended with both dudes in the water. Again, more on that later.
Yeah, this picture came out waaaayyy more questionably gay than it seemed at the time. Can't remember this dude's name, some Dutch kid we hung out w/ a bunch, good dude. We'd all been swimming at the above mentioned bar, hence no pants. Seriously.
One of the ways the little kids on the islands make money is by finding frogs and other animals and letting gringo's take pictures of them for a quarter. Pretty sure the parrot wasn't wild, but cool nonetheless.
Back at Red Frog.
We found this crazy crab by the payphones. This is the patented pose of Greg's that I was talking about with the starfish. The thing was ornery as shit, and ended up fighting one of the stray dogs, which was really sweet to watch. The dog kept bugging out and barking and trying to bite it, and the crab just snapped the shit out of the dogs muzzle with its giant claw.
The two dudes in this picture with Kyle are our boys Tacha and Jaime. Lots of the guys on the island will be all buddy buddy with you so you'll hire them to take you places on boats, take you to see shit, etc etc. But if you're not tossing out cash, they don't give a fuck about you. And that's not saying for a second that they're shitty dudes or anything, it's just the way that part of the economy works, same way hot bartenders will pretend to actually give a fuck about you so you tip better. The point is, at first when these guys were talking us up and whatnot about what kind of rap music was cool in the states or whatever, we figured that was the case. But then we ended up hanging out with them a bunch of nights in a row, and Tacha tried to hook me up with some girl he knew, but no dice. Anyway, they ruled, and I wrote all this because this is like the one picture I actually remembered to take of the various kids we met there.
Leaving the Bocas, bummer.
This was the border crossing between Panama and Costa Rica. The dude who helped us out with where to go as far as getting passports stamped and whatnot on the way over told us that it was a "gift" to Panama from Baltimore in eighteen-something. Which was definitely the last time it was repaired. There were huge planks missing in the walkway the whole thing shook when tractor trailers drove over it. Speaking of the guy who told us that, he only had one leg and had figured out this system of sitting his stump on a bicycle which he kind of pedaled/kind of pushed with his good leg, and it worked so well that we didn't even notice he only had one leg for at least the first five minutes. Totally sweet guy, his being able to speak almost perfect english made dealing with the border 100x easier. Could have definitely used him when the cocksucker border guards in Panama were breaking my balls about getting a printout of my flight itinerary when we were crossing back into CR. He also had two sisters who were probably the two hottest girls we saw the entire trip. Like absolute tens, and sexy exotic tens at that. Goddamn.
Speaking of...not tens...we were hanging out in this bar at the border waiting for our bus, where I was enjoying the dollar Imperial's and trying to teach the other two to play poker, these girls came up because they all wanted to take pictures with Kyle and his tattoos. They were probably about the four thousandth people to ask about them/want to touch them, because not many people down there have full sleeves, or crazy brightly colored tattoos in general. The second girl REALLY liked Kyle.
I have no clever caption for this, but it's one of my favorite pictures of all time. It's too bad she's not standing up in the picture because you can't really grasp how comically large her boobs in relation to her body, because she was probably all of four feet tall, with like double D hooters.
Awesome bus seat graffiti.
One of the eight thousand cats at the hostel we stayed at our last night in San Jose.
How fucking gross is Greg's sunburn/peeling back?
Getting to the airport at 4am sucks, but I still don't get why Kyle decided to sleep the 15 mins before our flight boarded.
When we left Laguardia, a gypsy cab guy came up to us and asked if we were going to midtown. He seemed kind bummed when he found out we were going to Bedstuy, but he was like "well I'll take you there in a limo." I told him we didn't need a limo, just a regular old cab, but it was all he had and he'd do it for $35, which is cheaper than a yellow cab anyway. So we got to ride back in style, which was pretty ridiculous. But a sweet end to an awesome trip.
