¡Vamos a Montar un Caballo!

            We got an early start this morning as Mom and I had booked for ourselves a several hour horseback ride that took off in the early morning. We had a quick breakfast of fruit, said our goodbyes to Dad who was going to spend the morning with Luke and Arden, and walked down to the end of the road where the beach begins and waited until the horses showed up shortly thereafter.

            There were about 4 other people that rode in a group with us and we found out later that two of them were from South Carolina and two were from Virginia. Our guide, who spoke “pequito” (very little) Spanish, matched us with a horse using I’m not sure what scale.  Size maybe? Mom got a pinto horse named, you guessed it, Pinto, and I got a smaller grey horse named Andres which is Spanish for Andrew.  Yep Dad, you just got replaced by a horse for the day J.

Mom and I on Andres and Pinto

            Our guide took us down to the far end of the beach, turned us off onto one of the roads that we followed for a short ways, and then cut up and into the forest.  I guess I should say, we led him because there were three of us experienced riders that tended to consistently take the lead.  Whenever we got to a crossroads we would usually just look back and our guide would just motion us in the right direction. There was me and Mom of course, but the third was a man named Oscar who had apparently been riding horses for many, many years.  We got to hear some pretty cool stories from him about breaking horses, camping out on horseback, horses that he had owned over the year… A real, full blown cowboy for ya.

Our guide (actually up in front for a change!) followed by Oscar on Flecka and Mom on Pinto

            The horse that he rode was a rather fiery little grey named Flecka who ALWAYS just wanted to go, go, go! On several occasions the three of us let the horses go and galloped them up a hill or across a short stretch for a ways.  I’m not sure what exactly our guide thought of all of this since we couldn't really understand anything he said, but he seemed to be ok with it and figured out pretty quickly that we knew what we were doing.

            The tour was about three hours or so and we got to see some really cool scenery.  We stopped off at several lookout points along the way. One in particular that looked out over Samara beach was amazing! The tide today was extremely low and a good amount of the rock reef was jutting out of the water.  A bit more than normal I am told. We rode all the way to Buena Visa Beach the next beach over and then headed back towards Samara.

The view of the far end of Samara Beach

            My hind end is probably going to be so sore tomorrow after that ride as the saddles were far from comfortable, but I had a really fantastic little horse so it was well worth it.  He reminded me a lot of Toby (my horse) actually.  He was fairly calm and level headed, and yet had a lot of get up and go when I asked him for it.  A little jiggy and excitable here and there but all around a horse that I would definitely request again if we decide to go on another ride.

Andres after and awesome ride

            When we got back to the hotel I gave Dad and Luke a call to let them know we were back and then Mom and I just hung out for about an hour or so.  Mom did some reading and got to get some stuff done, and I finally got to check out one of those hammocks! A bike vendor showed up some time in the afternoon selling little meat and cheese turnovers and Mom and I bought several for me and the boys for when they got back

            Dad and Luke showed up a while later laden with one fish from their endeavor into the ocean and pocketfuls of rocks and shells. That’s what you get when you put a Geologist and a Biologist together! Luke, Mom, and I took a short trek around town to get some food shopping done so we could get started on making an early dinner. I got to see some more monkeys when we made a stopover at Luke’s house! Several of them had babies with them! That was cool.

Monkeys with babies!

The plan for the evening was to eat dinner at 6:00 and leave the hotel by 6:30 and drive to Playa Camaronal where apparently the turtles are supposed to come ashore after sunset. We made good time with dinner and headed out right on time before we realized half way there that we didn’t have as much gas in the car as we would have wanted. Gas stations in Costa Rica are nothing like the states in that they are quite rare.

Despite the fact we still haven’t put any gas in the car since we left San Jose and have since done a bit of driving around (in other words, great gas mileage!), Mom was still a little nervous about being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with the baby in toe.  When the low gas light came on that was the end of it and we decided to turn the car around.  Honestly though, that was totally ok and totally worth it in my eyes because I got to see a lesser anteater! Also called the collared anteater. I didn’t get to see it for very long since it was just in passing as we drove by, but still cool none the less!

We’ll do turtles another night when we actually have a safe amount of gas in the car.  Certainly not worth it, especially when we have Arden to think about!