After another long week of bus travel and a few connexions, we get to Punta Arenas, departure harbour for the Nicoya peninsula. As we arrive there, we meet a German girl coming right back from Envision. We sit down together in a coffee place while waiting for the boat. She is going back to Santa Teresa where she has been living for 3 weeks already. Olie, her nickname, is a doctor and her life in Germany is a mix of too much work and a daily life that seems to bore her. It seems that she is working in a field which is still pretty sexist. Her trip is a few months long and she stays in one place at a time for a while each time, she searches for herself rather than visit places for tourism. I like her ideas. I have to say moving from place to place all the time is pretty tiring. On the way to get onboard the ship, we meet Jack, he is British and it is his first backpacking trip. He has incredible stories to tell and genuine new eyes on traveling that are particularly enthusiastic and refreshing. All four of us embark on the boat and along the local music in fashion here, salsa and reggaeton, we sail to the peninsula, chatting away. We have a good time and decide to continue the trip together to Santa Teresa.

After another two bus rides, we stay at the same hostel as Olie, and since we are introduced, the owner gives us a good price for staying three nights. A little break in the trip is welcome. The day after all four of us gather in a different hostel for a Silk Yoga session. Santa Teresa is a big street next to a beach with cool hostels, a few hotels, restaurants and bars. It is isn't too crowded and the beach is nice with various wave types for all surfing levels. Life seems to be touristic but not hyperactive. You can eat well if you are ready to pay a good price for it but we can also cook at our hostel so it's perfect to do the one and the other. Hostels, hotels, restaurants and shops all seem to be at the hands of israelians or argentinians. There are also a lot of argentinians that work here. Apparently about ten years ago this place was more or less empty, just a good surf beach where fans have put some roots in and developped the place fromm scratch along the peninsula coast. We don't see many locals and wonder where they live. More inside the land apparently. 

We start the Yoga Silk session by a warm-up including some acro-yoga, a two-people yoga which is both impressing and surprisingly nice to do as a couple. We follow outside with two long bands of silk tied to a tree branch above a thick gymnastic mattress. We all look without exception very gracious, suspended in the air, passing from one figure to another, knotting and unknotting the bands of textile in a happy colourful ballet. Another good time full of joy, laughs and discovery as we bend and extend our body under the watchful eye of our argentinian teacher.

The day after Tom decides on a little treat for himself. We hire a quad for the day. Ours is all the dust on the trails! It is still a nice way to get around in the area though too noisy for me since it is not possible to drive by car in loads of trails of the peninsula. We go along the coast towards a waterfall, going through a little cemetery on a little island you can reach on foot at low tide. It is warm. TO visit the waterfall from above, you have to pay an entrance fee and go down a series of uphanded bridges made of wooden plancks and steel cables above the jungle. It is quite a view. There are groups of tourists going around as well. We bathe in the lowest pool of the waterfalls. Magnificent. Water is of mild temperature there and the place is quite peaceful even with the people all around. In front of us, three young girls spend their time there taking selfies. Posing like this or that with different angles to be more like this or that. They even take a selfie of themselves jumping from a rock into the waterfall pool. Where has the simple pleasure of jumping into the water gone? It seems their phone is grafted to their hands and continuously connected to the rest of world, eyes riveted on their screens. I sigh a little but then we are gone again on a quad, running full speed on the trails to get back.

We find Olie at the bank and take her back with us. Tonight it is drinks on the beacj, dinner at the beach bar and a big game of Peludo. A game Jack brought back with him and that you play with dices. It rapidly becomes an international tournament where we become the representative of our countries of origin. An american fro the hostel where we are staying also joined the game and it becomes a high stake competition between Germany, France, UK, US and Japan. The final will be a feminine one between Germany and Japan. When we leave again, we are well rested and happy. Santa Teresa still is a very touristy place but it has a quiet peace to it that may be due to its tourists, rather surfers than consumers, keeping a bit of authenticity which is quite nice compared to what we had seen so far of the Costa Rica coast.

After taking the boat in the other direction and a bus, we stop in Libreria, just a step on our way to reach Playa del Coco where we are going to see a friend of Tom's who lives there. The hostel at Libreria has a big steel grid to close it off, the place isn't touristy and is next to the bus terminals to go everywhere else. For dinner, we only find a little "soda" place, local restaurant, kind of a fast food, serving only local meals (rce, red beans and other stuff to go with arranged with a particularly hot sauce). During the night, we are woken up by shots being fired. There I realise how the events of last year have deeply changed our way to think. Immediately, the one like the other, we think about a mad terrorist shooting everything that moves. The shots get closer and we here cars driving by fast. Tom wants to go outside, says that if we stay here and someone comes in shooting, we will die. Still we wait. Eventually it stops. We don't sleep very well that night but we get through it. Taking the first bus outside of the city, we learn later from Tom's friedn that it was the countryside festival in Libreria and that sometimes, drunk people start shooting in the air. She will also say that since a few years now, insecurity has grown in Libreria and other big cities of Costa Rica because of the obvious and steep increase of the inequalities, a catastrophic consequence of uncontrolled tourism development without it being an improvement on the conditions for the local population. The problem is known and repeated in an infinite pattern accross the world. Rapid and uncontrolled development, unregulated, create inequalities that once there tend not to disappear. It's really dumb, as humanity, we learn nothing and repeat our mistakes over and over again when it would be so simple to start in good regulated conditions in order to avoid these dire consequences.

Anyhow, we get to Playa del Coco, much cleaner and better organised and obviously richer as well. It is a bit like Manuel Antonio again, but with a bit of restrain which gives a feeling to the city of a kind of classical beachside city from a rich country even when the number of locals here is still pretty low, being higher though than in Santa Teresa. Our backpacks on our backs, the sun abve our heads, we cross the city looking for a place to sleep tonight. It is according the looks of the city, pretty expensive. We still end up finding a place at a reasonable price even if a little above our budget. Heck, there is anything else anyway and it has a swimming pool. Nice room and nice hosts. We could have gone to worse. The evening, we find Clara, Tom's friend, who lives here. She cmes with a friend of hers who has been living in Costa Rica for a few years. We spend a nice evening, drinking cocktails in a tourist bar and chatting. Back at the hostel, we meet a african-american woman who offers us mango and tells us she prays a lot every day. She finds everything awesome. In the street, strolling, we meet a 40-year old French who just got dumped by his girlfriend and is selling roasted coffee beans on the street in a little cart. Life in this beachside city seems more balanced, people working there are locals even if owning a place remains still, with some exceptions, a privilege reserved to foreigners who invested in the area. Our fourth week is reaching its end. Tomorrow we leave for Nicaragua. We are not so far away from the boarder so we might as well go visit a piece of it.