Three ¨Bitches¨ and an old Bag

First off, I gotta say thanks to everyone and your well wishes about the bag.
And second...

THEY FOUND IT!!!!!

No shit! I spent some time over at a neighboring hostel that night, and Cheri, the desk gal from Kentucky who is bilingual helped me make the hours worth of phone calls to the Tracopa bus company. We´d explain the situation, and they´d say to call back in 10 or 20 minutes and finally a guy named Jose yelled across the garage and said ¨We got it¨.

Sweet! So, there is no way to ship it back to Quepos as they don´t have a Quepos stop. Tracopa would actually not come anywhere near Quepos except the main highway is missing a few sections due to mudslides. But I can pick it up at the office on Wednesday on my way out of CR. So assuming all things go well, I´ll have my old bag back. Yahoo!

It´s been interesting not having the day bag, I´ve used sexy plastic bags tied to my belt. Kinda fun to simplify actually. Missed the hat though, so had to get a CR hat. But otherwise, I´m just winging it. Who needs a tour book?

So that´s the bag, what´s up with the ¨Bitches¨ Craig? That´s rude...

Nope. I´m making a reference to the book ¨The Beach¨, which the main character Richard meets a Scottish guy in the first chapter, and due to his thick accent, Richard thinks the guy is saying ¨You gotta find the Bitch¨, instead of ¨Beach¨...

Well, here in Manuel Antonio, I´ve found 3 beaches... really, they are all right next to each other, but saying 1 beach isn´t accurate. Yesterday I went to the public beach, paid a guy named Pedro, who supposedly surfed in a some music videos, to teach me to surf. He did a good job, I stood up many times, and really had a good time. Then enjoyed the fact that the sun was shining, and it started raining, and I was in the ocean. I took some amusing pics that I´ll post when I get home since there´s no way to access the computers where I am.

Today I headed to Manuel Antonio National Park. It´s only opened limited hours, I guess because of the crazy rains the last few weeks. But in 4 hours I hike the cool trail that goes around the Catedral Point. If you google the park online you´ll see a pic of the point. And behind it are 2 beaches that are separated by maybe 30 feet of palm trees. So I enjoyed both sides, swam a bit, climbed on rocks, saw some 2 foot iguanas... and the Monkeys.

Ahhhh, the white face monkeys. They know exactly what food looks like. Food bags. Plastic bags. They are not interested in water bottles or sandles. But they race out of the trees the SECOND you walk away and raid your stuff. It´s pretty amusing once you realize it´s going on, as you watch people wrestle with Monkeys to get their bags back. I had to bring my stuff into the ocean with me or it would have been gone.

This inspired me to find a day bag that is also a dry bag, so you could swim and keep it with you in places where monkeys, or people, might go for your stuff. It might already exist, if not, I´ll see what I can do.

Tomorrow, I´m going on a crazy Canyoning trip for my Bday! Woooooooooo!
Hopefully we can find some Karaoke or Dancing too, but given how things are here, we will see.
It´s going to be interesting to celebrate with a bunch of strangers I won´t see again...

... but fear not, we´ll have a belated bday bash when I get back to LA. After all, Mic´s need be rocked.

Thanks again for the well wishes on the missing bag,
Craigo