This is long

now that I've got the internet working over here...




It's day 3 but I'll write about it all from the start now. On Fri night/Sat morn we arrived at the airport (LAX) just under 2 hours before departure and our seats on the plane were given away. We argued with the service reps (which there was none of now after we started with almost a dozen). Associates were standing around doing nothing or going home. They offered to put us on the 1:30am flight and give us $200 vouchers and this new flight had a stopover in San Salvador, El Salvador. I was tired and put up a bit of a fight. We thought we were going to miss this new flight as the associates were taking forever getting our vouchers (3 of us didn't even get them) and checking our bags. The supervisor was taking her sweet time getting down to the ticket terminal. We made the plane in all different seats and landed in San Salvador at about 9:15 am. 1 hour flight to San Jose from there. Relatively easy to get out of Santa Maria Airport. We got a shuttle to Avis (about 10 miles away) and upgraded our midsized SUV to a full size Mitsubishi Montero 4wd (2003-pretty pimp ride).



It took about 4 1/2 hours to get from San Jose a bit east of central country, to get to Flamingo. The countryside is beautiful. Alot of green, rolling hills and mountains. Mango and banana trees everywhere. Tons of full size semi's driving on tiny roads. Many, many broken down cars and thousands of tiny repair/dealership places. Cows, horses, goats, and pigs on little lots with small houses. The land was the plentiful thing on the property. Animals wander around freely including livestock. Dogs walk all over the roads and are mistaken for roadkill (they lie on the side of the road with trucks going by and don't move-safe to say plenty of dead dogs too). We get to Flamingo and drive around and get lost. It's a kind of shanty town in parts and hotels and a couple schools and markets on the rest. I later found that these are the outskirts of small towns Brasilito and Matapalo. We wandered around aimlessly and find little shacks where locals and surfers live, but eventually find the road to Matapalo. This is the closest town to Playa Grande, where we were staying. The house was about 6 km from town down an extremely rough road that was fun to tackle in the 4wd but it ended up thrashing the car in the long run. There are a ton of crabs wandering this road. They're bright red and blue and when you confront them they puff up and put up their claws like they're flexing for a fight. The things are about 4-5 inches across for full grown crabs. Also safe to say we squashed quite a few of them inadvertantly before we actually fought. We arrived at the house and Mayia met us with her son Juan Carlos. He's 24 and she had to have been in her mid to late 40's. She showed us the house, which was phat as hell, then took us to the super mercado. Spent about $100 on groceries and cleaned them out of chorizo and steak. $100 gets quite a bit down there, but prices on food stuffs, gas and goods is generally in the same ballpark as the states. We didn't want to cook and it was pretty late so we went down the road from the house where there are some houses and a hotel tucked away and we ate burritos. Pretty traditional ones and not too surprising. The power went off right when we finished the meal and we sat for a bit, and got bit, by mosquitos. But this allowed us to have some needed post traveling drinks. We went back to the house (which i will give you the tour off momentarily), and everyone pretty much crashed but i remembered Oyie and I left our ballcaps at the restaurants. I grabbed a flashlight and walked it back. About a 20 minute walk. I scored the hats and walked back. The cacauphony of birds, frogs, and crabs were loud but both welcoming and comforting.



The house was a palace. Easily a multi million dollar house if you plop it down on a southern California beach. Walking in (pics will follow), there was an entry, a half bath to the left and a spiral staircase up to the master loft that overlooked the living area. King sized bed, master bath, a/c. The kitchen was below this bedroom and just beyond the entry way. There was a large stone counter/island with the rangetop, nice appliances, fully modern. Through an opening to the right was the couches and tv, and dining room. Really high vaulted ceilings made it a large space. Just past the kitchen opposite these living/dining rooms were two other bedrooms, both with beds when you walk in, both had staircases to lofts in each one and a full sized bathroom. The showers spoiled us. It was one of the biggest showers I've ever used. Next to teh living room was the doors to the back and the beach. It was a nice patio with an outdoor bar and sink, a shower with a pretty intricate stucco mural of a woman with the shower coming out of her torso and not her bare breasts! A nice table with umbrella, some beach chairs, some hibiscus, and coconut trees sporadically next to the patio. This leads to some fig-like trees that connect and create a ton of shade just feet from where the tide breaks, then some beautiful beach and ocean. It was damn nice, I gotta say.