Manzanillo bike trip

 

Today felt like our first real day of vacation. :-)  We weren't on a plane or a bus or waiting for a plane or bus. haha  We woke up kinda late, had a leisurely breakfast, said goodbye to Erin and Shannon who were continuing down to Panama, and then set out on our $5 bicycle rentals to find a hotel for the next two nights since Banana Azul was all booked up. It was such an amazing beautiful ride its so hard to describe. We started out with the goal of going down to Punta Uva but were enjoying the ride so much that we decided to continue down to Manzanillo. (side note - Tyler is looking up how to say "fart" in spanish, apparantly you have to say 'throw a fart', which if you're interested, haha, is "me tiro un pedo", he is cracking me up right now. He just ran the spanish through a translator and it said "I shot a fart", hahaha omg. its been a loooong day). Ok anyway back to our ride..

We bicycled down the main road here, which was an adventure in itself since most of it was either really rough and unpaved or full of muddy potholes or huge puddles; it took us both beside the ocean and through the jungle. At Punta Uva we stopped at the beach, which is one of the most gorgeaous beaches I've ever seen, SO warm and clear, and walked about a mile down it. We were feeling pretty good and the weather was great so then we decided to ride further south to Manzanillo. This part of the road took us mostly through jungle and it was so awesome, at one point we heard monkeys, they were super loud but not near us, and the sounds of the birds were almost deafening. It was stifling hot too so we were super happy whenever we could fly down a hill or when it would rain a little, it felt so good. :-)  In Manzinillo we had a really good lunch of fish, salad, rice, beans and fried plantains and I had a delicious fresh passion fruit juice. yummm  On the way back while we were stopped for a moment Tyler noticed something on the side of the road so we both looked closer and found this amazing plant that was closing its leaves whenever rain hit it. It doesnt sound like much me telling you but it was crazy! It closed its leaves so fast we almost thought it was a bug or something. We got it on video to show you here.  You can also hear the birds and jungle noises.  Pretty cool.

So on the way back we managed to find a new hotel for tonight and tommorrow night which is nice and a good deal. Its called Isla Inn and is on Cocles Beach. Its not as nice as Banana Azul but meets our needs.  After we booked it we continued on back to Banana Azul to return the bikes and pick up our bags. We had riden all in all about 16 miles! haha, so we were thrilled when the Banana staff invited us to jump in their pool. They also have a pretty good tours reservation desk there so we took the opportunity to book two things that we wanted to do in the next two days; a 4 hour guided wildlife jungle hike through Cahuita reserve and an all day class 3-4 river rafting trip down the Rio Pacuari. The rafting company is also going to drop us off at our next location we plan to stay at, Volcan Arenal.

Tyler wanted me to add something about "leafy bug".  When we got back from dinner, which was really delicious authentic italian pizza set to reggae music, there was a weird looking bug on our door.  After looking closer we realized it looked exactly like a leaf with the veins and everything.  Very strange.