Cato strikes again

This time he waited until I resurfaced from a mild and utterly routine ducking before sucker punching me right between the eyes. Sneaky bastard.

P.S. - hey, my eyebrows have gone blond!

You say banano, I say banana

In Costa Rica, the fruit we norteamericanos call a banana, they call a banano. Apparently the name (and gender) varies by country across the Spanish-speaking world. Whatever you call them, bananas are as close to a staple food as a fruit can be for an unemployed surfer in rural Central America. They've got a lot of calories to help with the paddling, plenty of potassium to keep the muscle cramps at bay, and they are cheap cheap cheap.

30 cents worth of bananas

The produce truck sells bananas for five cents each. It's like they grow on trees or something.

Grocery shopping in the sticks

One of the downsides of not having a motor vehicle in Guiones is the difficulty and expense of keeping stocked with groceries. In town, there is a tiny organic-food store and a slightly larger "mini." Slightly out of town, past the only local nightclub, La Banana, is the closest "super," which is bigger and cheaper than the mini, but not by much. I haven't tried the organic store yet; I've assumed - maybe erroneously - that the prices there are astronomical, and it's a little further out of my way than the mini. I mean to investigate it sooner or later. But I've done plenty of shopping at the mini and the super.

The mini is as conveniently located as anything in town can be. The footpath I take into town spits me out right in front of it. But it's still a 10-minute walk home, so my purchases are necessarily limited to how much I can stand to carry while I hike back along that footpath through the woods, usually at around 1pm in the height of the day's heat.

A trip to the super involves borrowing a fixed-gear beach cruiser-style bicycle from the Surf Simply bike rack and making a very hot and unpleasant uphill slog on the dirt road out of town while all manner of SUVs, trucks, and motorcycles roar past, kicking up Lawrence of Arabia-grade clouds of dust. But once or twice a week it just has to be done. The limiting factor of my purchases at the super is how much weight and volume I can carry in the bike's basket.

There's also a produce truck that makes a stop by my apartment Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I think we're on their route because Sarah, the Surf Simply chef, buys all her produce from them every week, but several of my yogi neighbors and I have taken to buying fruits and veggies from them too. The truck has a wider selection of produce than the stores and their prices are much lower to boot, but you do have to hang around waiting for them to show up. The truck is not refrigerated, by the way - it's actually pretty sweltering inside. You can't really stock up because the produce goes bad pretty quickly. You climb up the rickety makeshift steps formed by three overturned plastic crates, pick your stuff, give it to the guys to weigh it, and pay whatever they tell you. Yesterday I got the following items for under $10 total:

• 1 dozen eggs
• 1 pineapple
• 1 mango
• 5 bananas
• 1 bunch celery
• 2 yellow onions
• 9 oz mushrooms
• 1 bunch basil

Cheaper than the Whole Foods at home, and delivered (almost) to my door!

It's Friday!

Party party party party fun fun fun fun.

Alone again, naturally

My dad left here for home this morning, a couple weeks earlier than originally planned. While he was doing his morning stretches on his second day here, something that wasn't supposed to pop in one of his knees did. After a few days of ice packs and ibuprofen it became clear that it wasn't going to heal by itself, so he made the call to go back to D.C. early and get treatment there, which I suspect will involve an MRI and some surgical tinkering. Bummer.

But it was still good to get to spend a few days with him, and I think that aside from the physical discomfort and the boredom of being apartment-bound, he enjoyed his stay. I got to show off my vocabulary of roughly 10 Spanish words, and he got to eat the best chili (possibly the only chili) in all of Costa Rica, courtesy of yours truly. And he did see some monkeys. Everybody loves monkeys.

So now I am once again living the solitary life in my apartment. I don't mind. It's nice to be able to spend as much time as I want surfing or reading books without having to worry that anybody or anything needs my attention. I can just exist. It's quite tranquil. Four to five hours a day of surfing keeps my body tired and my day full. I fill the rest of the time buying groceries, cooking, eating, reading, talking to Holly over Skype, and applying sunscreen.

My next visitor is Holly, who comes to visit in three weeks. I am pretty excited to see her and to have some adventures together here. I'm hoping to make some big strides in my surfing by then so I can show off. Chicks dig surfing prowess.

Real improvement comes from real instruction

Having spent around 60 hours in the water so far on this trip, I've not only done a lot of surfing myself, I've witnessed a good bit of surfing by others of various skill levels. As a beginner, it's often pretty humbling to realize that seriously that little kid is that much better than me? but it's also pretty cool that I now have enough experience to look at some of the other beginners out there and recognize what they're doing right and wrong. Aha, I think, you nosedived that time because you weren't going fast enough. Or, you missed that one because you tried to pop up a second too soon. Watching other people make mistakes that I've made myself reinforces the knowledge that I've acquired and the mistakes that I've corrected or am still trying to correct in my own surfing.

Of course, my critical monologue is strictly internal. It's not my place to be offering unsolicited advice. What drives me crazy is that quite often there is somebody present whose job is to offer advice and criticism - a paid surf instructor! If a novice like me can see someone fall off their board and think you lost your balance because you put both arms in front of you instead of keeping your leading arm back over the rail, then a professional instructor should have that and more to say.

Sadly, the impression I get is that many surf instructors in this world are really paid to assist rather than instruct - to push beginners into waves rather than teach them how to catch waves themselves. And I guess there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what the student wants. Some people undoubtedly just want to have a fun couple of hours, where fun means "standing up on a surfboard by any means necessary long enough for somebody to take a picture." And that's fine. I just think it's a shame that there are probably plenty of people who would enjoy and benefit from actual instruction who don't realize that they aren't getting it from their so-called instructor.

One of the reasons that I esteem the Surf Simply coaches so highly is because of their relentless focus on technical fundamentals, constructive critique, and real improvement. If your hands are off to one side, they will tell you. If you're exhibiting the dreaded poo stance, they will pause the video and show you.

And the passion for true teaching and real results makes Alex Wilkinson, my current instructor, worth his weight in gold, too. Aside from coaching me once a week on an official basis, Alex is constantly giving me feedback whenever he sees me out in the water. A few days ago I was surfing on my own when I saw somebody waving me in from the beach. When I went ashore to investigate I found Alex, in the middle of shooting some video footage for some other project, waiting for me. "You're looking down at your board when you pop up," he said. "Look all the way down the wave when you pop up. I don't ever want to see you looking at the board!" Two days later, I came in from an afternoon surf and ran into Alex again. "I can see you're looking down the waves now - much better!" he said. Real improvement!

Monkeys

A troupe of monkeys decided to cross the road right in front of my house. Watch for babies!

Mission accomplished. The new tree is soooooo much nicer than the old tree.

A brief intermission

After 15 consecutive days of surfing, today I didn't surf at all. The last few days the waves have been really, really small, and today they disappeared completely. If the forecast is to be believed, we won't have any real waves again until Friday.

As tragedies go, this one is fairly convenient, insofar as it makes it easier to force myself to take a day or two off and hopefully heal the bruised rib that I've been trying my best to ignore for the past few days. After all I've done for that surfboard, the very first chance it got it karate-chopped me right in the thorax. A bruised rib is certainly not incapacitating, but it has made getting on and off the surfboard rather less pleasant than normal, and slowed me down a bit in the paddling and popup departments.

The silver lining is that the incident has helped me solve the problem of what to name my surfboard. After much consideration I have settled upon Cato.

10 degrees north of the equator...

...twice daily application of SPF 50 can only do so much.

You can't always get what you want

What I asked for:

"as much sunscreen as you can stand to pack"

 What I got:

When referring to a liquid that is packaged in discrete containers, it's so important to pay attention to the difference between much and many.

My first houseguest

My dad got here last night at around 11 PM last night safe and sound. I haven't stayed up that late since I arrived here, and it was a struggle to keep awake. My anti-soporific was worrying about all the things that could go wrong when a 65-year old American retiree who doesn't speak a word of Spanish, is deaf in one ear, and apparently forgot the hearing aid for his other ear, shows up at Liberia airport by himself in the middle of the evening and needs to find the cab driver that's supposed to take him to the tiny stretch of unlit dirt road outside the podunk beach town in the middle of nowhere, two and half hours away, where I'm staying, in a country that doesn't have a postal address system.

As it turns out, it all went fine. Though I really wish he had remembered that hearing aid.

No pain, no gain

I got out for my morning surf a little early today, and I was lucky that just as I headed down to the beach, Ru was also heading down for a short session of his own and offered me a ride. This turned out to be serendipitous on two counts, since it not only saved me a 10-minute walk, but once we got to the beach and I realized that the repair shop had forgotten to reattach the leash on my new-to-me 7'10" board when I picked it up yesterday, I was able to borrow a leash from Ru.

Anyway, as we waded out into the water, Ru said something interesting. To wit,

You'd think that when you're surfing all the time you'd get to a point where you don't wake up every morning feeling sore. But you don't. Instead you wake up pretty much every morning feeling like shit. The funny thing is, you're probably in the best shape of your life.

I've surfed every day for two weeks now, and I can vouch that I'm as sore now as I was on the second day. And that's not even counting the various cuts and scabs, the jellyfish stings, the jammed toes, the lump on my head, the bruised rib...

Still, every time I get in the water I feel great.

The local music scene

Pour some sugar on me

The roads here in Nosara are dirt with a little bit of gravel thrown in to remind you that you're wearing flip-flops. Since it's the dry season right now, there's no rain to keep the dust down, and it gets very, very dusty.

The local strategy for mitigating the dust problem is to wet down the roads. Yes, every so often a truck loaded with Mobil barrels will show up somewhere, and a crew of three or four guys will spend the day pouring the contents of said barrels onto the road. There is no pump or sprayer involved, the guys just pick up the barrels and slosh the contents out onto the road surface, gradually working their way down the stretch.

The first time you encounter one of these crews of sloshers can be pretty alarming. But don't worry, they aren't dumping petroleum on the road - they're dumping molasses. I don't know if it's diluted or if the molasses we buy in stores for baking has been concentrated, but in either case this molasses is not a viscous goo, but an eminently sloshable brown liquid. In any case, it still smells like molasses, and it definitely changes the road surface - now the gravel actually sticks to the bottom of your flip-flops.

Climb and drop

Yesterday morning, I had my first private lesson with Alex Wilkinson. Alex was my first surf instructor ever, so I already knew that he's an excellent teacher, and in the genre parlance I was "massively stoked" when I heard that he'd returned from a stint in the Maldives to set up Pureline Surf, his own private coaching business here in Nosara. The universe was working for me.

One of our first goals is to transition me from the 8'2" board I've been riding to a slightly shorter 7'10" that I bought last week. Alex quickly diagnosed some issues with my paddle technique that were working against me on the shorter board and showed me how to correct them. Then we worked on angled takeoffs and catching lots of waves. The waves were pretty small and mellow, but I did manage to catch a few, and Alex had a lot of good recommendations for improving my form.

My homework for the week is a climb and drop drill. This involves taking off across the wave, then repeatedly climbing up the face, turning and dropping down, turning and climbing back up, etc. This is all accomplished by shifts in body weight. Or it will be, once I manage to get the hang of it.

Water ballet

Pizotes!

Across from the road in front of Surf Simply, at the edge of the trees there is a spot where food scraps are dumped for composting. This attracts pizotes, a sort of Central American analog to raccoons (although they have true raccoons here too - I saw one the other day). The pizotes have gotten used to new scraps showing up in the early afternoon, so it was no surprise that when I took mine over a few minutes ago, they were quick to appear. Here are a couple of them:

Pineapple core - yum!

Breakfast (and lunch and dinner) in bed

I keep finding myself hanging out on the bed in my bedroom, because the bedroom is where the air conditioner is. Even with the bedroom door open, it's at least 10-15 degrees cooler than in the rest of the apartment. And the rest of the apartment is about 10-15 degrees cooler than the outside.

Eating my meals sitting in bed makes me feel a little like a hospital patient. But it's so nice and cool in this hospital.

My culinary efforts thus far have been very modest. Eggs on toast, bananas, yogurt, cereal, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I cut up a pineapple half an hour ago and now have enough pineapple to feed 10 people. Tonight's experiment - veggie quesadillas made from the small and random assortment of produce and the only grated cheese (mozzarella, oddly enough) that I could get my hands on yesterday.

The importance of being fully waxed

There are few things in surfing as aggravating as paddling out and catching a wave, only to have your hand or foot fly out from under you as you try to pop up because you missed a spot when you waxed the board. Not only is it frustrating as hell to lose the wave you worked so hard for, but the slip is typically accompanied by a swift and unhappy encounter between the surfboard and your elbow, knee, foot, or face. Occasionally it's possible to recover and stay on the wave, but at least for me the most common outcome is to resurface with my head full of equal parts rage, pain, and seawater.

Moving day

The end of week 1 means that I have to leave the pampered existence of surf camp behind and move - 30 yards down the road. My prior understanding of my new lodgings' location turns out to have been incorrect, and I am in fact a bit farther from the beach now, but correspondingly closer to what is commonly referred to as "town." Town is in fact a single unpaved street on which can be found two surf shops, a convenience store, a couple of cafes, one or two clothing boutiques, a surfeit of real-estate offices, and a bank that I'm told sometimes has money in it. It is a one-horse town where the horse has been replaced by a quad bike.

The new digs are small but comfortable.

I have a sweet hammock out front.

The living room doubles as surfboard storage area.

The beach is 10 minutes walk down the road this way. That's Ru's pickup parked in front of Surf Simply, just a stone's throw away.

And it's about 5 minutes walk to town in the other direction.

After I got settled in, I hitched a ride with Ollie, one of the Surf Simply coaches, to the "super" that's beyond the edge of town in order to stock up on groceries. The most super thing about the super is definitely the price. The meat and produce selection is pretty minimal. All the meats are frozen meats. One of my neighbors, Lulu (aka the woman who makes the banana chocolate-chip muffins) tells me that there is an organic meat guy who comes by once a week. I hear there's also a produce guy who comes by two or three times a week at certain times. It seems I am going to have to impose more (read: some) constraints on my schedule if I am going to cook myself anything truly delicious.

I capped the day off with a short, and mostly unproductive surf session before the sun went down. I only managed to catch one wave, but it was a lovely sunset all the same.

Es muy tropical aqui'

Feelin' hot hot hot.

Thank god for air conditioning and the ocean.

Riding the line

Today I rode down the line for the first time ever. Not once, not twice, but three times! What a rush.

It was an early morning - we were in the water by 6:15. High tide, so the waves were softer and not as steep as the past couple of days, but with the typical morning offshore wind that helps prop them up and curl nicely. Perfect beginner conditions.

Successfully riding down the line is a big milestone for any beginning surfer, and it's been the one goal I've had fixed firmly in mind from the very start of this trip. When you start learning to catch waves, you pretty much just ride the board straight down the face of the wave like a toboggan down a hill; when you get to the bottom the wave breaks behind you and the whitewater catches up and pushes you in to the beach like a snowplow. In contrast, to ride down the line you have to turn the board hard to one side in the brief moment just after you catch the wave so that you are aimed across the face instead of down it. Your beginner's intuition tells you that the wave is just going to flip your board over sideways and throw you into the churning water - and to be fair, if you don't execute it correctly it very well might - but by leaning hard and really digging the side of the board (aka the rail) into the face of the wave, you can conjure up hydrodynamic magic that will send you flying across the face of the wave like a rocket. Pure awesomeness ensues.

Laura, the Surf Simply photographer, was out taking pictures of us this morning, so I'm hoping to have some documentation of this achievement in the next few days. Fingers crossed she got some shots of my epic achievement.

My day off

Today was our "day off" at surf camp - which really means the staff get a well-deserved break from dealing with us and we are left to our own devices. But nobody ever got good at anything by taking the day off, so at 8:30 I tucked the 8'2" that I'd set aside the night before under my arm and set off down the beach on foot. This also served as a test run for my commute (once I don't have Surf Simply driving me to and from the beach), and overall wasn't too bad - about a 7 minute walk from my soon-to-be residence, which is just down the road. The return trip took a couple minutes longer and the board felt a few pounds heavier by then, but it was still manageable. Phew.

The waves were beautiful this morning - long, peeling ones with an offshore wind propping them up until they were almost vertical. But too challenging for me. I decided to forego trying to fight my way out back and do what I probably should be doing anyway - popup drills in the whitewater. Not very glamorous, but I need to get better at consistently getting my feet to the correct spot on the board, coming up with my weight solidly over my front foot, and using my hip to shift my from front to back. I do think I made some progress. The fact that I get to practice in warm water under a lovely blue sky makes even slow progress enjoyable.

Other notable things that happened today - I ate two freshly-from-the-oven banana-chocolate chip muffins, and I had an amazing full-body massage. It was a pretty good day off.

Howlers

Thus far my naturalistic investigations have revealed that there are at least two kinds of monkeys roaming the trees here in Nosara - howler monkeys and what, out of sheer ignorance, I will call quiet monkeys. For all I know the quiet monkeys may comprise several actual species, but if so they are all equally quiet. The howler monkeys, on the other hand, can make quite a racket when they are so inclined. Every morning around 5am or so they start hooting and bellowing and grunting at each other for reasons known only to themselves. As far as I have seen, both kinds of monkeys stay in the trees and betray no interest in human affairs.

Today as we drove down to the beach a family of howler monkeys was hanging out in the trees alongside the road, about 20 feet up, hooting away languorously. Along with several adults there was a little baby monkey who would repeatedly wander around his branch for a few seconds before returning to dangle by one arm from one of the adults. Of course, since we were on our way to the beach I didn't have a camera, but I can assure you it was super cute.

Eating well in every sense

I just had the most delicious sea bass for lunch, courtesy of Sarah, Surf Simply's incredible culinary wizard. After the woefully overcooked dorado tacos I had last night at [redacted], this was a sensational way to restore my appetite for the delicious local fish that is plentiful on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Along with the fish we had squash, fried plaintain, rice and beans of course, and a delicious strawberry-pineapple smoothie. Life is good.

Sarah's food is always excellent, but what I appreciate almost as much as how good it tastes is the care she takes to make sure that every meal covers all the nutritional bases. This is critical when you are spending 3+ hours a day in the water. Surfing demands so much energy from your body that you are hungry almost all of the time, and you will eat just about anything edible that you can get your hands on. It's a very good thing when that just so happens to be a well-balanced meal that's delicious to boot.

Surf Simply

For my first week in Nosara, I'm staying at Surf Simply, which Holly and I first discovered in December of 2010 and made a return pilgrimage to last March. It's great to see some familiar faces again, and to meet some new folks too. Over the last year I've raved to various friends, relatives, coworkers and acquaintances about what a great experience Surf Simply is, and this time out is proving to be no exception. We've got 13 guests this week, of which half have been here at least once before. That kind of loyalty is no accident, and I have to hand it to Ru and his gang for making this place such a success. It's inspiring to me to see someone build a successful business out of making people happy and doing what they love.

More later. Breakfast now.

Day 2 - surfing recap

Another beautiful day today, with a low tide session in the morning and a high tide session in the afternoon. Today the focus was on basics, specifically body position and popup form. In our morning session, we spent about half the time doing popups in the whitewater, and the other half out back trying to catch unbroken waves.

Practicing popups in the whitewater sounds like a pointless exercise once you've started being able to catch waves out back, but it's really essential. Because the wave has already broken, and there's so much less power behind the board than with a breaking wave, everything slows down, and flaws in your stance, posture, and weight distribution become painfully apparent. As humbling as it was for me to realize that some of the basic popup skills I had worked on so much in the past weren't up to snuff, it was encouraging to see that everybody, even the experienced surfers in our group, had similar problems. The beauty of video replay is that you can see in painful detail what you are doing wrong, and hopefully correct it in the future.

The rest of the low tide session was theoretically spent catching unbroken waves. In my case, it was mostly spent being pummeled. Low tide waves are more challenging for a beginner like myself because they tend to stand up and break quite quickly, so the window of opportunity between not-yet-steep-enough and holy-shit steep is often only a few meters. At high tide, in contrast, the waves tend to be fatter and stand up more slowly, so there's more margin for error in judging where and when to catch a wave or let it pass you by. So this afternoon's session went much better, and I was quite pleased with myself when I caught the first ride of my group. Our instructor Harry's refresher course on paddle technique and turtle rolls (given in the pool between session) was invaluable, and for the first time I finally was able to execute a few proper turtle rolls. By the end of the session, muscle fatigue set in, though, and now sheer exhaustion is overtaking me, so it must be time for bed.

An armadillo is snuffling around next to my patio

This is my 5th trip to Costa Rica but this is the first time I've seen one. It seems completely unafraid of people, and I was able to get within about 3 feet of it before it shuffled off into the underbrush.

Making mistakes

I am not a naturally patient person. For me the most frustrating aspect of learning any new physical skill like surfing is the fact that I can't short-circuit the process by just assimilating raw knowledge and moving on. It takes a lot of practice, and almost all of that practice is going to consist of making mistakes. And I hate making mistakes. In fact, until my late twenties, I assiduously avoided doing things that might turn out to be mistakes, which in retrospect was a bigger mistake than almost anything else I could have done.

A large part of preparing myself mentally for this trip was accepting the fact that although quitting my job and surfing in the tropics for 3 months sounded great, it might turn out to be a mistake. That's OK.

Not Seattle

Day 1 - second surf

With only a few hours of recovery from this morning's inaugural session, my muscles were none too pleased to be called back into service this afternoon for another go-round. At least the high tide waves were slower breaking and a little more forgiving than this morning's. A post-surf yoga session helped ease the pain, but I can only imagine what I'll feel like in a day or two when the soreness kicks in.

Day 1 - first surf

After a day spent mostly in transit from Seattle, and a fitful night's sleep, at 8am this morning I finally got to hit the waves. It was low tide, and the waves were fairly small and nice for "dusting off the cobwebs" as Harry put it.

It's always a surprise just how hard paddling is. In case you were wondering - it's really effing hard.

Gone surfing

After almost a year of planning, I'm finally here in Nosara, Costa Rica.

My goals are simple:

1. do a ton of surfing
2. clear my mind
3. see what happens