bruised, bitten, and a little burnt - but totally worth it!

Semana Santa started off with getting on the bus to Puntarenas in San Jose on Tuesday afternoon. We stayed in Puntarenas Tuesday night so that we could get to Malpais and the beach earlier on Wednesday, and to help break up the trip. There's not much to say about that first night, other than the fact that we ate some pretty damn good Chinese (I don't know why, but there were a TON of Chinese restaurants there) for dinner and there was a boat on fire in the harbor when we got into town. Puntarenas was kind of dirty...definitely just a pit stop kind of place...but the hotel we stayed in was very nice and clean, and we even had tvs in our rooms!

Wednesday we took the ferry across the gulf to the Nicoya peninsula and then a bus to Malpais. Malpais is a very small town...not a lot to do...except go to the beach and surf, so that's exactly what we did! We stayed at really awesome Surf Camp and Resort - with a pool and everything :) It was a little strange though to stay in an open air room






Unfortunately our surfing pictures are on Myla's camera, so I don't have any to show you right now. There were lots of monkeys and iguanas hanging around too. The beach was a short walk from our hotel, and we definitely took advantage!





















After we spent Wednesday and Thursday in Malpais we headed to Montezuma on Friday morning. Montezuma was a LOT of fun, there was a lot more to do and a lot of ticos on vacation too :) We hiked to a huge waterfall on Thursday and on Friday we went horseback riding to a different waterfall. Sean and Caitlin were the crazy ones who actually did some cliff diving (the whole time I kept thinking about how much I wished Adam was there because I know he would've loved it...and he probably would have been one of the crazy cliff jumpers too). I stuck to the small stuff, rope swings and jumping off boulders :)