Soft Top Destination, Day 1
With a 11 days off, I wasn’t sure where Bri and I should go. It wasn’t long enough for Indo, and my flight benefits wouldn’t cover the costs to catch the little puddle jumper flights. Better to fly direct… Puerto Vallarta became an option, but the idea of going to some country I haven’t been to before was too hard to pass up. So the options came down to a remote location in El Salvador or something more touristy like Costa Rica’s Tamarindo. After including my wife in the process, we decided we’d hit a tourist town. Crowded lineups or not, we were willing to catch foam waves with the crowd and hit some beer and tacos after.
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The flight…First class was a nice surprise. With the flight being wide open, and my wife and I the only standbys, calling it luck would be an overstatement. Another surprise was the other family sitting across from us. A fifty-something dad who was drunk and covered in tattoos was being loud and obnoxious with his wife and daughter. And of course, his wife was equally buzzed, and everything she said was accompanied with flailing her hands and arms. It was high drama for a red eye.
When the customs forms were passed out, I used my own or, and when I heard them ask the stewardess for one, for which they rarely do, I tapped him on the shoulder to give him my own. When the sun came up about five hours later, I was still penless. I asked his wife for the pen, since she was the one using it, and she pulled it out of her bun and handed it to me with the cap missing.
Upon deboarding, I heard her complaining to her husband how she wanted her pen back for her hair. Wow…she had even thanked me last night when I handed the shit over to them. Lesson learned, don’t give up your pen unless asked. The customer is the enemy.
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The host of my Airbnb place informed me not to pay over $60 for a taxi into town. Right when Bri and I exited customs, we were aggressively corralled towards a line of taxis by this dude. “How much is it?” I said.
“Right this way, Sir, and I’ll tell you.”
Motherfucker. Here we go again. I may as well be in Jakarta. I’ve always been a terrible bargainer, but when I pushed for he price he finally said eighty dollars. In my shitty Spanish we went back and forth, me lowering he bar at forty and he not budging.
In the humid morning air, I walked further down the curb to get a second opinion from some workers. The woman told me it was a hundred dollars. Get the fuck outta here. The other guy told me eighty, and then he flagged down a taxi driver who said he’d do it for sixty. “A todos,” I said, pointing to me and my wife. He agreed. All looked well. Then he pulled up to another taxi, told us to hop into it, and then another guy hopped in. From there I restated the sixty dollar agreement. “Si, si,” he said. “Sesenta con propina. Ochenta dolores.” He smiled at me through the rearview, brandishing a gold-capped tooth.
Bri could tell I was losing my shit. “Did he get us?” she said.
I told him to stop the car. Bri seconded. “Autobus,” we said. With the car in motion, I opened the car door.
“Sesenta es okay,” said the driver, but Bri and I were not. It was a tense hour long drive. The guy made two phone calls bitching out the other guy about why he’s taking us to Tamarindo for such a small fee. But when we approached town, the driver kindly asked where we wanted to be dropped off, and gave us an enthusiastic, “Pura vida!” As we left.
The breakfast in front of the beach was classic tourist cliché. It was a slow morning with a cool offshore breeze but humid. Out check in time was at 1300 and it was only 0800.
$27 later we were walking the south end of the beach where we saw a small crocodile at a small river mouth. At the very end there were a ton of people getting surf lessons. The wave itself was small, but the water so tropical that I wanted to jump in there myself to get relief.
As we started our trek towards the north end of the beach, our backpacks started getting heavy. My arms were shiny with sweat, and my farts were getting moister each time. We watched the main peak by the northern river mouth. The waves here were better but three times as crowded. After cruising around and checking about surf rentals, we stopped at a bar and ordered a pitcher with nachos. By the time we were done it was time to check in.
The lady at the Airbnb site said no one had told her we’d be coming. Of course, the whole conversation was in Espanol, which means I sounded like an idiot. After that hurdle all that mattered was the AC in our room. My tank-top tan was legit. Cold ass shower was perfectly fine.
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After a solid nap we walked out in time to catch the sunset. A Euro couple approached us and attempted their best Spanish in asking me to take a picture of them. It was the second time that day someone assumed I was fluent. Now the sunset…it was gorgeous. With the low tide runners breaking in shallow water with the fire in the sky engulfing everything, I knew this trip was something special. Even more special was the fucking sweaty ass humidity even in the night.
“You like weed, blow?” said some local in a baseball
cap, long curly hair spilling out over his ears. That was the mantra of the night, weed and blow offered to us in every dark corner. Right on.
And with the tourist season officially dying, the hosts for the restaurants seemed desperate to lure us into their venues. And yeah, I’m a cheap fuck, so all those restaurants on the beach were fucking expensive. I came for tropical water, fun-sized surf, and cheap beer and tacos. Fuck the bullshit. So we went about a block into town and found some small outdoor eateries lined up next to each other and settled on a large $11 pizza that stuffed both of us.
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First impressions? Thank God our Airbnb joint has AC and a kitchen. The kitchen is going to save our asses from spending money to eat 3 meals a day out on the local economy. Pay with your credit card as much as possible because the exchange rate from your bank is better than what the vendors/shops will give you if you pay in cash. I’d have more to write, but this is only day 1. Tomorrow, we surf.
SOFT TOP DESTINATION: Day 2 & 3
After soMe research, I found out that the surf shop with the best selection charged the most, so we went back to a shop called Kelly’s where a dark gangly kid with long curly hair works. He showed us the foamies and NSPs that only cost $10 a day. Since the surf looked small leaving our room, I decided on a 6’6 fish shaped NSP and Bri went with a 6’8. Finally for the first time we were on our way to paddling out into some surf.
Most of the surf schools were at the main peak in front of Tamarindo Daria, but the rivermouth had a long soft right that only had about 6 longboarders on it. Surprisingly, just a little south of it was a smaller but empty left that no one wanted to sit on. Naturally, Bri and I paddled for it.
We had been sweating our asses off before jumping in, but, fuckin’ A, goodluck on the water providing any relief. Bri called it “the surf sweats,” and it doesn’t get much more accurate than that. I mean, literally, THAT FUCKING HOT. Now as much as I’d like to pump up the surf to you, I won’t lie. People had already been telling us that Tamarindo is a beginner wave. I’m sure when the swell is solid overhead it’s another story, but the current swell is small. Yet, despite how mooshy and small the lefts were, it felt great to catch waves in this tropical place. We had the right boards for the occasion. I struggled to turn my beast of a board. I think you have to be really good to do a legit cutty on one of these things.
We traded off waves for a couple of hours, even tried to duke it out with a couple of legit nose riders at the top of the river mouth but just couldn’t put maneuver them. Afterwards we went back to El Vaquero for “Nachos as Big As Your Ass” and a pitcher of Imperial Beer. All was well, but then we had been sweating so much that the beer dehydrated the shit out of us. We were in headache country and headed back to the room for a nap. When we woke up we both felt like shit.
We still had the boards for a couple more hours before we had to turn them in for the day, but then the tide was drained so low that the shit was closing out like Bay St., Santa Monica on a bad day. A few Advils later and we cooked some spaghetti with the groceries we got from the market. We went to bed a little uneasy, thinking about the small surf, daily expenses we were incurring, and if spending a week here was too long. At least, we somewhat felt this way until day 3.
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Day 3
Playa Grande is north of Tamarindo separated by a river mouth that looks shallow enough to walk across but just this pas September a tourist had his leg severed from the knee down by a croc. Jeffrey, the kid who we rented out boards from showed us the pic. “Never swim across the rivermouth,” he said. So after choosing a Rusty longboard for Bri and a huge and chunky CI Average Joe, we paid the boatman $1 each to get across the river mouth. Jeffrey tried to point out the Playa Grande break from his shop. 10 minutes he said. No…the walk was fucking LONG. We passed closeout beach break after closeout beach break until stopping at the south end of Playa Grande, next to a few lone surfers. Armed with a huge hug of water and boards in hand, we decided to paddle out for at least an hour before heading back. Lo and behold, the surf was actually much better than it looked. I’d compare it to HB on a high tide but with a long face that holds shape. I even got three hits on a backhand right. It’s fun trying different equipment. I’d never ride something so chunky back home, but I made it work and had so much fun doing it. The surf was consistent and more rippable than Tamarindo. Best thing was, we had that shit all to ourselves. We had a serious case of the surf sweats but trudged through it until the tide topped out around 8ft., and the winds chopped it out. Still, we had that shit for like 2 hours.
The walk back was tiresome but satisfying. We legit scored empty surf in Costa Rica just a hike away from the main tourist trap. Another $2 and we were dropped off a stones throw from our room. Lunch was cereal, pastries, and bananas.
After a few errands in town, we paddled back out at the Tamarindo rivermouth. Because of the low tide, no one else was out. We caught some rights to ourselves for about a half hour before we were joined by a Chinese guy on a longboard. He said his name was Joe and that he was from New York but originally from Torrance. We all shared until 6 fucking guys from Encinitas invaded our spot and sat right on us. One of them actually apologized and said, “I know what you guys are thinking, you guys are out here all by yourselves and here come these motherfuckers.”
Just then, the clouds from the mountains swept into the lowlands. The wind changed. Thunder started, and the rain began. People started leaving the lineup.
We turned our boards in and got cover underneath a garage overhand. The rain was torrential, coming straight down, heavy, and all at once. 10 minutes later, and it was over. Back to the room with our leftover spaghetti and ice cream from the market. Bri and I kept going over how grateful we were to be able to do things like this together.
