Beach.... Beach, class, more beach

In the past week, I dont think i have ever spent as much time in a bus as i have this week. I am about to get into a bus again in an hour. we have been to the osa peninsula, white water rafting, and zip lining. It has been amazing and white water rafting was gorgeous. my boat consisted of myself, nolan, jamie, beth, sam, and big john. our guide, ninja, helped up down the river suffering no casualties and no one even fell out of the boat. i had a close encounter as we hit a class 4 rapid and i was shot up into the front row, but i was saved by nolan, thankfully. after rafting, we headed back to san jose for the night and left for the osa peninsula the next morning. We knew the bus ride was going to be long, but i dont think we knew what we were in for. the ride started out pretty standard, i took a nap, etc. Then trouble hit us, we were driving down the road when we noticed that a bridge had disappeared and we could not cross the river, keep in mind we were about 7 hours into the bus ride when we found the bridge was missing. we think it was swept away by the tropical depression that passed through a couple days earlier. So we were forced on back roads that were extremely narrow and keep in mind we are on a huge tour bus. our next encounter was when we entered the dirt road trail. it was a steep decline onto a very questionable bridge. we were told, "everyone off the bus because we are about to do a semi-dangerous maneuver" we are all like uh oh, whats going on. we all get off and cross the 15foot bridge on foot, and the bus driver has to get the bus across. the front of the bus gets onto the bridge fine, but the back of the bus bottoms out and gets very stuck. the driver tries to drive through it, but the wheels just spin. after about 15 minutes of "oh shit what do we do" we decide to push the bus if possible. so me and about 6 other guys get behind the bus and push as the driver presses the accelerator. the bus gets pushed free and gets across safely. after this, its just a very bumpy ride and the total bus ride took somewhere between 8-10 hour ( i was asleep so i cant be sure how long) plus a 1 hour boat ride to arrive on the osa peninsula.

The osa was great! it was beautiful and was hardly populated and free of touristy things. We arrive via a "wet landing" aka we jump off the boat onto the beach. we then got into what they call taxi's, which is really just 3 SUV's that take us up the mountain to our camp site. We were shocked to know that we were the first guests to stay at this place, which was really just fancy tents with a main dining room/ lounge all outdoors under a roof. hard to explain, but see the picture above to see what i am talking about.

The hotel was just tents under large roof but the accomodations were nice. we went on nature walks where we saw howler monkeys and some nice birds. we also saw our first set of leaf cutter ants who are one of my favorite animals in the forest. The second day at the osa, we went snorkeling on the island about an hour off-shore of the peninsula.

we also had to boat through this very narrow passage with these amazing trees that had very long roots that went all over the place.