Orosi

Buenos dias from the Orosi valley!
It is really beautiful here, not quite as picturesque as the Rough Guide says, but the views are just stunning. To give an idea: it´s like being in a bowl, surrounded on every side by verdant, lush landscapes and dark mountain tops with clouds sitting just on top. It´s incredible fertile here and easy to see why, when you experience the weather for one day - it is warm and humid, with occasional heavy rain. There are coffee plantations all around, sadly it´s not picking season yet so we couldn´t go for a tour but luckily we can drink a lot of it!
True to what we´ve been promised, the Ticos are really friendly - they seem to place a lot of stock on pleasantries, but as long as you start a conversation with ´¿buenos dias, como estas?´then they are so lovely and really helpful - and they have infinite patience with our poor level of Spanish, which isn´t a problem when asking questions, but then they reply with a string of ´(%/)?&(·%¿¿)´which takes us about half an hour to understand, and usually ends up looking like a game of Charades or Win Lose or Draw, and tends to involve puppets. We´ve also spoken to the other people staying at Montaña Linda, including two women from NYC (more on them later) and a lovely guy called Adrian who is Tico but speaks very good English and seems to live there, but we can´t quite work out what he does or why he lives there. Oh and also some Argentinians who have no English, and we can´t understand any of their Spanish (the dialect is probably equivalent to someone who´d learnt Queen´s English trying to understand a Glaswegian), so the language is indeed quite a barrier.. but they seem nice anyway. One of them is painting spoons and selling them for $5.
There is a supermarket just around the corner, and the hostel has an outdoor kitchen, so we´ve been self-catering which works out very cheap (we bought what amounts to nearly 2 chickens for a pound) and is quite fun, especially since the products are, as ever, called strange things. My favourites are ´Bimbo´bread, and ´Terror´cleaning products.. presumably the latter contains anthrax? Will take photos.
There are lots of things to do here - yesterday we went on a 5-hour trek around the mountains, which we thought we could do in about 3, since the directions seemed to wildly overestimate the times.. however, by about 3 hours in we were clearly nowhere near Orosi and the directions didn´t make sense. A couple of times we had to decide whether to turn back and retrace our steps, or carry on and potentially get very very lost. Also, it gets dark here at about 5.30pm, and this was 1pm. And we hadn´t had lunch yet. And our 500ml water had run out about 1 hour in. So not the best trek ever, although it was quite an adventure.. in hindsight, of course. The trek says at the bottom that if anyone has any suggestions or amendments to make, to make it easier for subsequent trekkers, that we should add them in. This is what I´m adding: ´don´t worry if you reach a sign saying ´Private Property´, this is fine and you probably won´t be shot by an angry farmer. We saw a guy and he just said ´hola´. Don´t worry if, about 3 hours into the trail, the directions no longer square with anything you can see around you. You will probably finish the trail with blind, desperate optimism that this must be the way back, right? This is normal too, so that´s fine. Just relax and enjoy the scenery. There are a couple of VERY steep hills, the directions say nothing about them, but it´s fine, and don´t forget to go down them very slowly, preferably sideways, as if you break your ankle here it´s a LONG way for your partner to piggy-back you down. Oh and don´t worry about the two houses you´ll walk past where half a dozen crazy-looking dogs run at you barking and baring their teeth, they are just being friendly, even if you are scared to death. The owners won´t be in a hurry to call them off, either. Enjoy!´
So, yes. It turned out to be around 10 miles, raining a lot of the time (cheap kagouls from Primark keep the rain out but emphatically are not breathable) and almost always going steeply up or down hill, and quite rocky ground too. My legs ache :( Ben wants to do the harder one.

Although they were very nice and gave me their email addresses as they left this morning with a promise of "if you´re ever in New York, look me up", we´re incredibly glad the women from NYC have now gone. They were staying in the room next to us, and the walls are so paper-thin that we could hear every noise they made and word they spoke, as if they were in the room with us. They didn´t really say anything, either .. their conversations went along the lines of: "that rooster sure does crow a lot", "uh-huh, that´s what they do", "it´s their job", "oh yeah" .. ad infinitum. So we´ve been using iPods to drown them out and help us fall asleep - they´ve woken us up a few times though. They were perfect examples of Gringos, and we´ve been feeling better about ourselves in comparison, since, even if we don´t speak the language and are tourists, at least we´re not as bad as THEM.
Not too many mosquito bites so far, mostly thanks to our fantastic net and the fact that we´re generally beneath it between the hours they bite, ie. dawn til dusk. It´s light from 5am til about 5.30pm here, so our waking hours are similar.
Today we´re going to the waterfall about 30mins away (which is run by an eccentric guy called ´Nano´, who will apparently give us a tour of his coffee and banana plantation, and if you get lost on the way to his house you can ask "practically anyone" for directions. Very sweet!), then back for lunch, and then out to the thermal baths. Tomorrow we´re off to the beach town of Mal Pais, for ´chilling´and surfing, and then to Liberia which is about 3 hours from the Nicaraguan border.. we´re probably going to pop across for a day or two, since everything is apparently much cheaper there. After that I´m not exactly sure .. probably somewhere on the Caribbean coast, as long as Hurricane Gustav stays away.
Hope you are all well - we´re missing you :)

Lots of love,
Louise and Ben xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx