Mal Pais

I have had a few conversations with people over the last couple of days and some of them (mostly coming from the parental units) have told me that I haven't written a post in awhile. I said I knew, but most of the time I have something to write about; but for the past three weeks, we have just absolutely relaxed. We met up with good friends from Sydney and spent 10 days in Caye Caulker. Basically, that is all that I care to write about the place as all four of us just hated being there. We moved to this beautiful, secluded spot at Mal Pais, Costa Rica. We have been staying here for the past ten days, reading, swimming and relaxing at this house that Sam found on the internet. I highly suggest coming here. The complex is called Casa de Soliel and is run by an ex-pat named Trent whose family is great and being here has been so easy. So there is my perfectly laid out excuse to why I have fallen off the grid. We are moving to Nicaragua tomorrow and staying in San Juan del Sur for the foreseeable future - the idea is to stretch our last pennies as much as possible as well as talk to people in Spanish. Mal Pais is a funny town. The place is a surfer's paradise and people from the states and all over the world come here to lose themselves in the waves and the laid back lifestyle. Here, English is the dominate language and seeing butt cracks from shirtless surfers dudes is the required style and obligatory fashion. If you are into that, welcome home. For us, it is not our scene. Mal Pais and the town next to it, Santa Teresa, are connected by one bumpy dirt road. On it you will find people on quad bikes hauling their surfboards to the next break, and people just randomly going nowhere. The town is less hippie than I expected but still it has all the familiar trappings of a place where reality goes out the window. The town itself is almost fiercely exclusive: tourists are treated as ghosts. The locals, mostly ex pats not Costa Ricans, are wary of others and exude this smugness about the place. It is not an outward explicit attitude, but it is the subtle words, the names they drop or don’t drop that give us an idea that: we are on the outside, dude. The place is gorgeous though and the waves are great. For basically a week, Ben and Andrew have told me that if I wanted to learn to surf, this is the place to do it. Three years I have avoided surfing even though I lived next to the beach. I have never found the idea of surfing in Australia, or in general, to be that enticing. Furthermore, surfing in Australia, to me, represents a bad drunken dare, a heedless, hedonistic affair that the outcome brings you one step closer to death than to personal enjoyment. You have to battle rips, sun, other surfers, monster waves and let's not forget sharks. Even this can happen when you are surfing in Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O55ddcZWCI. I think my favorite story about the death dance surfers have with sharks and the complete apathy of Australians is when a reporter went into a Shark copter- Helicopter that patrols beaches looking for sharks - and during their time in the air, they spotted over 30 sharks in swimming areas. One time the patrolman said, look there is a pod of hammerheads near people, no warning. I mean where do I sign up. Here is a different story, nothing to worry about except for a rip, but if you get pulled out, instead of floating over the side of the world like in Australia, here you have a good chance of being picked up by a boat. Sam and I rented a board that had seen better days. One look at it and I asked the renter if they would pay us six dollars to rent it. It had more holes than the bucket, dear liza, dear liza. Being supremely tight with our money, we got a lesson from my friend Ben, who is an experienced surfer, before he left. On towels, outside of our pool, he showed us the steps: lie down, paddle, arch your back then do this crazy back flip, 18o turn around where your left leg is behind your right. Both of us said, got it, and practiced a couple of times. I must say I had confidence in that I would be able to do this. I am athletic and so is Sam. Our towel boards gave us no trouble and this would be a cinch.
As a pulled myself out of the washing machine that is the ocean here, wiping the sand from every hole and nook in my body, placing my arm back into its appropriate socket and draining my head that brimmed full of salt water, I realized that this would not be that easy. We could walk out into the surf and we were catching the whitewash - the aftermath of the waves as it tumbles towards the shore -, but still the prospects of surfing were grim. My first three attempts left me legless, a face full of salt water and nowhere near surfing. I thought of the towel surfboard and cursed Ben. I was determined to do this. I battled back out to the surf. Waited patiently for the next whitewash. It crashed 4 meters before me. I paddled. I caught the power of the wave, the board started to move, I felt the lift. I did the arch of the back and...... It's funny when you know something is going to hurt. I was powerless to stop it. Maybe because I was destined to hit head first into the water with my arms serenely out to the side. Apparently, I had given up on surfing and was trying my hand at flying. I emerged from the water, wrapped in the leash and laughed at by Sam and the birds in the sky. This time I told myself, take it slow, do the steps. I did the exact same thing as before: waited, waited then got my wave. I paddled and while being propelled forward, I got my feet in the right direction. I stood (wobbled?) up for the first time. Overjoyed with my success I forgot Ben's last piece of advice: stay low and balanced. I was stiff upright and vulnerable. It might have been two seconds before the wave, clearly upset it hadn't put me through the second round of spin, jerked with more energy. My collapse was epic. The surfboard just stopped, I kept going. I tried to bail, but as I did the surfboard moved again like it was magnetized to me. I went down, knee first on the back of the board, then my other leg, then my chest to finally oozed, a broken man, into the shallows. I tried one more time after my success (dumb luck?), but this time I pressed down too hard on the front and water rushed into my face forcing me to go butt over ankles into the water. I clearly had done my time for the day. It was enjoyable, I suppose. I guess I am just going to stick to the surfer's fashion here: Shirtless and all butt cracks.