Playa Maderas

AHHH! Soy enamorada con San Juan del Sur! I’ve always been something of a summer person, and I was a summer baby. Give me sun, sand and water and I’ll guarantee you that I will be happy. Today was one of our free days and we crawled out of bed to take a shuttle (read, the back of  a truck fenced in with iron bars) to a beach called Playa Maderas, about 20 minutes away from our hostel. The dirt roads were surprisingly good about 75% of the way, after which the ride became hell as we swerved and dunked our way over huge potholes down a hill. 

Casa Oro, the guys who took us out to the beach. 

The shuttle is organized by a company that rents surfboard and gives lessons, and so the people in the two shuttles with us were all surf bums. I’m not sure what this was for, but some of the guys were wearing green paste all over the upper top half of their face. I’m assuming it’s some kind of sun protectant, but why green and why does it have to be so visible? Maybe it helps with glare or reduces the sting of salt. Speaking of salt, my lips were completely chapped and stinging by the end of today due to the amount of time I spent in the ocean. 

One view of the beach. 

My first impressions of the beach: gorgeous. The sand was extremely soft and relatively white. There were also three independent restaurant joints there, populated by the usual raucous/tanned/hippy/chill surfer types, that served all kinds of typical beach-y food like tacos and burritos and fried chicken (which is always appropriate, anywhere, anyways). The water was the clearest I’d ever seen of an ocean. I could see all the way down to the perfectly smooth, sandy bottom even four or five feet deep of water. The aquamarine water was also the perfect temperature; not too cool but not warm at all, feeling like weightless ether over our burnt limbs.

There were also a number of dogs that kept stepping on us. I believe they belonged to the restaurant owners, and looked extremely well fed. However, they had no qualms about coming directly up to you, not even looking you in the eye, and stepping all over your towel and shoving their butts in your face. Force mandates force, so I spent a good half hour literally just pushing dogs away from me. At one point, I was pushing the head of one dog who stubbornly kept trying to walk forward right into my face. 

The dogs

Although surf lessons were offered, I decided against taking the lessons because a) they were 15 dollars, which is expensive (I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back to the US, because I’ll be shocked at the prices of everything) b) I really don’t think you can learn something as difficult as surfing in one hour and c) there were so many surfers there that I probably would have made a fool of myself. However, I did cave in and rent a boogie board, which was one of the best decisions of my life! I spent a solid three or so hours just floating in the azure ocean with the sun on my back, catching waves and body surfing them to shore. At first, I had absolutely no idea as to what I was doing, but some nice surfer folk taught me some tips and what to look for in a wave, and by the end of our day at Playa Maderas, I was spending most of my time paddling on my stomach and body surfing. At one point, I paddled out so far that there weren’t even any surfers around me, though I only ended up so far out because I had taken a short nap on my board and had drifted farther and farther out. Catching a wave is exhilarating. You have to wait, sometimes for tens of minutes, in the right place, judging where the waves will break and finding the "A" of the wave where the force is the strongest. Then you have to start paddling like crazy at the right moment, catching the crest of the wave but not getting sucked into it. All of a sudden, if you do these things correctly, there's a huge surge of speed that the wave gives to you and you're lifted up four or five feet by the wave. At this point, I often couldn't see due to the spray, so I held on desperately as my board rocked this way and that and trying to steer the board to shore. I think I may try surfing tomorrow. 

The beach also had spectacular views, some of which I captured on camera. The beach is surrounded by cliffs of shale or something, which had fallen in huge, diagonal slabs as if sheets of it had slipped millions of years ago. Amount the rocks were crabs, hermit crabs, and snails. Speaking of crabs, the forest around the beach has tons of these black, red and yellow crabs, vividly colored, that remind me of huge spiders. They don’t seem to need water, but burrow amount the roots of the tree. Strange!

The shale (??)

Leaving my mark.. 

The beach during sunset!

Now I’m exhausted and probably going to be sore/a little burnt tomorrow. At least I don’t look like the guys, who laid out way more than the girls surprisingly, and are now a bright shade of scarlet. Dinner soon!