Paragliding

On Saturday a few of us got adventurous and decided to go parasailing. But...it turned out there wasn´t anywhere to do that locally, despite being oceanside...so we did paragliding instead. For whatever reason this was way more scary to us, but we were determined to do it. In the end it was not scary at all, as you are soaring very slowly and gently. It was a gorgeous day and one of the rare sunny ones, and I´m so glad we went. I gave my camera to one of the girls to take pictures but she forgot and used her own camera the whole time, so I don´t have any to post now but we´ll swap photos online later (thank you Facebook!)

The crew loaded into the back of the truck. And to think 3 weeks ago when I saw all those kids, families, EVERYONE riding around in the back of trucks I thought they were crazy. It´s just the norm here, and we had no choice! I did intentionally grab what I deemed the safest seat however!!

We jumped off about 20 minutes south of Montañita. It was so gorgeous! (This is Tomak´s turn, he kepts his arms out like that for most of his time so he´s easy to identify)   :)

Carly just after takeoff

Waiting for Carly to reappear over those hills

Carly was the last to go, so her instructor asked her if she wanted to land on the beach instead of back up on the mountain with us. Of course she said yes, but then it turned out to be high tide with not enough beach, so they landed in the street! The traffic here is pretty light though, so thankfully all ended well. They landed in front of a little beachside resturant and he bought her some calimari to munch on while they waited for us to drive down and pick them up. Of course no one told US that they were landing on the beach, so we were waiting, and watching, and waiting, and watching, and waiting for them to come back over those hills. No one else had gone to that side, everyone had been going to the left, so we were a bit nervous that it was an accident and they were stuck somewhere. After about 5 mintues of nervous anticipation I asked the other instructor "Donde esta Carly?" (Where´s Carly?) and thankfully HE was in on the plan. It was a fun day, and something I´d definitley be willing to do again!

Where Carly landed

After our adventure we were pretty hungry, so we all went out to lunch together. We´d all heard about how great ceviche is here, but none of us had ever had it and we were a bit nervous. The best I can describe it is a cold soup with your choice of fish, shrimp, octopus, squid, or mixed. We decided to share a bowl of mixed ceviche and we all LOVED it! Yummo!! I hesitated slightly when my spoon had a bit of octopus tentacles on it, but even that was okay! (Just a bit chewy...but I managed.)

Ceviche

The CUTEST puppy was begging for our scraps while we ate lunch. It was so hard to resist his adorable face and little yelps, but since street dogs are so pesky and prevalent here we knew we had to resist. But it´s a lot easier to deny the dirty, scraggly dogs than this adorable little guy!!