I suppose if you have beautiful weather all year round the thing to do is have an open air living room, which I quickly became a big fan of! That night all of us piled into the rented passenger van and made our way to the rodeo!
First we made our way to some friends of our hosts who were renting this incredible house up in the mountains that overlooked the entire beach. It had an infinity pool nad tons of monkeys around including this one just a few yards from the deck.
Whoops, that's more proof I was here, the monkey is here.
This is a howler monkey. His arm is on the left with his head peeking through. His tail is on the right and if you look closely, just below that you can see some extremely uncomfortable looking reproductive organs just hanging out for everyone to see. No wonder they howl like a beast in pain, it is a tough life swinging from the trees with a set like that! After a quick grimace of pain at my fellow male two legged cuz, we were off to the rodeo. I have to say I was very excited because the rodeo here is a big event. It runs on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday just a few times a year and everyone in this small town including all of the surrounding areas come out, dressed to the nines! We ate some of the local food (mystery meat grilled on skewers, cotton candy and caramel filled churros) and made our way in to the main event. The ring is circular and everyone rushes to get a seat on the fenceposts that surround the ring.
This is basically in the ring! Your legs hang into the ring and when the bulls come by you have to lift your legs out of its reach! Fantastic! The best part is that the drunks jump into the ring and hang out until the bull gets close and they all run for cover or slide under the fence to safety.
The bravado inspired me and I jumped into the ring! I am not kidding. We were sitting on the part of the circle directly across from the gate where the bulls are released.
After the riders are ejected or jump off they let the bulls run around the ring as the locals watch and laugh at the stupid people, like me, in the ring. At first I stayed near the edge of the ring and when a bull looked in my direction from 30 yards away I would jump up the fence. After a few bulls I felt more at ease and stayed longer and longer. At one point I actually wandered out to the center of the ring as the bull was released with the rider on it. Flip flops are not the preferred footwear for such events but I never got too close to the bulls so it didn't really matter. One of the highlights was when a member of our group went behind a bull and pulled its tail and slid under the fence as the entire crowd laughed. No one went to the hospital and afterwards we went to the rodeo disco which was the icing on the cake! I am waiting on some photos from some of my new friends with me in the center of the ringbut will post them as soon as I get them. I'm not sure how you say 'giddyup' in Spanish but i'm doing some research!
