We spent the last two weeks on the Southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where the weather was hot-ish and humid. We took the bus from San Jose after a nice few days staying at Hostel Pangea which is highly recommended if you like meeting people, hanging out and drinking Imperial (the local beer) – we loved it. The bus was uneventful although incredibly sweaty since the bus driver refused to turn on the AC, apparently the locals think this saves fuel! Getting pretty tired of being endlessly sweaty by the way.
Our first Caribbean village was Cahuita (pronounced “kah-wheat-uh”) which had a couple of roads, a lot of hotels and restaurants in various stages of disrepair and a pretty laid-back vibe. We spent one day walking through the local park which has one trail that parallels the coast about 20 feet from the ocean and runs 10k from end to end with a great restaurant at the far end where we had one of the best fish dishes so far. We saw five! sloths, a handful of Capuchin monkeys (one making a huge begging effort) a group of howlers Our very first night we were wandering around and saw a restaurant that showed movies every night, so we went back had cocktails and dinner (more yummy fish) and then watched Avatar with a bunch of other travelers from all over. We also went snorkeling and Darcie saw a shark and a ray and I saw a whole lot of random but frequently quite beautiful fish.
We met a lovely mother/daughter couple from Belgium, Bieke and Alessi who kindly offered us a ride down the coast to the next village, Puerto Viejo. It was nice to ride in a car – it has been a long time. PV is probably 10 times as big as Cahuita and has been totally over-built for tourism but none-the-less is a fun and chilled place to hang out. We wound up being there for 8 nights. Our original plans had been more adventuresome but we just got stuck in and had a good time, swimming, scuba, walking, cycling and so on.
The scuba was a little disappointing in as much as visibility was down to 5m (~15ft). Even so we saw some huge crabs and lobsters, a raft of lion fish and I had a remora latch on to my leg in the vain hope that I was a shark with parasites. Darcie had much fun at my expense with the parasites… It was fun to dive even so and the water down at 60-70ft was still a delightful 81F!
We had some very nice meals (not cheap though), our favorite places being Salsa Brava and The Beach Hut. The latter has a weekly pig roast (whole pig on the spit) which was amazingly tasty and only 7000 colones (about $12) for a huge meal that can easily be shared by two people. Salsa Brava had the best ceviche. Then of course there was Caribbeans that had great coffee and ice cream (mad on the premises).
Our final two days we were subjected to an impressive heavenly deluge, so much so that the local road out of town got severed when the approach to the bridge got damaged and there were big landslides up in the mountains on the main road from the coast to San Jose. Upshot of this was it took 9.5 hours to get back to SJ (it had taken 4 to get to Cahuita). The trip was amusing. The bus company (we had already bought our tickets) chose not to tell anyone that the bridge was out until we were 5 minutes from the bridge! We wound up sitting around sweating badly for about 4 hours before we could cross over on foot and pick up another bus that turned out to be more of a local bus dragooned into service for the run to SJ. very noisy, not particularly comfortable but at least the windows opened and every body was in a good mood despite the fact that 6 people wound up missing their flights home.
We wound up back at Pangea for a night before heading off the next day to Monteverde.
For the enquiring minds, there are mosquitoes in the southern Carib but not swarms. Darcie was munched on a bit as was I until we learned the tricks – clothing and bugs spray to be precise.
No comments:
Post a Comment