Puerto Viejo and Journey Home - Days 7 - 9

We're now at Puerto Viejo, down on the Caribbean coastline. Joel and I debated at mid-trip where to go for the beach portion of this trip. The Pacific Coast in Costa Rica has tremendous scenic beauty and great beaches, but there were also supposedly hordes of tourist, ugly condos and not what we were looking for. Joel did some digging and found a small village on the other ocean that was more or less untouched by the tourist hordes. So...we opted to go there.

Puerto Viejo definitely isn't what I envisioned the Pacific Coast to be like. The Caribbean has a more Jamaican feel to it. The people here are more of African descent rather than the Ticos (what the Costa Ricans call themselves) from the interior and rest of the country. It's also really hot. We got a killer deal on a room (no A/C) just inland a few blocks that was pretty much open-air with screens. At one point, the room went over 90 degrees in the afternoon. Amazingly, it cools off considerable indoors at night. Now if I could only get my place to do that without the A/C.

Puerto Viejo has brings with it the lifestyle of Jamaica too. I haven't yet been there, but we got offered drugs on the first walk that first night. The guidebooks pretty much warned of this. The rest of the town was pretty nonthreatening though. I just wouldn't get caught on some sidestreet alone at night, but hey...that's advisable alot of places in the US as well.

The beach here has the rainforest and palms come right down to the shoreline. The beaches aren't groomed, so they don't have that ideal look that you might find in some similar locations.

We went to an even smaller village the next morning called Manzanillo. There was a short little hike along the coastline. Crabs and hermit crabs and coconut shells were everywhere. We rented some snorkel gear and headed out into the ocean. Since the waves were breaking about 200 yards out, we figured the reef would be pretty accessible from this beach. Too bad the ocean was restless, because it stirred up alot of sand. We saw parts of the reef tho and some pretty cool looking fish.

That pretty much wrapped up our Costa Rican experience. The next morning we took a public bus back up to San Jose and got a small hotel room within five minutes of the airport. Thankfully, we managed to keep our time in San Jose limited. We did score a ride with one of the more interesting bus drivers in San Jose. His driving was atrocious and he kept flashing his lights, yelling and flipping off the locals as he switched lanes and swirved through traffic WITH A PUBLIC BUS.

Hope you enjoyed my blog travels to Costa Rica. I'll hopefully get to put another series of posts together this fall when I travel for over three weeks in South America with GAP Adventures to Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Iguassu Falls.