•Costa Rica: Manuel Antonio, Jacó and San José 02/11-02/17

Sunday February 11th 

We tried to go to Taco Bell for breakfast this morning but it turns out it’s closed on Sunday!! Luckily we didn’t walk all the way there before figuring it out. We were walking out from the hostel and Jeff mentioned something about it being Sunday. I hadn’t thought about what day it was, but thought I remembered seeing in google that they were closed on Sunday. We walked back within WiFi range of the hostel, and sure enough! Crazy! They are open 7 am to 9 pm Monday to Saturday, closed Sunday. Those are some conservative hours! We instead went back to Yoguis. They are open 24/7. We had a really cheap, really delicious and really satisfying breakfast of gallo pinto, toast and ripe plantains. Total cost $5!

A delicious load of gallo pinto, sweet plantains and bread at Yogui's

We got back to the hostel and finally got to have our free breakfast fruit, a tiny ramekin of diced pineapple. We packed up after and left. It’s moving day! We left a bag at the hostel and made a reservation to come back in a few days. We are heading to the Pacific coast, to the National Park of Manuel Antonio. This park is Costa Rica’s smallest and also most popular. We didn’t cook all week in San Jose, and I don’t think we’ll get the opportunity to cook at the next place, so we left the food bag behind.

The bus ride was pretty short, 3 hours, and about as pleasant as a bus ride can be. The scenery became green very soon after leaving the city. We rode past tons of palm tree farms that are the kind that produce palm oil. Costa Rica is one of the biggest world producers of palm oil. An hour into the ride the driver pulled off at a roadside restaurant, the type of place that’s accustomed to receiving buses. He parked the bus, turned it off and got out and sat down at the counter to take a meal. No announcement, haha! Eventually everyone else got out to use the bathroom and buy snacks. It was an open air dining facility, with probably 10 different business under one roof. There was a guy making smoothies, a couple of food carts selling grilled meats, 3 cafeterias with trays full of food, a stand selling typical candies and a convenience store. It was hard to tell where one business ended and another began.

Unexpected roadside stop

Lots of foods for sale at roadside rest stop

Smoothie station complete with plastic lid sealing machine

African palm fruit trees. This is where palm oil comes from. Costa Rica is one of the world's biggest producers.

We got off the bus in Quepos, the gateway town for the national park. From Quepos, there’s a narrow and hilly road that leads 6 km to the national park. Lots of shops, restaurants and hotels are located along the way to the park, our place included. We are staying at Hostel Plinio, and although it’s less than a mile out of town, it’s an uphill walk, and waking along the road isn’t recommended, at its really narrow, there’s a lot of traffic and there is little to no shoulder. We took a $2 taxi. 

It wasn’t time to check in yet, so we put our bags in the storage closet and took the bus to lunch. The bus goes up and down the road between Quepos and the national park at the end of the road every 10-15 minutes and costs about 50¢. We ate at Falafel Bar, a newer restaurant that’s very popular. We ordered falafel plates that come with 5 falafels, hummus, hand cut fries, and a self serve salad bar. The salad bar is one visit, so we loaded up. It was a really good salad bar, nice to have so many colorful veggies on our plates. 

Colorful plate of food from falafel bar. I have once again beat Jeff at the fill your plate as full as you can game.

We came back to the hostel and spent the afternoon by the pool. It’s incredibly hot here. The kind of hot that has you sweating even when you’re sitting perfectly still. Every time we think we have finally adjusted to the heat, a day like this comes along and proves us wrong!

Our hostel is not supposed to be a party hostel, but there were two different groups of hooligans with annoying music and portable speakers for ensuring everyone else had to listen too. When one group left, the other group was ready to take over with their speaker ready. One of the speakers was as big as a violin. What kind of people travel with a giant speaker!? Hooligans!!

Our dorm is pretty neat. I think there are 4 dorms and they are each in their own unit of a 3 story building. You go in the bottom floor and find one private room and the shared bathroom, on the second floor is the dorm with a balcony, and on the 3rd floor is a crows nest style deck! Neat! The construction style is rustic jungle hut, with lots of wood and just wire and mesh over the windows. From the top floor and other areas in the hostel you can see the ocean, so we got a nice view of the sunset tonight.

Painted on the wall at the hostel kitchen

Looking up the stairs to the reception area

Hostel pool, the hooligans are cut out of the photo

3 story building with the rooms at our hostel

For dinner we decided to brave the road and take the downhill walk into town. It wasn’t too bad. We found most places in town to be closed since it is Sunday. We got some groceries so we can take lunch to the beach tomorrow. We decided on tortillas with refried beans and veggies. Somehow we made it home without the beans.

We ate dinner in one of the few locals restaurants that was open for dinner. We were handed a menu, but I immediately asked if they could just make us a vegetarian meal. The guy said yes, and seemed very confident in this, like it was a request he was used to. We sat for a really long time wondering what was taking so long, when finally he brought our two plates filled with steamed veggies! It was a wonderful assortment, broccoli, cauliflower, chayote, zucchini, cabbage and boiled green plantains. I wondered if he’d somehow misunderstood me and thought I’d asked for plates of vegetables. I asked if we could have rice and beans too. He quickly complied. I didn’t have high hopes, but it turned out to be a lovely dinner. You never know what you’re going to get when you ask for a veggie meal of the day. 

It was late when we finally finished with dinner. We were lucky to have perfect timing for getting on a bus back. We were back at the hostel and in bed before 9, the only ones in the dorm, just like always, haha.

You never know what you will get when you ask for vegetarian food.

Monday February 12th

When it is time to find a new hostel, I extensively research the breakfast offered at each of the possible options. I do this by reading Hostelworld reviews and also by using the keyword search on TripAdvisor. I also sometimes find photos of the breakfast on TripAdvisor. When researching Manuel Antonio/Quepos options, I learned that this hostel, Hostel Plinio has gallo pinto and fruit for breakfast!! I was sold! Hahaha!

The breakfast here is served through a window opening in the private hostel kitchen next to reception. The lady inside has gallo pinto, scrambled eggs and two different fruits each day. We got just the fruit and gallo pinto, the breakfast of my dreams! The gallo pinto is scooped using a one cup plastic container, which isn’t a lot, so we were delighted when we learned that we could get more! I made us some griddled ripe plantains slices (in the separate guest kitchen) to go with it and some avocado slices. The fruits of the day today were watermelon and pineapple. We got two plates of fruit and gallo pinto each! (: <3

Hostel gallo pinto and fruit with added ripe plantain and avocado

A toucan in the tree by while we were eating breakfast

We lounged around for awhile after breakfast reading the last chapters of my Dr Greger book. It’s a fascinating book, and one of the few I’ve read that I could actually pick right back up and read again. I will probably read it again when we go home, and take notes! It’s all about the studies that scientists have done on the effects of adding certain plant food to people’s diet and the outcomes that are achieved. It really shows the power of fruits, vegetables and spices and their ability to heal, oftentimes as well as or better than prescription medications!

We got up really early since we got to bed early and the sun comes up at 6, so it was still pretty early when we left to go to the beach. The national park is closed on Monday’s to try to offset the negative human contact with the wildlife. Our hostel recommended a secluded beach we could hike to instead. There are lots of paid activities we could have chosen to do instead, like jet skiing, sky diving, Segway touring, dolphin watching, etc. There is every kind of tour you could imagine here, you can even go stand up paddle boarding on a board that it outfitted with LED lights that illuminate the water beneath you! Segwaying on the beach sounded neat, so I looked it up, and it costs $100 for a couple hour tour, and we’ve always wanted to skydive, so I looked that up and it costs $336!! We chose to stick with the free activity instead. You could spend a fortune taking a vacation in Costa Rica! Luckily for the most part, dorm beds have been cheaper here than in Panama and when we eat local food it’s pretty affordable too, but I imagine most tourists don’t eat the local food regularly like we do.

It took about 45 minutes to get to the beach, mostly on backroads, then at the end on a trail. On the way we saw the best monkey show ever! We got to watched as a whole gang of adorable little spider monkeys migrated across the road. It wasn’t a busy area at all, we were the only ones there, but they used a power line to go up and over the road. We watched them go one by one, there must have been 50 or more of them! They were so cute!! They are the more rare monkeys that everyone wants to see when they visit the national park, so we felt very lucky to get to see them.

There were 5 other people at the beach when we arrived. It supposed to be best at low tide, which was earlier in the morning, so all of the others left, and we had it all to ourselves for a few hours. It was a small rocky cove with big waves. It was a little scary for swimming at high tide, because many rocks were concealed by the water. Jeff cut his foot by accidentally kicking a submerged rock. We stayed for several hours, our first successful beach day of the whole trip! We saw the high tide come and go and almost completely fill the cove with water. We found a nice big log set back in the shade and watched the waves and ate our lunch, two bananas each and a bag of in the shell peanuts. We were supposed to have our bean tacos, but without the beans it wasn’t possible!

We left the beach in the late afternoon, which was an uphill hike. On the way we found a huge pack of vultures tearing apart a smelly dead spider monkey! It was right in the road, and quite intimidating to walk through, vultures are huge birds! The vultures watch the monkeys and look for young, weak or injured monkeys and attack! Poor little monkey! 

So many monkeys!

What a monkey show!



Spider monkey

Watching the monkey show!

The road/trail to the beach

secluded beach near Quepos

A nice big driftwood bench

A neat frog with really long legs that can jump super far!

A few of the vultures in the trail that came back to keep eating the monkey after we had passed through.

When we got back to the road, we took a back way in to Quepos. It was a pleasant road with ocean views and no traffic. In town we went to late lunch-early dinner at Soda Sanchez. They had a really nice vegetarian plate of the day that consisted of rice, beans, salad, stewed potatoes, avocado, fried ripe plantain and a homemade tortilla. They have a Vitamix blender, so we each got frozen frozen cantaloupe smoothies! It was another fantastic local meal, and all for $12!

After dinner we went back to the grocery store for our refried beans. I also got more ripe plantains, an avocado, cilantro and a lime. Town was much more lovely today on a Monday than it was last night, Sunday night.

We took the bus back to our hostel and called it an early night. We went back to the comfy couches by reception and I researched and booked our next week of travel. Jeff just leisure read! He’s finished so many books on this trip!!

A perfect vegetarian casado

Sunset from the crows nest at the hostel

Tuesday February 13th

This morning I added some supplemental food to our gallo pinto breakfast: cooked sweet plantains, diced avocado, tomato slices and lots of chopped cilantro. These additions made for a decadent breakfast. The fruits of the day were pineapple and banana. We were so full that we saved the bananas for later. I think the kitchen lady likes us because we eat all of our gallo pinto and always ask for more and because I speak Spanish and we always say good morning and thank you! She gave us whole bananas instead of the segments that everyone else got. Most of the tourists don’t like eating rice and beans for breakfast. It also amazes us how much tourists expect people to speak English, they don’t even try to use a few Spanish words. They could at least speak simple clear English words, but they don’t do that either! They just talk as if they are in the United States and expect to be understood. That was probably one of the best breakfasts of the whole trip! We love gallo pinto!!

We were out on the highway waiting for the bus by 7:30. Today we visited the national park. By 8 we were in a ridiculously long line to buy tickets. It took half an hour for it to finally be our turn. They told us at our hostel that we could pay the entrance fee with a credit card. I pay with credit card whenever I can to save our cash and limit our need for going to the ATM. We were informed however, that it wouldn’t be charged as a normal credit card transaction, it would be charged as a cash advance, and that we could incur additional fees from the credit card company for such a transaction. We had no choice but to go ahead with it, because I didn’t bring extra cash. Once we’d paid, we had to wait in line to get in. All the while we were being hassled to buy whistles, pottery, guided tours, water and coconuts. The same guide asked us 5 different times if we wanted a tour. 

When we finally got in, the path was choked with guided groups that stopped every 10 steps to look at something new. The guided all have telescopes, and had them pointed at anything and everything, even butterflies and bees. We spent about half an hour pushing our way through the crowds until we finally reached a more secluded path. We went to a lookout point and a few beaches that are a little more secluded than the main beach. We also took a loop around a peninsula. In all we hiked about 4 hours, all the while sweating profusely. It was really hot and humid, but at least we were in the shade the whole time. During our walk we saw howler monkeys, white faced capuchin monkeys, a few sloths and some lizards.

The area around the main beach was insanely crowded with people and monkey and raccoons. It was like going to the circus. Raccoons walked the beach going from backpack to backpack looking for food. There was an infestation of white faced capuchin monkeys. They were in every tree, perched atop every sign, scurrying across the ground and opening peoples backpacks! We saw a monkey steal a bag of nuts and run up a tree to enjoy his loot! Monkeys and raccoon steal a lot of food from the bags of people who are swimming and have left their bags unattended. We were able to bring in a full lunch, but we kept it in our backpack on our backs until it was lunch time. We met some other people who had their bags searched when they entered and had their food confiscated! There are lots of restaurants at the park entrance that sell lunches to go specifically for taking in the park, and lots of other people had food, so it seems strange. They should really have lockers for people to lock up their food in. While we were hiking we encountered a monkey on some stairs that jumped back and forth on the railing trying to get at our backpacks. It was a bit intimidating. We saw another monkey off in the bushes with a bag of chip. And Jeff even saw a guy layout his foot long sandwich on a railing for the monkeys to take. He thought he was alone when he did it, but Jeff saw it as we approached and confronted him. He claimed that the monkey stole his sandwich! He was in an area where no one would stop for lunch and at a time too early in the morning to be stopping for a large sandwich. What an a**hole! We were pissed! There are so many people every day feeding the wildlife, and this has turned them into pests, it’s sickening! The park is trying to remedy the situation, and that is why they have started closing the park on Mondays, and they clear everyone out of the park by 4 pm each day.

Even though it was a sad and depressing experience in some ways, it was also fascinating. There was so much going on at the main beach, you could sit for hours watching. We found a more secluded spot to stop and take our lunch though. We were harassed relentlessly by a pair of raccoons. They weren’t scared of people at all, they came right onto our beach towel which we were seated on. Jeff had to bonk them on the head with his sunglasses case to get them to go away, but they would just come right back! This went on for a few hours, the whole time we were there! We had to take turns swimming. A monkey wandered over to our beach at one point and looted a tote bag hanging in the trees. Jeff chased him down the trail, but couldn’t get the food back. I guess all he got were the peels of some bananas.

Lining up for park tickets

Refreshing drinks and fruits for sale outside the national park

Fresh hibiscus flowers make an eye catching display.

Really crowded right after entering the park

Park trail map

tour groups with guides and telescopes

Neat information about leaf cutter ants. We see them often.

Getting very close to monkeys

The view from the high point in the park

Monkey up in the tree with a sandwich

Monkey down below trying to decide if it wants the cheese that fell from the sandwich. In the end the cheese was left uneaten. 

Another view from a high point along the trail

The guy in black is the idiot that gave away his sandwich. Other monkeys are standing by, waiting for scraps.

Neat spiky palm tree trunk

Puerto Escondido view

Lot of nice trail work

Las Gemelas Beach

A howler monkey in the tree above the beach

Mama and baby capuchin on the monkey super highway

People get very close to the animals

Looks more like a music festival than a national park

Sneaky racoons

The monkey in this tree just got ahold of a bags of nuts

Monkeys everywhere

Playa Manuel Antonio

More people scaring the monkeys and pretending to offer food and a wannabe thong butt.

Surprisingly I didn't have to wait in line for a photo with the sign!

Poor little monkeys

Another mama with baby

So cute

This lady doesn't even know they are there,

A family of 4 monkeys hanging out and grooming each other.

Playa Espadilla Sur

Playa Espadilla Sur

Lounging raccoon, waiting for people to leave their backpacks unattended.

Nice stone stairway

View from the Punta Catedral

There is a big sloth and it's baby in the top left of this photo.

Couldn't help but take another photo, they are too cute!

Looking toward the busy beach

On Punta Catedral trail

Playa Manuel Antonio

In spite of how pessimistic we were feeling when the day started with the lines and the crowds, we still had a great day. The hiking was nice, it was fun seeing wildlife, and we enjoyed our time at the beach, Playa Espadilla Sur. Playa Manuel Antonio was the next beach down and was the busier one. We also had a really nice picnic lunch, refried black bean and sweet plantain tacos with a pico de gallo like salad with added avocado and red bell pepper. It was so delicious! Plantains on tacos probably sound like a strange addition to tacos, but I would compare it to having sweet potatoes on tacos. It really is a good combination.

Our beach had a steep angle to it, the water got deep fast, causing the waves to break right onto the sand. These were huge waves that came down in a big crash and sent water rushing up the shore. For a whole I lied down in what I call the soak zone, and let the rushing water wash over me. When it was time for our final rinse off, Jeff had the idea for me to let the waves take me, so I rolled down the slope until I was pulled in. I closed my eyes as tight as I could and was tumbled around with such force and speed that I got instant motion sick. It was a crazy feeling! I was probably only at the mercy of the tides for 10-15 seconds, but it was so powerful, I’ve never been so instantly sick! I didn’t throw up, but felt lousy the rest of the day. An experience like this gives you respect for the power of nature. 

We stayed until the park closed. We’d be looking forward to buying a coconut when we got back out. There were coconut being sold everywhere, some sellers were even right at the gate thrusting coconuts into our faces as soon as we exited! I’m sure they got a lot of business that way. We went a few stands down, to spread out the business. Fresh coconut water sure is refreshing! They are stored in coolers all day so they are nice and cold too! Hundreds of coconuts must be enjoyed every day outside the gates of Manuel Antonio. Most people just toss the coconut after drinking the water, and so many coconuts go uneaten! It makes us sad. We had our coconut broken open, and the nice man even used a big serving spoon to scoop out all the meat for us.

After our coconut we went across the street to an ice cream shop that sold local kombucha. They had a ginger flavor, and I was still feeling ill from my tumbling in the surf. It was expensive kombucha, but I was hoping it might help me feel better. It was extremely fizzy and exploded all over me when I opened it. I drank as much as I could, but chugging a kombucha probably didn’t help my stomach! We also found another prescooped broken open coconut in the trash that hadn’t been eaten, so we put it in the container in my backpack. I suspect that people don’t like the taste of natural coconut because they are used to sugary coconut products and artificial coconut flavor.

Really good lunch, sweet plantains, refried beans, tortillas and pico de gallo style salad.

Annoying raccoon won't leave me alone

Our nice rest area in the shade.

An agouti came through our rest area

Nice shade canopy

view of our rest area

there is never a shortage of photo shoots to watch. Three photo shoots in one!

Both of the other photo shoots went on forever. The two girls sitting in the sand were taking photos for hours.

This seems to be the favorite pose for most girls these days. This photo shoot went for about 30 minutes and include her dipping her hair in the water then quickly whipping it out for just the best photo ever!

We continued down the park access road toward the bus stop. We stopped along the way to admire a gigantic ceiba tree, and to watch one last monkey show before getting back on the bus. We stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way back to our hotel. The restaurant is called El Avion, which means the airplane. They have a really good location in the hills with nice views of the ocean and the sunset. They also have a giant airplane in the middle of he restaurant that serves as the bar. It’s a real airplane that the owners bought for a few thousand dollars. I saw this restaurant last time I was here, 7 years ago. I thought it looked neat, but we probably wouldn’t have gone if my sister hadn’t recommended it to us. She was here a few years ago and ate there. They don’t have many vegan options, but there are enough, and the views are fantastic. We were early birds, getting there well in advance of the sunset, and got one of the best tables. From our table we got to watch an affectionate pair of toucans through our binoculars and also see the pretty sunset. People kept crowding around our table to get pictures from the railing. We had fruit smoothies, a veggie sandwich with fries, a salad and some veggie nachos without cheese. It was a fun experience, certainly more expensive than a local restaurant, but for 3 main dishes and two drinks and tax and tip we paid $38, not bad.

Right after the sun went down it began to rain. We were lucky to enjoy three beautiful clear sunny days. Even in the dry season here, it’s not really dry and we read that you should expect rain here all year. We feel very lucky.

We went to bed really early tonight, 8:30! All of the sun and heat and sweating zapped us, and I couldn’t shake my lousy motion sick stomach, so sleeping was a welcome escape!

We think this is a ceiba tree. The bromeliads covering it are huge.

Couldn't resist one last monkey photo.

the airplane

inside is a bar and you can climb into the cockpit for a photo.

pretty smoothie drinks

bird watching and dining!

view through the binoculars

sunset from the restaurant

history of the airplane. I don't know how legible this is on a computer.

A fine dinner at El Avion

Wednesday February 14th

Today we moved away from Quepos. We originally had reservations to go to a place in the hills called Rancho Mastatal. It’s a permaculture farm that I’ve always wanted to visit. We were going to stay for two nights. I had planned our whole week around this, and even made reservations in San Jose for after we left there. They emailed me yesterday though informing me that they gave away our room! The guy claimed that my last email went to his spam folder and he just assumed I never responded, so they gave it away! That’s frustrating. So we are moving to Jacó beach instead. 

Jacó beach was the first beach in Costa Rica to be developed for tourism, and it just keeps growing and growing. The whole beach front has been deforested to build hotels, several of which are towers. The main road is a mile and a half of endless gift shops, surf board rentals, car and motorcycle rentals, tour operators, restaurants, bars, bakeries, coffee shops, ice cream shops, smoothie and juice bars and grocery stores. It always blows my mind to see such a concentration of commercialism. It’s hard to imagine how they all stay in business. Needless to say, it’s not really our kind of place, but it’s interesting.

We left on the 11 AM bus. The distance should be able to be easily covered in well under an hour, but took almost 2 hours on the bus. We are staying in an Air BnB that is a shipping container studio apartment. I’ve always wanted to see inside a shipping container house. We’ve only used Air BnB one other time, to stay in a retro single wide trailer in Colorado. It was a really cool place. I look at Air BnB for just about every location we visit, but we never want to spend the extra money, unless it’s something really cool

We got checked in and asked for a recommendation for food and cheap local food. The guy mentioned a couple places, and told us that cafeterias were popular here, the places where the food is all made and you point to what you want. We’ve been missing those since we left Panama, so we were excited! The place is called Restaurante Garabito and it’s located well off the main road. We got huge plates of delicious food and iced tea for $12. They had lots of veggie dishes and even green banana ceviche. I had read about the ceviche and had been wanting to try it.

After lunch we looked in a fruit market next door and found some fun things to take back to our apartment. I got a section of guanabana, a caimito, a ripe mango, and some pejibaye. In English pejibaye is apparently peach palm fruit, but I don’t think anyone in the US would know them by that name. They are a fruit from a variety of palm tree though. We had them a few times from street vendors in Colombia where they called them chontaduros. The fruit shop sells them preboiled. Jeff doesn’t like them much, but I was very excited to find them!

On the walk back we stopped in a grocery store to check out the selection. I got some soda water and grape juice to mix with a bottle of wine that was left by the previous guests of the shipping container. When we got back we hid out in the air conditioning until the heat of the day had passed. It’s disgustingly hot out. We don’t understand Celsius temperature well, so I looked it up. We had seen some temperature signs displaying 36, and that’s in the high 90s Fahrenheit, and it’s humid. No wonder we’re dying.

The beach is just a block from our place, so once the extreme heat had passed we went down to the water. Jeff took a swim, and then we took a sunset walk to the end of the cove. It was a really pretty sunset with lots of colorful clouds, and the colors reflected in the surf and on the wet sand.

We were still really full from lunch, so we ate a light dinner of odds and ends. I found a can of asparagus in the apartment and some corn cracker that we like, so we ate those. We’ve never had canned asparagus, it was weird. Seems like a stupid vegetable to can, because it makes it no longer taste like it should and it’s also expensive. I don’t understand why anyone would buy it and leave it behind. We also ate the palm fruits with ketchup and mayo. They are more vegetable like even though they are called a fruit. They remind me of pumpkin, but they are harder and drier. Jeff complained a lot and I had to finish his. We also had our wine cocktails and stayed in the rest of the night watching movies on Netflix.

Our red bananas were finally ripe today, and really good.

An amazing meal at Restaurante Garabito! Wish we could have gone back.

A view of the main road in Jaco

The refried bean selection in the grocery store.

This is how you make your fried foods healthy!

tubes of margarine

Jeff outside the shipping container

Kitchen and second bedroom

Bathroom. Walls look curved, but that's just panorama effect.

Our patio

Our room

Pejibaye

Thursday February 15th

We ate an assortment of fruit on the deck of our shipping container for breakfast this morning. We had coconut (that we found by Manuel Antonio), guanabana, caimito and mango. 

exotic fruits

We had time to watch another movie on a Netflix before we had to check out. We chose an Adam Sandler movie that neither of us had ever heard of called, That’s My Boy. It was really funny.

Only one night was available for the shipping container. We like it well enough in Jacó that we decided to stay another night instead of going back to San José early. We already have a reservation for Friday and Saturday night at our hostel in San José. I found a nearby hostel that is more hotel than hostel, which is the kind of place we prefer. These kinds of hostels tend to be more impersonal and tend to have good facilities. 

On the walk to the new hostel, we stopped for an early lunch at a place called Taco Bar. I have been finding that everywhere we go in Costa Rica there are too many exciting places to eat! We keep wanting to stay more days everywhere so we can eat! We have been overloaded with food, and I will be relived for the break that I think Nicaragua will provide! Taco Bar has an overwhelming menu, the entire thing in drawings, hip little drawings of each plate that look like food blogger photos with little bits of food all over the place. They have a full breakfast menu, tacos, salads, pita sandwiches and full dinner plates, plus smoothies and all sorts of other drinks. All of the main dishes, which includes tacos, comes with an all you can eat salad bar. That’s the main reason we came. They also have counter seating in which the seat is a swing, that was a draw too!

The menu was really confusing. We each got two tacos each, one with each veggie option. Hummus, falafel, grilled veggies and portobello mushroom. Maybe you were supposed to mix and match the fillings though, like hummus and veggie? We weren’t sure if you could have more than one filling per taco. The tacos weren’t that good. The veggie and mushrooms ones were basically a giant pile of oily veggies with no flavor and a crispy white tortillas that was hard to fold up and eat. The swings were fun though, and the salad bar made up for the lousy tacos. I wish I’d only ordered one taco! We also got a delicious papaya smoothie that came in a 32 oz mason jar!!

this doesn't look like tacos should!

Fun seating and nice salad bar!

Our new hostel is called Room2Board. They are also a surf school, and they rent surf boards too. They have a pool with water slide, a bar and restaurant and 3 floors full of rooms above the main floor. We checked in, rented boogie boards and headed to the beach, which is only a few steps away. The boogie boarding wasn’t as easy as we had hoped, there’s a strong current that pulls you down the beach away from where you started, and the water gets deep quickly making it hard to catch any waves. It’s not as easy to paddle on a boogie board as it is on a surf board, unless you also have flippers. We usually stand in the shallow water and kind of jump into the wave. We tired out after just half an hour. I think we were also dehydrated after a really salty lunch. We napped on our boogie boards for a long while before mustering up the motivation to get back in. We went for another half hour then called it quits. We had better success the second time around.

We came up to the top deck of the hostel where they have lots of rocking chairs. From here we could see the beach and watch the sun beginning to set. We learned that there’s some sort of electronic dance music festival going on this weekend in Jaco, and there’s another one next weekend in Manuel Antonio, so a bunch of weirdos with the US and Canada came down just for these festivals. They all look like gypsy hippie types. They have infiltrated with hostel and beach. They come bearing hula hoops and fire sticks and partially shaved dread lock heads and genie pants. Also our room absolutely reeks of marijuana, the most intense marijuana smell I have ever smelled. It will be an interesting night. 

Jaco Beach

Jaco Beach

Pool at Room2Board Hostel

Nice hostel room

Really nice rooftop deck

Sunset on Jaco beach

A beach full of hooligans!!

We had a really hard time choosing what to have for dinner. There’s a pizza place called pizza bar that had a 900 degree oven, so they can make pizzas almost instantly. You get to choose your toppings from a subway like display of 50 or more options. They also make pizza crust bowls for salad! 

We also wanted to eat local cafeteria food again too though and just couldn’t make a decision! We started walking towards the pizza place because it’s closer than the cafeteria we ate in the other day, but on the way we passed another cafeteria called Jacó Rústico. I remember this one being recommended by our Air BnB guy, so we went in to have a look. The options looked too tempting to pass up, so we got a plate to share containing green plantain ceviche, a pumpkin wedge, beans, tortillas, beet potato salad, green salad and stewed veggies. It was incredibly delicious, and we almost got another plate, but we stopped ourselves and continued on to the pizza place.

The pizza place had a confusing menu and was ultra hip like taco bar. We ordered a salad and a pizza to share. Each topping you add costs extra money but the prices per items vary and are not advertised, so it’s really easy to rack up a hefty bill. We got capers, artichoke hearts, portobello mushrooms and roasted garlic on our pizza. It was loud in there and hard to communicate with the guy behind the counter, so on our salad, instead of broccoli we got a ton of roasted garlic! They don’t build it right in front of you, just check off boxes on an order slip. We also got red onion, roasted red pepper, mushrooms and avocado. They had kombucha on tap, so we got a glass of each kind. They were huge beer glasses! In total our bill came to 20,000 pesos, an average cafeteria meal costs 6,000, so it’s quite the difference. It comes out to about $35 US dollars, so really not bad. It’s probably about the same as it would cost in the US. Compared to local restaurants, gringo food is expensive. We had a good time sitting in their giant swing at a window to the outside, and our food was good. 

Next door to the pizza place was a gelato place, so we topped off our food spree and Señor Turista evening by having gelato. They had three delicious vegan flavors, mango, ginger-lime and basil-pineapple. We found a hermit crab inside the gelato place. He was far from the beach, a few blocks up and across the main road, so we put him in my bag and took him back. We walked the rest of the way back on the dark and deserted beach. The tide was way out, so there was lots of nice hard packed sand for walking on.

Luckily our room is on the 3rd floor and far down the hall, about as far from the bar and pool area as we could hope for. We were in bed by 9:30, well before anyone in our room. The bar music stops at 11, so if people want to party they have to leave. Amazingly though our room is pretty quiet.

What a "buffet" restaurant looks like.

Plantain ceviche on the left and beans and veggies on the other plate

Sapotes in the middle, guanabanas on the right and on the left are huge melon like things called chiverre that is made into a sweet paste, that's what's in the packages.

Pizza salad bowl

Another fun seating option!

So hip, you'd think we were somewhere in the US

Friday February 16th

We awoke to find a man sleeping on the tile floor atop a special hippie carpet. There was an unclaimed bed, but we assume he was a squatter who somehow made it into the room without paying. We were up really early, and all of the people in our room were sleeping in, since they were partying late into the night. We left the room for awhile to eat, and the freeloader had disappeared by the time we got back. We were still feeling pretty full from last night, so we just had some fruit and nuts. I got a free grapefruit from the kitchen and a bag of lime flavored peanuts. We also ate a sapote that I found in the grocery store. We haven’t had a sapote since Colombia, where we only ever had two of them. I’ve been wishing for one ever since. This one was perfectly ripe and custard like. I hope to find them again. Read about sapotes on Wikipedia if you feel like it!

The bus stop is on the other side of town. The guy at reception insisted it was a horribly long walk and we should just take a $5 taxi. The taxi ride would cost more than the bus ticket and that just seemed crazy, plus we like to walk. It was only about a mile and a half, and we got to walk along the beach at low tide. It was not too hot since it was still pretty early morning, but we still arrived very sweaty! We needed the exercise after all that food we ate yesterday!

Random guy on his hippie carpet on the floor of our dorm room.

Morning low tide on Jaco Beach

We didn’t have a long distance to travel to San Jose. It should have taken less than an hour by car, but it took 2 1/2 hours as the route goes by the airport on the way into town. We drove on a smooth paved road in a nice big bus with comfortable seats.

We got out of the bus at a different terminal than the one we left from. There are several different terminals in town that serve different destinations. This terminal is called 7-10, because it is at the intersection of street 10 and avenue 7. It is conveniently located in walking distance of downtown. It’s a wonderful feeling to know your way around and not need to get in a taxi to take you to where you want to go. From there it was about a mile and a half walk to our hostel. We stopped off for lunch at the downtown location of La Tortillaria on our way. We got salad, picadillo, gallo pinto and plantains of top of giant corn tortillas. We also got a traditional drip coffee called chorreado, a papaya smoothie, and for dessert a chorreada (giant sweet corn pancake). The food there is so delicious. Maybe one of our favorite meals of the trip.

Our travels today

Typical coffee preparation

We will forever dream of this meal!

Chorreada - Sweet corn cake, as big as a dinner plate.

We had planned to go out to dinner, since there’s so many restaurants we’d love to visit again, but I ended up cooking for us. I found sweet potatoes and carrots in the free bin, so I cooked those into a curried veggie mash and served it with lentils and brown rice that we had in our stored food bag. It was nice to eat some food with little salt. We have been overloaded with excessive loads of salt from all these meals out. 

We quickly learned that Crazy Mary is still here at the hostel. I cooked with headphones in, in hopes that she might not try to talk to me. Or if she did I could pretend not to hear!! I managed to make it though the cooking process in peace, but shortly after we sat down to eat, she came and sat with us. She loves to talk and just plops herself down next whoever and immediately begins running her mouth. We’ve overheard her tell all sorts of crazy stories, but mostly she likes to talk about her intellectual property being stolen and being raped and sodomized by the culprits and how they are following her and have her phone tracked, etc. She is from Canada but has been down here at this hostel since November. We don’t know why she is here, but learned this from another girl in the hostel that has been in and out of here a few times and had the misfortune of sharing a dorm room with Mary. Jeff overheard her tell someone that she is a paranoid schizophrenic. We feel bad for her, but it’s really difficult talking to her. She makes you want to run. She told us she was in the Starbucks down the street and that whoever it is that’s been targeting her has found her down here now.

Luckily we were done eating shortly after she sat down, and she had to tend to her own dinner preparations, so we didn’t get stuck for too long. We left and walked 15 minutes to the San Pedro Mall to watch a movie. We got tickets to an English showing of The Black Panther. We got there about 45 minutes early to buy tickets but it was almost sold out! You get assigned seats, and we were stuck with the front row. It was pretty intense trying to watch the action scenes so close to the screen. I felt like I was on the verge of being motion sick the whole time. Black Panther is a Marvel comic book story that I knew nothing about, so the story line was a bit difficult for me to understand, but it was still an enjoyable time. It 10 PM when we got out, and the mall was a ghost town. It was kind of creepy and hard to figure out how to get out! On the walk back we could see lots of young people just beginning their night of partying. It was well past our bedtime, so we hurried back!

My fake headphones (no music playing) to keep Crazy Mary from trying to me. We later learned nothing will stop her! 

The mall all shut down after the movie.

Saturday February 17th

Our hostel in Puerto Viejo had a huge tree in the backyard called water apple. It was full of fruits, and they were rotting all over the ground. I really wanted to try it but couldn't find a good one. When we were walking from the bus station to the hostel yesterday, I saw a street vendor selling them, so I bought one. I never seem to be successful at buying just one or two of something, the vendor always rounds up and sells me more, so I ended up with two of them. This morning for breakfast we tried the fruit with our allotment of pineapple and tea. The water apple is pretty bland and kind of makes your mouth feel chalky. It crisp and juicy at the same time. Jeff really didn't like it. I thought it was ok. I always enjoy trying new fruits. Before we could get away Crazy Mary invited herself to sit with us. Even if there are no chairs around, she'll find one and pull it up next to you!

A new fruit, water apple (manzano de agua)

We escaped as quickly as we could and walked to Taco Bell to try out the gallo pinto breakfast options. We got two crunchwraps and two sliders. The crunchwrap had hidden meat in it!! It also had gallo pinto, sour cream and hash brown patty. The slider was a smaller version of a crunchwrap, without meat, and instead of a hashbrown patty it contained tater tots. After we ate those I ordered one more crunchwrap with no meat and no sour cream. I can't say any of them were really outstanding, but I liked the vegan one the best.

On the walk back to the hostel, we stopped in at a bakery called Bread House. They had an eye catching display of black, red and green colored breads. I wanted to know what made the black ones black. They told me it was olives, but there is no way adding olives to bread would make it that black. It reminded me of a time a few years ago that Burger King had a limited edition burger with a black bun. My friend Josette told me that eating that burger gave you neon green poop from all the weird food coloring, apparently it was big news on the internet. With this in mind we got a load of black bread to try, haha!

Gallo pinto crunchwrap

Black, red and even green bread.

We lounged around at the hostel for awhile and ate our black bread. Eventually we got motivated and walked to the farmers market. We were so full of crunchwraps and bread that nothing really appealed to us. I didn't even want to buy produce for fear that I would be ambushed by Crazy Mary while preparing it! We ended up having a kombucha and trying a cup of coffee. Probably the most popular vendor at the farmers market is the Taza Amarilla coffee tent. Taza Amarilla means yellow cup. They use yellow ceramic cups that get turned in and reused, no disposables. You see the cups all over the market. They have cashew milk and minimally processed cane sugar. Jeff declared it the best cup of coffee he's ever had.

We took a different route out of the farmers market and found a Cosechas smoothie shop!! We haven't seen Cosechas since Colombia and although I was far from hungry, I couldn't resist getting a smoothie. I ordered the healthy "weight loss" smoothie with pineapple, celery, cucumber and parsley. On the way back we stopped in Francia park to sit and take earth. It was really windy today though and cloudy and cool, so our time in the park wasn't too pleasant with debris blowing in our faces.

Back at the hostel, I captioned photos on the computer, then Jeff proofread. I thought the computer was a safe place to be, but Crazy Mary came and got Jeff while he was proofreading, even with headphones on. He ignored her, pretended not to hear. Good for him, I wouldn't be able to do that! She basically began ranting to anyone that would listen that she went to the Apple store today to try to get her phone debugged and all about how they couldn't help her. She thinks there are people after her that have followed her to Costa Rica and have put a tracker or recording device of some sort on her phone. We learned from another girl in our dorm room that Mary has been in this hostel since November and she is getting worse in her paranoia, as it is getting close to time for her to return to Vancouver.
 
For our final night in San Jose, we decided to return to Luv Burger for dinner. We got a classic burger and a coconut bacon burger with sweet potato fries, yuca fries and kombucha. It was once again extremely delicious, the coconut bacon especially so. Since we knew we wouldn't be back there any time in the near future, and we rarely find vegan desserts, we decided to try their tiramisu cheese cake, made with cashews. Delicious!

A rascal puppy Jeff found at the farmers market.

Coconut bacon burger at Luv Burger. If you haven't tried coconut bacon yet, you should!