Today was a reminder to go with the flow and always have a plan B in your pocket…
We took awhile to get up and moving this morning after the long day yesterday and had some things we needed to take care of, so we left the condo later than anticipated to head to the Jaco Farmers Market. We arrived an hour before closing time to find the last two vendors nearly packed up…
So, we drove through town instead and thought we’d find some shops to look at, then we remembered we needed to exchange currency, so we headed to the BCR bank. Superman went through the metal detector and pat down only to find out no passport=no exchange. He was only carrying a copy, not the real thing. No big deal, we’ll do it later.
We thought about heading back through the main part of Jaco to shop and find lunch, but we were trying to get to a snorkeling spot with plenty of time to play, so we set the GPS to take us to Playa Blanco. When we turned off the main highway we were surprised by bumpy dirt roads through a community of shacks. No pictures, but there were several places advertising showers for 600 colones in the middle of nowhere… We decided that people in the shacks must not have running water.
Finally we made it through that into a paved touristy area – hotels, shops, etc. and turned to go to the beach only to find a security guard and a closed road because it’s a private community. We turned around and decided to find lunch first at the only hotel restaurant in the area. Miss A got a Cosado plate, the rest of us split a pizza. There’s really not a lot of variety on menus if you don’t like seafood or spending 10,000 colones per plate.
We went to the public parking for Playa Mantas (we heard that you can walk across the point to reach Playa Blanco). The parking attendant, through translation by Nixi Ray and Google, told us it’s $20 to park for the day, and they close in 3 hours. We’d have to be out by then or be towed. What beach closes at 4pm? She also said you can only reach Playa Blanco during low tide and she wasn’t sure what the tides are today. Maybe we’ll try it another day, but 3 hours isn’t enough time.
So, we headed to another beach I’d read about for snorkeling — Playa Herradura. This one ended up also being in a private Marriott owned community with a golf course and no access to the big beach. What?! Oh well, no problemo. There was one accessible beach called Rocky Marina Beach and we made the most of it.
The water was warm, there were tide pools, and a family of monkeys came to visit. A guy next to us got out a big bunch of bananas and shared a few with us– Miss A & Spud both got to feed a monkey and Superman tried but they didn’t take his. So fun!
When the sun was going down we cleaned up and headed back to Jaco for dinner on the main street…
Only we decided quickly that we didn’t love the night scene downtown. Definitely a different vibe there with a lot of bars, tattoo parlors and casinos. We walked through a couple of shops but weren’t tempted by the prices or emphasis on drugs…
(for example, this Nativity was priced at over $100 US)
So, we quickly got out of there and drove a few blocks until we found a quiet taco shop.
We also found a fruit shop and picked out a few new things to try and a few favorites. Pineapple, mango, ugli fruit, passion fruit, yellow passion fruit (the green one), Jamaican apple, Costa Rican guava, bananas and starfruit. Didn’t make it to the farmers market, but did get some fruit. (Did not buy cacao pods, but they were there!)
We also stopped on the way home and got coconut and lime ice cream to finish off the day. We enjoyed it while looking up info about Carara National Park and buying tickets for tomorrow’s adventure.
Like I said– today was a day for plan B and choosing to go with the flow. Travel is like that sometimes… Still was a great day in Costa Rica.
