Costa Rica - Playa Ocotal

After we did a brief tour of the cloud forest on Friday morning we took off in our car for the Pacific coast! A lot of what we did this day was driving, long but not terrible. Driving down the mountain from Monteverde to the Pan-American Highway was very windy and slow, but had pretty scenery. It was probably about two hours until we got to the big, huge, major highway....which was one lane in each direction in an approximately straight line...on occasion it would have three or even four lanes! Still with potholes, but luxurious! Not a whole lot exciting happened, we drove North until Liberia, then headed West for the coast! While still in Monteverde we had identified that we wanted to stay, at least the first night, at Playa Ocotal. It sounded very pretty and was near several other beaches we thought would be nice. One interesting thing about the beaches along Costa Rica's Pacific coast is the color of sand. There are black, pink, white, grey sand beaches....all right next to each other! So Ocotal is one of the black sand beaches, seemed good to us and there were several hotels that were recommended in our various books. Actually arriving at Playa Ocotal was a little more confusing than we first thought, the only way there was to drive through another beach, but it just seemed like we were driving off into the middle of nowhere. We turned around and drove around aimlessly for a while thinking we were somewhere that we weren't, but eventually we made it down to Ocotal, which was a gated community beach! This seemed a bit odd to me, but it was getting late and I was tired of driving.
So we get to the first hotel in our guidebook, which shall remain unnamed, and it was just weird. It was totally empty, though it looked very nice. The rooms were VERY expensive, but they had two double beds, so the four of us figured that wouldn't be a problem if we split the cost. However, the guy wouldn't let the four of us share a room with enough spaces to sleep four people, he claimed the rooms couldn't hold that many. He just seemed really sketchy about having us stay there at all and was generally creepy. There was even a family suite with separate rooms and he didn't think that would work. He then recommended a hostel in a bad part of the town we had to drive through that would be very cheap. I don't know what his scheme was...but I didn't like it. Anyway, we decided to look around and see if we could find anything else. Fortunately, just a little bit down the same road there was a cute looking condo up on top of a hill with a sign that said bed and breakfast. We drove up there to check the place out. There was a nice couple in the pool at the time and they said they were the only ones there and that the owner was nice. It turns out, they were right. The owner was a really nice older man from Romania. He had several rooms open and charged us a really reasonable price! Funnily, he gave us one room with a king bed, and one room with two beds. We think he probably assumed Emily and I would be in the king bed and the other two girls would be in the single beds. Oh how funny what people think...

We decided it would be a great place to stay and hurried to unpack our things to head down to the beach while there was still a little bit of sunlight. The beach was indeed gorgeous. It was a small, secluded cove with gorgeous black sands and a ton of cute little fishing boats. There was a somewhat overpriced restaurant down on the beach, Father Rooster's, which was an excellent place for dinner. Walking distance to our condo, good margaritas, live music, on the beach, good food...what could have been better? It was a great end to our Friday! Also, for some reason when we were walking back to the B&B there were fireworks! We think it was for Costa Rica's Mother's Day...or maybe just a birthday...hard to tell. Anyway, it was a great night.

Saturday August 16 was our day to explore the other area beaches, specifically Playa Conchal, which was supposed to be a gorgeous pink beach composed of crushed conch shells! Katie got to drive today and we took off fairly early in the morning (after our great host brought us up a pot of coffee!). We got a bit lost again trying to get out of the area, but Katie had faith in where she was going and did get us out onto the road (via some street that wasn't on any map...like many streets there). We stopped at a grocery store halfway there to get beach goods (i.e. beer and snacks) and had some more bread. Did I mention how disappointing bread is in Costa Rica? They eat everything so sweet! It is so gross and weird tasting to me to eat sweet and mushy bread. Blech. It was all a little bit like Hawaiian bread...only not as good...and not made into French toast by my father. So we get down to Playa Conchal and find a parking spot on the beach, we could have driven quite far down the beach, but would have driven through a small trickle of a creek and did not feel like dealing with that at the time. We decided to park at the far end and walked all the way down. The thing about this beach, according to the guidebook, was that you could only get to it at low tide. It was low tide and we scrambled out over the rocky point to get to this secret little cove. As it turns out, it wasn't a secret. The beach was PACKED, but for good reason. Also, there was a road and an easy path that go there from where we parked, but we didn't see that until after we already almost killed ourselves on the sharp rocks. We used this day to play in the water, lay on the sand, read books, and not do much. It was great! We were there until about 2pm, but decided we should go back before it gets dark. Walking back to the car we found that the tide was much higher, and fortunately we parked where we did, because we wouldn't have been able to get through the flooded torrent that the little creek had turned into! There was a big deal going on about how to get out the car that was stuck in it! But we couldn't really help, so we took off for home. Katie, the aforementioned adventurous driver, of course wanted to take the scenic route. I did, in fact, think we were doing to die and either fall off a mountain, be stranded on some rocky road, and/or drown in a river. Fortunately, although this things were all risks, we did manage to make it down the road...several hours longer than we thought it would take. The scariest part was probably fording the rivers. We thought there would only be one, but they just kept coming! And some of them went almost to my knees! We got back to the B&B, cleaned up, and went to the fancy hotel up the hill to the nice restaurant, Picante! No fireworks tonight, but I did drink the largest margarita ever.
On Sunday we decided it was time to drive further South on the coast! Again we woke up early, and I drove us down towards Jaco. The road was fairly uninteresting, though we did drive through Filadelfia, cross a nice bridge, and cross a bridge over a river full of nasty looking crocodiles. We stopped in Jaco for fish tacos, which were amazing! And the taco bar had swings! It was so wonderful! I wish everywhere had delicious fish taco bars with swings! We kept going on down the coast (after buying beer at the store) and decided to stay at Playa Esterillos Este.