Costa Rica’s "Hidden Coast": Nosara, San Juanillo and surrounds

On Tuesday, August 6, 2019 (post ophthalmologist appointment!) we drove from San Jose to our AirBnB rental for the month. The distance is only 150 miles (240 kms) but it takes ~4 1/2 hours to drive. We expected it to take our team at least 6 1/2 hours with the obligatory food, bathroom and stretching breaks. The countryside is beautiful and the roads are mostly good. Most roads are one lane each way so any interruption caused by roadwork or slow vehicles creates delay. We also knew we would not want to be navigating these roads in the dark, which is why we spent the night in San Jose and left first thing in the morning. It allowed for a relaxed day of driving without any real time pressure to get there. The last few miles were as expected; gravel roads, narrow bridges, low water stream crossings and lots of potholes.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and today have seen us settling into our new life. We have been exploring, working on a schedule and spending lots of time together.

Currently, it has the feeling of a weekend in Seattle except it doesn’t end after 2-days. Whitney is never on call at the hospital, I don’t have work emails/calls to do, and no pressing household errands loom. We are starting to lose track of what day of the week it is, which is a welcomed experience.

Our rental house is in a nature reserve. We have had visits from monkeys, iguanas, huge vulture like birds, bats, and there is a seemingly endless white-noise hum of the forest animals and insects. Scarlett, our resident naturalist, has set up her animal hospital next to the pool and has saved dozens of caterpillars, centipedes, frogs and other small critters who have fallen either into the pool or appeared to be in distress.

We have done our big set-up grocery shop at the Nosara Super (aka supermarket) spending ~181,000 Costa Rica Colones or about US$320. We love grocery shopping in new countries, seeing what products are available and what is native to the area. Our love of this was sorely tested by the fairly solid and seemingly continuous meltdowns. Scarlett and Nora because they both wanted to push the cart with the other inside, and Whitney and Hazel because they were too hot in the un-air conditioned store. Nonetheless we completed it and made the 8 mile (13 km) drive north to our rental house in about 31 minutes along the bumpy dirt road, crossing a handful of streams (including one where you drive through 2-4 feet of water) along the way.

Too early to tell how our overall trip budget is holding up. No surprises in either direction on this front yet, so that is positive, but time will tell.

The pictures are from our first 4 days exploring the towns and beaches from Nosara to San Juanillo, Costa Rica. We will continue exploring further, revisiting some of these places again, and doing a few activities to mix up the days.