About 5 hours after we left San Jose, our bus arrived in Puerto Viejo! It was about 2:30 PM and a perfect day to venture to the beautiful beaches there are there. Here you can see it's on the Caribbean Sea.
I said goodbye to Jeff and Rob as they were at a separate hotel quite a distance away, and I walked a few blocks to my hotel, Jacaranga, which was highly recommend by IHCAI and past exchange students. As soon as I walked in the "door" I could see why! I say "door" because the hotel was actually totally outside except for the bedrooms! Pictures are worth 1000 words, so here are a few photos to help paint a picture of where I stayed. Here is the sign and the entrance all made of hand-set ceramic tiles!
The "hallways" to my room!
My room, complete with mosquito nets and my own personal bathroom!
The "common lounge" of the hotel
Really video is the only way to do it justice! The video starts on my very own personal "porch" and ends showing the "hallway"
Now that you have an idea of the tropical vacation I was about to embark on, let the saga continue. So we arrived, I got settled, and I quickly ran to the beach for some much needed cooling off. The water was amazing, it was the warmest ocean water I think I've ever experienced! I relaxed for a few hours and read my book that my hermanita gave me titled, "Aprendiendo a quererse a si mismo"(Learning to love yourself). The book is pretty basic to read but some of the lines in it really crack me up.
After cooling off I decided to walk along the roadside to check out the street vendors and see what they were selling. They had everything imaginable! I was walking past the street vendors and the beachside store fronts when I heard my name. I turned around it was Rob again! Turns out Puerto Viejo isn't a very big place after all! We check out some of the stores and restaurants nearby, and then decided to go to a bar right on the water that had live music at sunset! It was beautiful and the drinks were great. Surprising our waitress was from the US, and had lived in Puerto Viejo for 10 years! She assured us we could order salad and have ice in our drinks, as most of the restaurants on Puerto Viejo, including hers, used purified water. We listened to the music for a while, it was an amazing group of locals, one of whom was a kid about 9 years old who was fantastic! You can't see much in this video, but if you listen, you can hear his cute little voice!
I woke up Sunday morning and went for a run on the beach, and it was beautiful. I ran to Playa Negra (Black Beach) and it really did have black sand in some parts!
I went back to the hotel, got changed and asked the receptionist where she would recommend I go for breakfast. A note about most of the stores, shops, and employees who work in Puerto Viejo, they almost all speak English. Because it is such a tourist destination, they usually just start speaking English the second they see a gringa. Anyway, the receptionist recommended either Cafe Rico which true to its name has rich coffee, or Bread & Chocolate which Rob also reccomended as he went there three years ago when he came to Puerto Viejo. I checked out the menus at both places and decided on Bread & Chocolate, and I was happy I did! I had an amazing plate of pancakes, which I had been craving for the longest time. They were cinnamon oatmeal and delicious!
After breakfast I headed back to my hotel and packed up my bags to check out, and the hotel let me keep all my bags there for the day for free. I went to one of the millions of bike stands and rented a bike for the day for about $2 USD! I ending up chatting with the man who was renting the bikes and he recommended I bike down to the next "tourist destination" to see the beach down there. I took his advice and off I went to Manzanillo!
I biked back from Manzanillo and found a beautiful beach. I laid out for a few hours until there was a sudden downpour, per usual here, and I ran for cover underneath the canopy of the trees and I wasn't the only one to have this idea.
While hiding from the rain, I met a girl named Shomalie who was from Canada and we started chatting. I remembered seeing her in Bread & Chocolate earlier that morning, and we share stories about our lives. An hour later and the rain still had not subsided, so we ran across the street to find more shelter at a restaurant. We ended up talking for hours, she was a really great person! We said our goodbyes and I headed back to the hotel to gather my bag and head to the bus to go back to San Jose. The bus ride seemed longer on the way home, but it was totally worth it. The weekend was great! When we arrived back at the bus station in San Jose, the taxi situation was interesting to say the least. I knew from my "safety talks" with Yuri that the bus station is not in the greatest section of San Jose, so I had to be careful, especially at night. It was different because all of the taxi drivers were out of their cars, so you couldn't see if they were driving legal (red-maroon taxi car with yellow triangle on door) or pirated (any other color car) taxis. I first went with a driver who said he could bring me to Guadalupe, and as we started nearing what seemed to be his car, it was blue, so I said never mind and went back to search another taxi. Eventually I met a really sweet girl from Germany who spoke English and seemed to be equally confused as me. She and I shared a taxi because the driver insisted that he fill the taxi with 4 of us since there were so many people. Two more girls our age go in and I learned they were from Switzerland, they also spoke English and were very nice. The driver told us it would be a flat rate of 5 colones a person (10 USD) which in the moment sounded steep, but he seemed to be the nicer and more reliable driver of the group, so we obliged. Turns out all of the Europeans I was with (surprise, surprise) spoke English, Spanish, and their native language obviously plus 1-2 more languages. I continue to be blown away about Europeans and their master for foreign languages. We spoke in Spanish most of the ride, chatting with the taxi driver who turned out to be really nice. I went to my house first, I paid my 5 colones and went inside. I told Mama Tica the story and she laughed as she explained that taxi right should be no more than 3 colones, not 5 a piece. Oh well, live and learn!
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