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Day 4 – Luna Azul I

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Wednesday 22 February 2023 – Today is the first of two full days we have here.  It’s billed by Pura Aventura as “relaxed”, which means, possibly, slightly old-fashioned.  We have a large half-share of a sort of bungalow, with a lovely veranda

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and several nice little details, like the pineapple decoration of this fan

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(although the room is called “Banano”). The hotel itself is up in the hills, away from the beaches of Ostional and San Juanillo

and it’s generally noticeably hotter and more humid than Alajuela, where we stayed upon arrival.  The hotel has a nice lounge with a picture-postcard entrance.

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We started the day with a decent breakfast, which was served in a slightly idiosyncratic way.  There is no buffet, so you basically get food put down in front of you without asking: fruit, yoghurt, granola, bread, butter, their own delicious jam.  You do get to vote on whether you get plain or strawberry yoghurt and whether you get tea or coffee (parenthetical note – I have been in Costa Rica, famous for its coffee, for three days and for some reason not a drop of coffee has yet passed my lips).  Eventually you’re offered a choice of egg style with a variety of accompaniments, so it was eggs and bacon for me; and Jane tried a taster of the local breakfast speciality, gallo pinto. Gallo pinto means “painted rooster”, so quite how they get from that to the reality, which is rice and beans is beyond me.  Also, by the way, “rice and beans” doesn’t sound very appetising, but it’s actually a very tasty dish. The beans are black, the rice is fried and the whole thing is nicely seasoned. Anyway, we enjoyed breakfast and it sustained us right through to dinner time,

Breakfast was enlivened by the arrival to the hotel’s pool of a vulture, in search of a drink. Well, I expect a corpse wouldn’t have gone amiss, but in the absence of that, a glug of slightly chlorinated water was obviously appreciated.

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This being early in the day meant, of course, that it was a breakfast vulture, rather than a luncheon vulture.

That joke will only mean something to people of my age or similar.  To all of you good folk out there, thank you. Thank you for listening to my joke.

So: what to do with the day?  There were many possibilities, but we’d identified three that seemed of interest:  some kind of turtle activity, since Ostional is where three-quarters of the world’s supply of Olive Ridley turtles make their home and crucially their maternity ward; a visit to a centre which specialises in the rescue of Scarlet Macaws; and a local walk to see the view and hopefully some wildlife, ideally undertaken at 6am as a pre-breakfast activity.

At first, the auguries for the first two didn’t seem promising.  The turtles regularly come ashore en masse to lay eggs in a phenomenon called an “arribada“; but one had occurred just some five days before, so the likelihood of seeing turtles on the beach (a night trip) was very small. Another option would be a boat trip to find turtles at sea and possibly snorkel among them, but we didn’t know how to fix this, and our breakfast waiter didn’t seem too sure about it, either.  The Macaw centre was in the southern part of the Nicoya peninsula, and that meant an arduous drive of somewhere between one and a half and two hours on the frankly crappy roads that are such a feature of the southern part – and, more to the point, the same drive back, but in the dark. Very daunting. Well, actually, terminal, since we decided that simply wasn’t a good way to pass the time.

We had a quick chat with one of the hotel managers, a friendly and well-organised Belgian chap called Olivier, who told us that a boat trip might be possible and we decided that tomorrow morning would be a good time. We were about to head out to visit Ostional in an attempt to avoid total inactivity when Olivier caught us to say that, effectively, the only option was to do the boat trip that afternoon. So we went to the office where his wife contacted Gacci, the skipper of the boat, to make arrangements – time (3.30pm), location (Rancho Cocobolo in San Juanillo) and cost (US $120 – cash only). Fortunately, I had enough dollars to hand, so we were all set.

The few minutes before we set off for the 10-minute drive to San Juanillo saw us sorting out all those things that we needed to take with us for a boating and possibly snorkelling expedition – swimming costumes, goggles, snorkel tubes, sunblock, waterproof cameras, courage (I am really not good at snorkelling).  We found the rendezvous point and also an English expatriate called Simon, who was to accompany us as a guide.  A few minutes later, Gacci arrived with his small fishing boat. After a flurry of activity we clambered aboard and set off, in lovely calm conditions – so calm, I wish I’d brought my Nikon. Ah, well. The phone does a good job almost all of the time,

San Juanillo beach, Costa Rica

We passed a local landmark, the “Indian Rock”, which delineates the start of Ostional.

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Gacci and Simon were surprised at the height of the water – normally there is dry land leading to the rock. Simon reckoned the tides were maybe as much as three metres higher than normal.

This affected two things.  One was the likelihood of seeing turtles. The other was the desirability or indeed the sense in going snorkelling, which is best done in shallow water, i.e. at low tide. I was glad about the latter as I really am not comfortable going snorkelling and only do so in order to try to get the photos, normally unsuccessfully. But the former seemed to be the case, as we went for over an hour without seeing any marine wildlife activity at all. Gacci and Simon bore up manfully under this burden.

Gacci and Simon

Simon thought it so unlikely that we’d see anything that he got the fishing line out (he had instructions from his wife to bring back something from the trip, otherwise it just looked like he was having fun, apparently).

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Almost immediately he’d done this, things began to happen.  We saw a couple of Olive Ridley turtles in the distance, and one glided right by the boat.

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After that we were treated to a rare sight – Black Turtles (the ones we know as Green Sea Turtles), rather than the Olive Ridley sort that Ostional is famous for.

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In fact, it turned out that we were seeing the sort of grim battle which Mother Nature has determined is the best way to banish the weaklings – two bloke turtles fighting to have their way with a girl turtle, who has quite a struggle on her hands to avoid being drowned. If you want to see some of the more grisly bits, and have some three minutes to spare, take a look at the video I made that summarises the afternoon. (There are some other delights in the video, I should point out. It’s not all turtle porn.)

Whilst we were rather voyeuristically and pruriently focussed on these interesting but surely testudinatical matters, there had been other action on the other side of the boat as well. The general shagfest extended to two pairs of Olive Ridley turtles, too

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and a distant view of another pair – no gatecrasher this time – of Black Turtles mating. I’m not sure we should be comfortable with the degree of satisfaction we felt with the amount of turtle mating we’d witnessed, but we certainly were happy that the boat trip had been more than just a couple of companiable hours bobbing around on the Pacific Ocean. So when the dolphins came to play with us (no photos I’m afraid, I did get some video though which is part of the video above) it was the icing on the cake, as we headed home past a beautiful sunset.

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Simon caught a skipjack tuna, which he was happy about but which rather disconcertingly flapped around in the back of the boat for what I thought was an unconscionable time. Then we arrived back in San Juanillo, where we bade goodbye to Simon and Gacci and his boat

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and headed back to the car in a lovely twilight,

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before making our way carefully back to the hotel. This provided further education about what it was like to drive on these dodgy roads with their unexpected potholes, craters and narrow bridges in the dark, so that Macaw place is definitely off the list of possibilities.

We had a good but (for us) late dinner back at the hotel

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before an earlyish night, as the morrow holds the possibility of an early morning walk; not something I would normally countenance, but, hey, we’re on holiday travelling, which makes it OK. No, really.  So, do come back tomorrow, and find out how that went, won’t you?

Day 3 – Xandari to Luna Azul, Ostional

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Tuesday 21 February 2023 – Today’s story will be short on pictorial content, mainly because eight hours of it were spent in transit, six of them behind the wheel of our hire car. Which is now a lot dustier and only slightly more dented than it was at the start of the day.

Also, I’m getting some technical issues with WordPress which is making it difficult to upload images and video for these pages.  I hope to sort this out in due course, but please bear with me for visual oddities for the moment.

Breakfast at the Xandari was as pleasant as yesterday and, as usual, accompanied by the hotel’s trademark background music – pop and rock classics but played acoustically on Spanish guitar. This treatment underlines how important the original sound of a classic piece is.  Take the tune out of the context of its original sound and it can be really difficult to identify.  Admittedly, it didn’t take too long to identify Hotel California, possibly because of the importance of that guitar solo at the end. But another tune was very familiar, but we couldn’t place it. Jane in the end got it – It’s A Kind Of Magic, originally by Queen.  If you don’t hear Freddie Mercury’s voice, it’s surprising how difficult it is to place the song.

Anyhoo, some research by Jane discovered that the route we were due to take to our next hotel was likely to go via toll roads, something that our information from Pura Aventura hadn’t vouchsafed. Thus we needed some local currency, and the hotel helpfully suggested a local supermarket where we could find an ATM. Having checked out and eventually managed to get the car’s WiFi hotspot to provided some much-needed internet, we headed that way.

As we left the hotel, I was glad that I had been paying attention during our taxi ride in from the airport, as it demonstrated that road surfaces were potentially shocking and that it was quite acceptable to drive on the wrong side of the road to avoid the worst potholes. The short stretch of road to the supermarket simultaneously sharpened up my reflexes and gave me practice at the special slalom techniques necessary to negotiate the roads.

I managed not to crash into anything for the few kilometres to the supermarket, but my blameless stewardship of the hire car came to an abrupt end as I attempted to reverse into a parking spot and found an iron pillar instead.  The car suffered only minor damage. My pride, much more.

Once I’d calmed down a bit (it really is just a minor scuff), we found the ATM and got some money our of it, but of course it was in reasonably large denomination notes, so we thought it would be a good idea to buy something at the supermarket in order to get some smaller change.  This is how we came into possession of some gin and some tonic. This seemed to represent the ideal combination of utility and desirability.

The next several hours were spent behind the wheel. Our eventual destination was the Luna Azul hotel, but we knew that the restaurant there would be closed for today and so planned a late lunch at a nearby restaurant called La Luna.

The toll charges were small – in the region of 500 – 800 Colones, which is one or two dollars –  and it turns out that we could probably have used a card to pay, but only at the expense of being the slowest car in the queue, so we stuck with paying cash to the people who were staffing the “Manual” channels and, barring a couple of minor wrong turns which were pilot rather than navigator error, it all worked fine.

 

By and large, for the most part of the journey, the road surfaces were OK, with only the odd pothole and unmarked speed bump to leaven the mix.  There was some congestion to deal with, and the speed limit is a leisurely 80km/hour, so progress was steady rather than swift, through countryside that frankly wouldn’t have looked out of place in Spain or Portugal, except maybe for the occasional huge industrial installations which cropped up now and again.

 

Everything was going smoothly enough until we got past Nicoya, which, on the map above, appears to be not all that far from our destinations. This appearance is deceptive.  At first, the road simply narrowed and became more sinuous, which meant that getting stuck behind one of the many ponderous lorries slowed progress even further. One lorry we were stuck behind for many a long mile seemed to be making a really strange screeching noise as it ground along, so we were glad that it went straight on when we turned off. Two things happened at this point.  Firstly, the road surface turned feral, so that the pothole slalom that I’d practised earlier was now a matter of survival for the car’s suspension; and secondly we could still hear the screeching, which was really worrying.  We stopped as soon as the appalling surface and prevailing traffic conditions would let us and got our of the car to see what the problem was.  This was when we realised that the screeching didn’t come from the car at all.

It was coming from the power lines beside the road!

We had a short chat with the chap I had blocked in as we stopped to investigate. He said it was simply something that happened in February and March and had no further explanation of its cause.  But, as you can imagine, we were somewhat relieved that it wasn’t a problem with the car.

Further on along this ghastly road surface, Jane suddenly commanded me to stop.  Whilst I was having to concentrate grimly on the road surface, she had seen something surprising beside the road.

Howler monkeys in Costa Rica

Monkeys were crawling along these electrical wires, and using them as a base to relax on!  We later found out that these are Howler Monkeys.  More on them later, I’m sure….

We carried on, with the road surface varying from quite reasonable to actively hostile.  Much of it was dirt trail and wasn’t actually too bad

but progress was slow.  In the first and worst section, we managed just seven kilometres in 20 minutes. The next six took 15 minutes.  The practical upshot was that by 4pm, instead of arriving at our hotel, we had only made it to where we’d planned a late lunch, the restaurant La Luna. (There’s obviously some kind of Moon vibe going on in these parts.)

We were allowed to have a table provided we could finish within 45 minutes – this was clearly the time they were expecting the sunset rush, because the place is ideally set for cocktails or a meal as the sun goes down.

It’s a very fine place. We had a salad and a couple of drinks each before setting off into the gathering dusk to find our hotel, which we did, courtesy of Jane and Waze. The kindly hotel owner, Rolf, showed us to our room (rather nice – photos in due course) and clarified a couple of things that the Pura Aventura pack hadn’t made quite clear.  By this stage, we were somewhat tired after a long day.  Bouncing along over and around potholes is hard work, you know.  So we settled in and awarded ourselves an early night.

We have two full days here in Luna Azul and as yet have no firm plans as to what to do with ourselves.  I’m sure we’ll think of something (besides addressing our stocks of gin and tonic), so please keep coming back to see what we got up to.

Day 2 – Xandari

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Monday February 20 2023 – After a 23-hour day yesterday and a late night to boot, one could reasonably expect to sleep the sleep of the just completely knackered. In the event, what happened is what always happens when I travel to the American continental mass – I find that I’m wide awake at 4am. I sort of managed to drift off for a bit but sleep patterns were further disrupted by: the weather – it was windy, with occasionally very vigorous gusts whistling through whatever it was was causing them to whistle; the wildlife, which woke early and started shrieking, in voices and at volumes unfamiliar to the British ear, with joy at the prospect of the coming day; and the airport, from which jets would fly over the hotel quite low at intervals (see later).  At around 7am we gave up the unequal struggle of pretending we were still asleep and made ourselves some tea. Yes, we have brought some Twinings Earl Grey tea bags with us; whyever did you feel the need to ask?

The early morning gave us a little time to appreciate better the room we were in, which was really very substantial,

and had a decent view over towards Alajuela and San José. There were a lot of raptors out looking for their breakfasts

so we eventually went to have ours in the hotel restaurant, which shares the same view as we get from our room.

The hotel breakfast was perfectly fine without being outstanding in any way, and after it we found ourselves at leisure, with only the need to be ready to receive a hire car at 2pm on the formal schedule for the day.  So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Until we arrived and were shown the map, we hadn’t appreciated the extent of the area in which the Xandari Hotel is set.  It’s pretty considerable.

Jane had read the description in the hotel material of the trail that leads around the grounds and it told us various relevant facts: firstly, that there were some five waterfalls with vistas overlooking them; secondly, a walk to all the waterfalls would take over an hour; and thirdly that the route back from one of them was “arduous”. Whatever, it seemed a perfectly good idea to go exploring – the sun was shining, it wasn’t too hot and we needed to start to get back into the travelling habits.  So, off we went.

The immediate environs of the hotel are nicely landscaped

The path leading to our room

and there are many sculptures and artistic touches as you walk around.

The use of mosaic tiles features heavily

and I reckon is more than a small nod in the direction of Gaudi, whose modernista work can be seen all over Barcelona.

As well as the sculptures, there were some lovely flashes of colour from flowers, some familiar, some less so.

After a while, we left the hotel area and headed into the wider “jungle” of its grounds.  This is when it became apparent what they meant by “arduous”.  Some of the going was quite up-and-down.

and there were some big trees around, too.

and some huge bamboo.

One particular bamboo grove was little short of spectacular and the noises it made as the wind blew through it were amazing.

We followed the trail down and down until we found the waterfalls.  Owing to the somewhat eccentric nature of the numbering system, number 3 was the first we came across.

Further along the trail, numbers 1 and 2 were not that impressive, at least to us folk who have been fortunate enough to visit Iceland (the country, not the shop).

and number 5 was charming (and offered us some decorative seats so we could take a breather)

but the star of the show was number 4. Even an Icelander might grudgingly give this one a gruff nod.

Our walk was, as I say, quite up-and-downy

and it was also quite round-and-roundy

but we covered pretty much the whole of the hotel grounds, which was quite satisfactory, and a very pleasant way to start to get the feel of what the country had to offer.

Shortly after we got back to the hotel it was time to collect our hire car, which was brought to the hotel by a National Rental chap who didn’t speak English very well but introduced us to the SayHi app which helped us around some of the complexities of getting hold of what was to be our transport for the coming weeks.

after which a drink in the hotel bar seemed a decent logical step.

After some nachos and a couple of beers, we retreated to our room for a rest.  Just before dinner, we got the opportunity to understand the reason that jets are so noisy near the hotel. They take off from the airport

and then turn to the left and fly directly over the hotel.

We had a decent dinner in the restaurant and then retired to our room for the rest of the evening.  Tomorrow sees us embarking on the first drive of our time here, and it’s set to be a long one of about five hours as we head towards Ostional, on the west coast.  It may be that there will be nothing to report tomorrow, but I guess you’ll have to check in, just in case something interesting happens, eh?