On Thursday at 8AM, we met Profesora Ana in front of the church in Atenas to prepare for our interview (Diego who runs the school had set us up to interview someone from the Atenas ministry of tourism at 9AM on Thursday). We sat at a table in the park and chatted in Spanish for a while. Then Profesora Maria showed up with RICE PUDDING! It turns out that cooking is one of Profesora Maria’s favorite pastimes. So much so that she gets up at 3AM every day and makes sandwiches and burritos that are sold at La Coope. She’s apparently somewhat famous in Atenas 🙂 It was a lovely gesture that she made a batch of rice pudding for us on top of her normally busy schedule.
Our interview was set for 9AM. Jill and I managed to get pretty worked up over it beforehand, but our interview subject was as friendly as she could possibly be. Her name was Lemory and she’s fresh out of tourism school and works as the PR person for Atenas. We asked her all of our canned questions and then had some follow-ups. Jill and I surprised ourselves by spending 30 minutes chatting away with her in Spanish. We learned about Cataratas Los Angeles, a waterfall near Atenas that we haven’t been to yet, and also about an overlook called El Mirador, above Atenas where you can see the Pacific Ocean.
We then met Profesora Ana back at the table in the park and trooped on to school, where she debriefed us on our interview and what we learned. I’ll be surprised if Diego doesn’t check up on us with Lemory.
When we finished Spanish school we trundled back home to load up the car and head for Ojochal. We also scarfed down the Profesora Maria’s rice pudding as a pre-roadtrip snack.
It was fantastic. She uses cloves and cinnamon. We piled in the car and proceeded to La Coope, where we got cash, filled up the car, and bought two of Profesora Maria’s sandwiches for the road. We got one “Italiano” and one “Pollo en Mostazza-Miel” (chicken with honey mustard). We proudly told the cashier at La Coope that Profesora Maria is our maestra (teacher) and of course she knew who Maria was. We ate the sandwiches on one of the straighter stretches of Ruta 32 on our way down to Ojochal. They were also delicious!
It would’t be a road trip in Costa Rica if you didn’t end up behind a tractor.
We also passed an overturned 18 wheeler where they had backed another 18 wheeler up to it and had a bucket brigade of guys passing cargo from the overturned truck to the upright one.
You see all kinds of roadside attractions in Costa Rica. It’s not uncommon for people to be selling furniture, or carved and painted pillors, or wooden macaws, or random statues. This is one of the more interesting statuary inventories.
After three and a half hours of driving we saw four toucans fly across the road (Por dicha!) and we made it without incident to the lovely village of Ojochal. We picked this location because there’s about a 60 mile stretch of the Pacific coast where the mountains come down almost to the water, which makes for some beautiful scenery and also lots of wildlife. We had no trouble finding our hotel, the Hotel El Mono Feliz (The Happy Monkey Hotel) and Sofia got us all checked in.
Because we had a couple of hours of daylight left we asked Sofia what spots we should hit before dark. She directed us to Playas Las Ventanas (Windows Beach). That turned out to be a good call.
Playas Las Ventanas is so named because there are a couple of caves that you can see through from the beach to the ocean at low tide. And when the tide is up the waves come surging through the caves making fantastic booming sounds like thunder and filling the whole beach with mist.
After Playa Las Ventantas we did a drive by of Playa Tortuga. Sofia told us it was more rugged that Playa Las Ventanas. She was right, but we did have a troop of 30 white-faced Capuchin monkeys meander through the treetops above our car.
Ojochal is kind of out in the sticks so we backtracked to Uvita where they have a proper super market (BM Supermarket – For Ticos by Ticos). We bought some snacks for the room and a few bottles of San Pellegrino for JillyP and then went to Heliconia for a lovely dinner. Another reason for picking Ojochal is that Ojochal bills itself as the foodie capital of Costa Rica. We concur. Unfortunately we didn’t take any pictures of dinner at Heliconia so you’ll have to wait until we go back.
Driving in Costa Rica for several hours will wipe you out. So we finished our dinner at Heliconia and headed back to the hotel and collapsed into bed.
The Hotel El Mono Feliz has a free breakfast for all of its guests. Because we had an 8:30AM booking Friday morning for a guided tour of the mangroves in the town of Sierpe about 45 minutes south of Ojochal, we were front and center for breakfast at 7AM. Our host Rhonda told us that Friday’s special was “Tropical French Toast”. I consider myself to be somewhat of a French toast connoisseur. This was the best I’ve ever had. Another feather in the cap of Ojochal as the foodie mecca of Costa Rica.
Because we were on the clock we didn’t tarry over breakfast. We thanked Rhonda and we were off! The Sierpe area south of Ojochal is an estuary brimming with some of the most amazing wildlife I’ve ever seen. This particular outing was my pick. I love flowing water and all of the life forms it gives rise to. The Waze lady got us to Kokopelli Tours at 8:30 on the dot. We got lucky in that there were 6 patrons signed up for the 8:30 tour but it’s 4 people plus the guide to a boat. So Jill and I got our own private tour. Our guide was named Jonathan and he was awesome. We told Jonathan when we got in the boat that we wanted the Spanish immersion experience so he only spoke to us in Spanish (although we asked him a few questions in English).
For the next four hours I was in heaven.
In addition to seeing tons of wildlife, we got a master class in mangrove ecosystems. They really are fantastic trees. Costa Rica has designated it’s mangrove forests near Sierpe as protected habitat.
A unique side-benefit of the mangrove tour is that being outside learning stuff makes me giddy with happiness. We capitalized on that by heading back from Sierpe to Ojochal to grab lunch at Citrus. Citrus is a gem in Ojochal and would be at home as in any serious food destination. We had gyoza as a starter and for lunch Jill had a shrimp pad thai that she said was the best ever. I had a chef’s take on my favorite vietnamese-style noodle bowl with super tender marinated beef and crispy eggrolls over rice noodles. Then we lingered over a couple of cappuccinos. They have a different menu for lunch and dinner so we made a plan to return for dinner before the end of our visit.
After an adventurous morning and satisfying lunch we retired to our cabana for a well earned nap. The Hotel El Mono Feliz has some central rooms, but we opted for one of their cottages that’s set back on the property in the wildlife. Our cottage was under a massive rainforest hardwood of some sort. In the middle of the night the first night we could hear things dropping in the forest around us. About three or four times whatever it was scored a direct hit on our roof with a bang that jolted us both out of sleep. We now know that was the ripe fruit of the tree dropping from great height and to great effect. We talked to Rhonda about it and she said that the gardener had just that morning alerted her to the fact that the tree was dropping fruit and would likely be doing so for the next week. Once we knew what it was it didn’t even occur to us to want to switch rooms and we got the giggles each time one scored a hit on us.
After our nap we headed back to Playa Las Ventanas to watch the waves crash through the tunnels and then on to our selected dinner location for the evening, The Bamboo Room.
We picked The Bamboo Room because it was reputed to be the best sunset dining spot in Ojochal. It definitely came through on that front, but as a totally unexpected bonus we happened into a live band, made up of expats, that did two fantastic sets of 80’s covers. We got to the The Bamboo Room at 5:00 and left at 9:30. The Bamboo Room is the kind of place that we would gladly make a part of our weekly staples. Super fun night!
Parque Nacional Marino Ballena is the headline national park for this part of Costa Rica is in Uvita – about 15 minutes north of Ojochal. Ballena means whale and the name comes from the fact that there’s a beach in the form of a whale tale that’s only available at low tide. The path to the beach is called “The Path of Moses” because the waters part to make the beach accessible at low tide.
After we left the national park we headed to Villa Leonor, which is a nice restaurant that has a “private” beach behind it. All beaches in Costa Rica are public, but Villa Leonor owns the only path to this part of the beach and there’s kind of an unwritten rule that if you come to use their path you will spend some money at their establishment. Fortunately the food is really good. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures at Villa Leonor. Except this one…
After a super taxing morning of swimming at the national park and then swimming at the private beach at Villa Leonor, we were worn out and ready to relax by the pool.
We lounged by the pool until it was time for dinner at Citrus. Citrus killed it again! We had a salmon spring roll as a starter. Jill had fish two ways and I had a sushi bowl. Instead of cappuccino we got a sublime dessert that involved some sort of fluffy chocolate and orange pastry and vanilla ice cream. Once again we forgot to take pictures of the food.
We waddled out of Citrus and trundled back to our hotel and climbed into bed.
This morning I noticed there was no breeze but there was still a fair amount of fruit falling off the tree above our cottage. So I stood outside of our cottage staring up at the tree looking for movement. Sure enough, I spotted an iguana on one of the branches. I’m guessing the iguanas, which are vegetarians, had been noshing on the fruit all weekend and knocking some off along the way. You think of animals as being super coordinated and good at what they do, but I learned this morning that iguanas are not particularly graceful. I was watching the iguana about 100 feet up in the tree and as he went to move from one limb to another he lost his footing and was hanging on by a back foot. He almost managed to save it, but he ultimately lost his grip and came crashing all the way down through the branches and hit the ground with a HUGE thud. It made the same sound as a bowling ball would have. I’d like to think that there’s enough spongy leaf matter on the ground that he survived the fall, like Wile E. Coyote.
We had a reprise of the Tropical French Toast this morning before we started our trip home. It was just as good the second time.
Shortly after getting on the road, we found ourselves behind this motorcycle with sidecar. It was two adults on the motorcycle and a child in the sidecar. I don’t know if the cant of the wheel on the sidecar is normal, but it kind of freaked me out.
We stopped to get gas in Uvita and spotted this BBQ place. If they’d been open we would have totally taken one for the team and tried their wares.
The whole concept of electrical service delivery in Costa Rica is a little bit disorderly to this particular electrical engineer.
We had a very uneventful drive home to Atenas. We stopped for pupusas once we hit town then picked up a few necessities at La Coope and walked in the door just after noon.
We had so much fun, but there are things we have exactly zero pictures of. I’ve been reflecting on why we don’t have more pictures of some of the things we did during our weekend in Ojochal and I think the answer is that we were having so much fun that we forgot to take pictures. This is the first place we’ve been in Costa Rica that we were sad to leave when it was time to come home. As I’ve previously mentioned the food in Costa Rica is perfectly adequate, but the food in Ojochal is outstanding. The scenery where the mountains meet the ocean is visually stunning and weaving through the mangroves in a boat is a pretty happy place for me.
The consensus is the the southern Pacific coast is our new lugar favorito (favorite place) in Costa Rica!
More evidence that we had a ton of fun is that Jill completely forgot our souvenir protocol and came home empty handed.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 