COSTA RICA – JACO

March 16-20, 2024

It was a short bus ride from San Jose to Jaco. As with many of our Central American journeys, the bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and left us to our own devices. Thankfully, there was a taxi across the street and took us to our guesthouse. It appeared to be more of a motel, but it was nice and well equipped. The stove was a bit of a problem, though. It took forever for the propane to ignite and then with a small explosion. One burner would be burning nicely only to suddenly go out, but the gas was still on! We complained to the host, and although he said he would look into it, I suspect he knew about it all along and just didn’t bother to fix it.

There was a small creek behind the property. It ran to the ocean.

I saw a wild peri-peri chili plant growing along a fence.

It was still REALLY hot

but, dammit, we were a mere 100 yards from the beach! We went out in the evening and watched the sun set.

I saw these weird tracks in the sand and stopped to figure out what caused them. It turned out it was small snails.

This was small crabs kicking sand out of their hiding holes.

Jaco is supposed to be famous for surfing. We saw a few, but not many.

The next day we went out during the day and quickly retreated to the cool of our guesthouse.

We spent an afternoon walking along the ridiculously expensive shopping district. Needless to say, we didn’t buy anything. However, I was quite taken with some of the sidewalk benches.

At one time there were water fountains along the street. They have fallen into disrepair and sadly become garbage cans.

In Canada, we have a problem with ravens ripping open garbage bags and eating what’s inside. Here, there were iguanas doing the same thing.

We did not spend a lot of time looking around, as it was stinking HOT and expensive. Welcome to the touristy parts of a country. Overall, we found Costa Rica to be more expensive due to the number of expats. The touristy areas were the same price, and sometimes more, than Canadian prices. I am glad we spent a few days in Jaco, but I doubt we will ever return.

We took a bus back to San Jose. We went to another bus terminal for our Panama bus. We paid our exit fees for Costa Rica and our entry fees to Panama at the terminal, in order to stream line things at the border. We had several hours to kill. They allowed us to leave our bags with them while we went to explore more things.

We returned hours before our 11:30 PM departure time as we did not want to be wandering the streets at night. There were several people also waiting for the Panama bus, and we began to chit-chat with each other. There was a very old man, in his 90s, who seemed rather lost and was asking about the hotel accommodations. (There was a hotel attached to the bus terminal.) I tried to help him with what little Spanish I can speak, then he says he is from New Jersey. So I switched to English. He said he didn’t speak English. But later, he was speaking only English to a German fellow. He spoke in an old man stutter, making it hard to understand him in either language. We gathered he had an early morning bus and wanted to stay in the hotel. He seemed to get frustrated with our attempts to help him and he walked out onto the street. The German fellow was concerned and went to follow him, but he had simply disappeared. We assumed he took a taxi. About a half hour later, he reappeared. At this point, no one was eager to help him. He was the strangest little man. We all boarded our bus and have no idea what happened to him from there.