December 2023

We arrived in the capitol, San Jose, and spent a night in a hotel to recover from our long journey. The focus of our trip was to visit laid back beach towns in the Guancaste province. The first major stop of our trip was Tamarindo. Landing into Tamarindo airport felt like landing into a farmers field as cows and goats roamed the grass next to the runway. We chucked our luggage into the back of a pickup truck and got driven into the town. We stayed on the less crowded Playa Langosta beach which was only a 15 minute walk into the main town where the majority of the bars and restaurants are. The best things to do in Tamarindo are to chill on the beach, surf, go to one of the many beach front restaurants and see an evening fire dancing show. If you’re looking for a party area in Costa Rica then this is as good as it gets.

We travelled 2 hours down the coast to the beautiful surf town Nosara. Nosara stole my heart the moment we started walking from our little jungle condo to the beach. We stayed on Playa Guiones. There’s a lot more than meets the eye in Nosara. Nestled in the protected areas of jungle land are a handful of small local restaurants and surf hire shacks. The beach is huge and empty compared to Tamarindo and it felt like we had found our own little secret paradise. Walking from Playa Guiones to Playa Pelada to reach La Luna cocktail bar just as the sun set over the ocean made for a beautiful Monday. Whilst drinking passion fruit mojitos a small family of Howler monkeys roared overhead. Walking back in the dark with no phone service was not as easy as the sunset stroll. We had to flag down a tuk-tuk from a main road that we wandered across, we didn’t even know there was a main highway near this beach town until then. Thankfully there was, otherwise we would have been wild camping.

Sad to leave Nosara, we really didn’t think it could get any better than this! We were wrong…

Santa Teresa (in the Southern Nicoya Peninsula) was our last stop of the trip and it lived up to all expectations of the recommendations we had been given by friends. A lot of time was spent drinking wine in the hammock on the terrace of our small apartment. A birthday celebration was spent at an incredible villa named “Todo es Posible”- Everything is Possible.

We spent a morning diving with ‘Iguana Divers’ at two dive sites off the coast near the national marine park. Towards the end of our trip we rented a quad bike and went on an adventure to visit the waterfalls of Montezuma. We parked at the bottom of the waterfall and hiked through the jungle using ropes to climb over huge tree roots up to three different levels of the waterfall.

On our way to the airport we realised that I had booked a flight for the day before, which of course we had missed! A slight 7 hour detour was all it took to resolve my mistake. We caught a ferry from Paquera to Puntarenas, followed by a 3 hour drive to San Jose airport hotel, back to where we begun our trip nearly three weeks prior. Memories to last a lifetime.