Today was a travel day again, so we got up, had a light breakfast and headed off. Along the way we stopped at Dominical, just to check out the little “Party town” of the area. Unsurprisingly, most places were still closed when we rocked up around 8am 😂.
We enjoyed a walk along the beach and through the town none-the-less, hitting a local cafe for some smoothies before walking back along a river trail. It doesn’t seem to matter where in Costa Rica you go, there is always an abundance of beautiful and/or interesting things to photograph 🙂
From Dominical we headed to our accommodation in a side-street of Uvita. We thought it was a side-street anyway, before finding out that its the main road leading to a premiere surf-learning beach.
We walked the beach for a bit before heading over to the Flutterby House, a mix of Hippie commune, backpacker accommodation and Surf-school. It was nice and eclectic, though we found ourselves thinking that the place is a bit inconsistent, likely because it attracts a certain type of tourist (low-budget eco traveller) which is near impossible to properly cater for. One great example was signs about avoiding plastics, like straws, while serving water in plastic glasses. I get it – convenient, safe and all that, but inconsistent if you want to be eco nowadays 🙂
It did seem like a cool place though besides this, including bunk-beds in mostquito nets under a tin roof… On the second floor.
We spent a bit of time chilling at our accommodation before deciding to head over to Tortuga beach (turtle beach) which was a short 15 minute drive away.
We know that turtles are usually around at night, but we thought we’d scope the place first, and we were glad we did. Turns out the beach is behind a rather deep tide-based swamp-like lake. As the tide was receding we got the idea to just wait and eventually wade across. Given I only had hiking shoes, it would be with bare feet for me. As we waited it started to rain, so we retreated back to the car for a bit. A few minutes later some local fishermen turned up, and I asked them if there was a safe way across. They told us there was, and managed to point us in the right direction. We managed to cross, though I didn’t realise that the ground was full of rocks, so my barefoot attempt was a lot more challenging than Manja’s with flip-flops. The current nearly took one of Manja’s flip-flops at one point but we made it without falling! The beach was stunning, miles long and abandoned. We were the only ones there until the fishermen waded over to try their luck in the retreating tide. We did our usual thing of collecting a bit of rubbish, which we only belatedly realised we would have to carry back across the stone-floored-waterway as that was where the only bins were. We watched the sunset and headed off in twilight, before it was too dark for us to cross. My GoPro ran out of battery unfortunately, so not much video of the otherwise awesome sunset 🥺. It’s all good though, we plan to come back tomorrow with the appropriate equipment…. and footwear 😂
The drive home was a touch stressful as it was dark and raining, but still warm, causing the windows to fog up real good. Add to that little or no street-lights and most people driving around 20km/h faster than the speed limit just for good measure. Really not my favourite drive, but we made it back without any problems. Once back we hit the Soda (little unofficial food place) two doors down for a pizza. Turns out when you go to a Soda, the people there do NOT speak English, though they were prepared for us and handed me an English menu. A Spanish lady was nice enough to help out when I had no idea what I was being asked. Turns out it was “Would you like a drink while you wait”. Le-sigh. Need to improve my Spanish, which really just means learn any amount of spanish 😉.
The pizza was really nice though, and we headed back feeling full and happy from the day.
