We picked up our car from Thrifty today and it is a Toyota Landcruiser Prado (Peter is horrified they call it a landcruiser as at home its just a Prado and nowhere near as big as a landcruiser).
We managed to fit 6 adults and 4 days of clothes each (just) in and headed to Cahuita on the Caribbean Coast for the next 4 nights.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant about 2 hours into the drive – roadhouse food is awesome in Costa Rica. They even brought out homemade chilli pickles which were amazing but ridiculously hot – although Matt, Shirelle and Stu used a fair bit on their lunch.
The 150ish km has taken us about 5.5 hours with a lunch break as the road to the Caribbean side is pretty much single lane each way and their are lots of big trucks and crazy drivers. Peter got us all to the Cabinas Nirvana Ecolodge safely. This is a beautiful property just off Playa Negra (a black sand beach) about a km or so north of Cahuita. The whole coast has a very afro-caribbean influence due to the colonial banana trade. The property is beautiful and we have howler monkeys near our room somewhere and have seen 6 toucans in the trees around the grounds. The Caribbean here is still rough and i don’t think you can swim here (apparently a bit further south near the border with Panama there are some great beaches).
We had a couple of cocktails at a reggae bar and then ate dinner at a restaurant called Sobre Los Altos on the beach which made delicious food but also had a mother and baby sloth go by (quite quickly) in the rain on the telephone lines (3 toed). The pictures are pretty grainy due to yellow street lights and my camera has troubles focussing in low light.
davstuholidays 