Our trip is now moving along literally and figuratively. We went down this morning and got ourselves some wheels, little Honda scooter. Top speed is 75 kph or 46.6 mph. Most the speed limits are either 40 kph in town and 60 kph in between towns. They also slow just before the bridges to 40 kph. our scooter was $200 for 10 days. Pretty cheap. We shouldn’t need any taxis for the most part and we should be able to do about everything we need to with it.
We got our freedom and took ourselves to the last beach town on the main road, Manzanilla. We met sketchy Walter there, he was trying to get us to take a tour with him. We may.
We then took our wheels north of where we are staying, Puerto Viejo and picked up Emily a decent boogie board. I still have my inflatable one from May. Since we have all the days it’s cheaper to buy one. We also got sunglasses. I had brought a cheap pair but they must’ve gotten left behind either in a cab or at the Hotel in San Jose. I think I like these better.
We usually walk most places, Caye Caulker we biked, and we talked about getting bikes but I think the scooter is going to be a better option here. There are a lot of bikes but it seems like everything is pretty spread out. The bigger towns have more continuous stores/ shops/ restaurants. They don’t have sidewalks or bike paths so they are all on the edge of the road, to me the scooter feels safer. It keeps up with traffic so we can mix in and don’t have to worry about getting sideswiped by a mirror or worse. It’s also a lot faster.
Puerto Viejo is probably the place you want to stay if you want more walking options, there is a price that will come with that though, more tourists. I prefer less tourists. The scooter connects the whole area here so it makes the choice easy if we come back this way.
Still haven’t gotten a complete feel for the place but it’s definitely different than the west coast.
We finally made it into the water today. It was a bit of an ordeal. We have a few options for snorkeling from shore and one is supposed to be just down the road a piece. I thought I seen the sign for it this morning and I looked it up on the map. We ended up not finding the road to the beach and we then looked at the last one which may not have shore snorkeling. We will find out since it supposed to. When we were there I seen two snorkels and they were pretty close to shore.
We found about entrance to another location and tried to walk to the beach we were looking for and there was a sign with a map showing it and the road but we hit a dead end walking. So we went back down the beach and found a few snorkelers. We didn’t think is was a bad spot but the waves and under currents were strong. Water wasn’t completely clear but we were able to see some things. We tried out Emily’s new underwater camera, I will maybe give it a review later. So pictures will be from her this blog day. I didn’t take any on mine.
We seen a big puffer fish and I seen some crabs. Maybe tomorrow we will get some more pictures. I think we are going to try snorkeling and Boogie boarding.
I’m debating seeing about a dive day maybe next Monday. I may look for a dive shop tomorrow, there’s supposed to be one the next town south of us. I’ll go see what the have open and get a feeling for the quality of place it is.
That is one thing I have not seen much of here is places offering diving and snorkeling trips. Seems odd. There are a few on the internet but I was expecting more places you could walk up and schedule a trip.
Hopefully I will get some pictures tomorrow. I need to do some of the hotel. There are some resident sloths here and we got to see them. It was getting dark so pictures were out of the question. Somewhere on property there is a frog pond with seven different kinds of frogs. I did see a little black and green one by the pool yesterday.
Stay safe!
Traveling with Emily! 