Cahuita,
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2006
1
38
110
Trip End
Ongoing
Cahuita, ****,
Costa Rica
Sunday, February 18, 2007
And so after a few hours bus ride from San Jose, we reached our first town on the Caribbean (have finally learnt how to spell it like!) coast of Costa Rica..Cahuita.
Very relaxed, laid-back town with a real Caribbean vibe. Nearly all of Cahuita's inhabitants are of African descent and a lot of them feel more comfortable speaking a Jamacian style of English as opposed to Spanish. If you sat back and just watched the people and listened to their sounds, you'd believe you were in Jamacia...well what I imagine the land of Malibu to be like anyway!
Although touristy, the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica is not half as developed as the Pacific
nice view eh
. There aren't any ATMs and they make the Latinos look like they're rushed. Cahuita was similar to Tela in Northern Honduras but there was one big difference: the lack of litter on the beaches. I was also delighted to see that they had special bins for recycable products...first place we had seen this in the "eco conscious" Costa Rica.One of the main reasons for us coming to Cahuita was to hike through its National Park. Now I normally maintain that the "best things in life are difficult".."no pain, no gain" type thing...but Cahuita is certainly an honourable exception.
The park is located right beside the town so for once, we didn't have to spend most of our time figuring out how to get there.
The trail itself was also quite easy: there were no major hills or descents, the mosquitoes were on a day off and it was a mere 9km...
And did I mention how absolutely breathtaking it also was? We trekked through the trail with powder blue water on our left and lush, tropical forest on our right, bisected by a narrow strip of powdery white sand...Spectacular.
We had gone for a few bevvies the Saturday night with a German couple so we didn't get off to our usual early start on the Sunday
white face monkey alert
. We were afraid that we would miss out on a lot of the animals as a result. But we weren't disappointed. We spotted (and heard) howler monkeys and tree sloths (very interesting animal. Like a monkey but a lot hairier and lazier. Literally just hangs off the branches for hours. What I found most interesting is that its young must hang onto the Mother's chest for dear life for if a sloth drops its young, it will never try to retrieve it) We also had more than one encounter with the white faced Capuchin. They're not shy in the slightest and one such creature hopped, skipped and jumped beside us for about 15 minutes, seeking food. I could feel his beady eyes scrutinising the plastic bag that I was carrying with our food. I actually got a bit scared by the end cos I was afraid he might have rabies and bite me...yep I know, what a wuss!
I also had my first swim on a black sand beach in Cahuita. Well at least, it's called a black beach but
to be honest, it's more charcoal and didn't look so different to what you'd see in our Emerald isle. But it was actually my favorite beach so far cos the water wasn't as sandy as others..and there were no jelly fish:)
We moved down south a little to Puerto Viejo on the Monday
