Hey there,
To get to Santa Teresa we took a ferry from Puntarenas and then two buses. Here we had made a reservation in a hostel (although I hate hostels) because all the options were almost the same.
The main road to get to Santa Teresa was all dirt with some giant potholes.
We arrived at the Hostel La Posada and were greeted by a dirty, disheveled Argentine woman with filthy fingernails. Things did not start well. While we were waiting at the reception for the key to the room, I began to smell cigarette smoke because it turns out that, although in Costa Rica smoking is prohibited everywhere, here it was the opposite. This place was disgusting, but in another post, I will tell you about it.
That afternoon, we had a typical Costa Rican casado for lunch and went to rest in Playa Carmen, which was the closest to the hotel. Diego got into the water and hurt his feet because that was pure stone.
In Santa Teresa the main attraction is surfing, and everything is full of people who, when they are not surfing, are smoking marijuana. We thought that if we had time we would try it, but we ruled it out because the beach was full of stone, and I didn’t want to get injured. In addition, I still felt bad with the flu.
The next morning, we went for a walk on the sand towards Playa Cuevas and just as we left the hostel, I was stung by one of those giant black wasps with red heads. Another attraction of this place is that when the tide goes out, natural wells are formed. In the hostel they told us “Natural pools” and I imagined an impressive thing with turquoise blue water. It was nothing like I imagined.
The last section before Playa Cuevas was all made of pointed stone and our sandals were destroyed. We decided to go back along the highway because our sandals weren’t going to do much. We met an Argentine we had seen the day before on the beach and he offered to take us.
His name was Sebastian and he said that he was looking for a beach called Cabuya, that his car had gotten stuck in the mud and that he had given all his money to some locals to help him. We decided to accompany him on his tour.
We got to Playa Cabuya, and it was horrible. All stones, brown and super-hot water.
Then we went to the Cabo Blanco Reserve which was closed and there was no one to charge entrance, so we could have done it for free. Just entering, we saw two deer. We had to do a 5km trek to get to a beach and we didn’t continue because it was too late to cover so many kilometers. Besides, the three of us were wearing sandals and without provisions.
We stopped for lunch in Montezuma around four in the afternoon and then went to the waterfall. To get to the waterfall it was another trek of skipping stones through the river, mud puddles and tree branches. We got to the waterfall and the water was brown from the constant rain, but it was a refreshing swim after all day in the sun.
That night my cold got noticeably worse, and I didn’t sleep at all because of the pain in my neck; At 4am, I woke up almost crying from the torticollis. I was hit at the same time by the flu, torticollis, and menstrual discomfort. Diego was scared because he thought that maybe I was poisoned by the wasp sting the previous morning.
He went to buy me some pills at the pharmacy. 5 euros each pill.
I got a little better and after lunch, we went to explore the beach on the other side and here we found better wells. Then we rested since Diego also started to feel sick to his stomach.
The last day we went to Playa Cuevas by road to do a trekking. We were the only ones; we walked many kilometers and saw many animals.
We enjoyed a better beach and reached an idyllic river where I took some wonderful photos. There was a part where it said that the Cabo Blanco Reserve began and a woman who was cleaning the rangers’ house did not let us pass. We ignored her and continued walking along the beach.
Santa Teresa was the destination that I liked the least in Costa Rica (after Puntarenas) because it is a place that does not even have a decent main road and you spend all your time breathing the dust that the cars raise, and it is full of dirty people who are smoking all day.
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