Bahia Ballena

Yesterday I described the facilities we find so helpful on our journey and while I am certain the toilets and showers look rudimentary to a North American eye they serve us well. 

The other thing is the beach. It’s not bright yellow sand, most of Central America is basically volcanic so black rocks and black sand are the norm but this a lovely empty beach. All to ourselves. 

And if you look carefully there is no trash. Ticos are obsessive about picking up after themselves and they value the country’s eco-tourism reputation so trash is a scarce commodity in public places. 

During the day the tide goes out at the moment and I wanted to ask Webb Chiles, a sports fanatic, if that was a football length out to the water. I have no clue but I figure it must be close. Is that 200 yards? Perhaps I need a quarterback to come out and measure it for me. But in any event it’s a long walk for a swim…well worth it. 

The waves are mild and the water is warm here, shallow over black sand so it’s like a frying pan on low heat. 

The campground itself is huge though not all of it is accessible to tall vehicles. You’d be surprised how limiting a tall vehicle is when overlanding. Parking garages have height restrictions as do campground entrances and in Mexico even supermarket parking lots have height barriers. Apparently those are to keep buses and collectivo taxi vans from parking in front of the shopping malls, which makes life awkward for us. Around here the campground is criss crossed with low wires because each palapa has a light bulb and a twin 15 amp outlet. A van would bring all the wires down. 

We are too tall at 9ft or 2.8 meters but how the big expedition trucks cope I don’t know. Even on city streets sometimes we fear clipping overhead wires. 

For the moment we have found our happy spot. Panama is getting back to normal and the protests are over so the highways are open. One day we’ll wake up and feel the familiar urge to move and that will be the day we leave. We pay day by day here so any day may be the last. 

I’m sure you understand it’s not easy to leave. We have cabbage and apples but we’re out of bananas rambutans and lettuce. We started our back up bag of dog food and we have plenty of treats so Rusty is okay. Layne keeps cooking from her stores, smoked pork chops and air fried potatoes last night, and we are going to bake today. 

To get to Panama we need to pay a vet to organize Rusty’s exit papers. Some vets charge $260 according to iOverlander so we may have to go back up north to the vet who treated Rusty for ant bites as she seems much more reasonable. Panama and Costa Rica make pet travel expensive and bureaucratic I suppose because they can.

I wouldn’t get a dog if I were planning to overland a vehicle but I won’t leave him behind. 

I expect we’ll be on the road later this week back up into the mountains then when we have Rusty’s documents we’ll drive the Caribbean coast which I’ve never seen, passing through Puerto Limon and Puerto Viejo to Sixaola so we can drive the Caribbean coast of Panama too.

If like Joebob you are following along on the map you might enjoy checking out Rocking J’s in Puerto Viejo. We plan on spending a night there and I’m not sure if we will be laughing at the antics or clutching our pearls. It’s in the iOverlander app as well and also with mixed reviews…

Meanwhile we have some beach lounging to do. Soon enough we’ll be on the road and doing useful stuff. 

Don Trino Campground

 Monday morning in the campground. What joy! What bliss! There is but one other tent far out of sight and we are alone in our little patch of Costa Rican waterfront. 

We arrived at the campground Saturday afternoon and managed a quick swim as the sun was setting but we’ve been back in the water twice  a day since then. This is the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica so tides are big and lots of sand is uncovered at low tide. 

The locals mostly come for the day at the weekend though some bring tents. Our mobile home (“casa rodante”) creates some interest and we showed our home to Jorge who was next door and fascinated by our roaming life. He’s an IT manager in the city of Alajuela three hours inland and he had brought his family to spend Saturday night under canvas on the shore of Bahia Ballena (Whale Bay) at the campground. 

So let’s see, we think this campsite is brilliant and not just because we are alone here during the week. Ticos unlike Mexicans are quite restrained in public. They don’t play loud music and they aren’t very effusive or openly curious about the gringos in their midst. So being surrounded by quiet conscientious Costa Ricans of a weekend is no hardship.  They even pick up and bag their own trash! 

Still you have to understand this is no Kampground Of America. The caretaker cleans and removes our trash bags after sloshing the loo and shower with disinfectant. We put toilet paper in the loo for our convenience but this rates as A plus on our travels! Toilet seat, proper flush and regularly emptied toilet paper basket. Big thumbs up! In Latin America you don’t flush toilet paper or you’ll bung up the sewage system. Indeed we have a separate basket in our van toilet compartment. When I’m back in the States  I get confused remembering to flush the paper!

And the shower, ah yes indeed. This is all we need, cold water is no hardship this close to the equator. We have nails to hang our clothes and a place to put shampoo. Big thumbs up!

This is what we look for when we spend twenty bucks a night. Then we like to have a pool or better yet smooth sea water to swim in, not a surf break. If surfers like a spot we generally don’t. Rusty likes no dogs but when there are some, as there are here, he growls if any of them come too close to his home. He’s figured out they are all pretty scared and he doesn’t hesitate to tell them to stay clear. I like my dog’s new level of confidence that he’s developed on the road. 

So here we are on a hot dry sunny day with a muddy van after our driving adventures. We’d better wash the mats and stuff hadn’t we?

Well yes indeed and then hang them out them out to dry but first I wanted to mention that other critical feature we look for in camp life: plug in electricity. And here it is inside the palapa we get to use which also has an electric light. Notice all you fussy engineering types it’s just a household outlet but at least here it’s protected from the rain… the big black box is our voltage regulator and step up converter. Electrical outlets as far as Ecuador are 110 volts like the US but from Peru south they are 220 volts like Europe. So our magic box will step 220 down to 110 for us but it also prevents electrical spikes. We were having a few Monday morning spikes yesterday so the box interrupted the current from time to time saving our system from extra work and overloading our inverter. Brilliant!  (In case you’re interested we have a 3000w inverter so we bought a 3000w step up regulator so we can run the air conditioning through it. However in Central America we use shore power to charge our batteries and run the a/c at night off our 600 amp battery system. I fear if we try running a/c direct off shorepower we’ll blow the campground electrical system…)

In an all electric van we need to plug in if we aren’t driving for a few days. We can idle our engine and get lots of juice that way if we have to but in a campground a plug is much easier for us. So Don Trino has everything we need. Plus the sink. 

Most of Costa Rica seems to have potable water at least so far. So we fill our tank using a bucket and a siphon though we still filter our drinking water through our Berkey. But it’s nice to be able to wash dishes outside the van and do some laundry by hand. 

Even though it’s not all spiffy like you’d see in the States it’s nice for us to find this level of amenity on the road. We might stay a few days before we head toward Panama and our container shipping plan to get to South America. 

The Worst Roads In The World

Amazing to relate we did not ford this river. We were trying to get to Playa Cocos from Playa Guiones and Google Maps said this was the road indicated. We gave up and turned around. There had to be a better way. 

Yesterday was a crap show every way we turned. And as Layne pointed out indignantly we didn’t even get a glimpse of the ocean on this “coast” road. 

The mud hole above was cleared for us by the truck driver. He saw us looking hopelessly at the hole so he flattened it and waved us through. Amazingly kind. Then there was a section of sharp pointed rocks. It made us jiggle in our seats like Mexican dancing beans. 

It was Saturday so there was tons of traffic on the dirt roads to the beaches and they took the potholes at speed raising clouds of dust to cheer us up as we grumped along trying to find the least potholed way. 

They passed us any way they could, on the left or the right weaving and dodging holes as they went. 

I tried to photograph the nightmare but I couldn’t encompass the madness in mere pictures. 

It was ten miles an hour and coming to a complete stop for the ones we couldn’t weave around. 

Oh yes, they have weird antediluvian bridges to negotiate too. 

No sign of an ocean or a beach. We spent all day struggling up and down this coast looking for a place to camp and the wild camps were worse than the seedy campgrounds and the roads were worst of all. 

That was the best part: the iOverlander campgrounds were nightmares of grossness, and we are used to less than pristine campgrounds. Filthy facilities, cramped parking areas with no privacy and not a view of the ocean. 

We found one place that looked like a weird replica of a down at heel Florida trailer park with trailers piled up against the water front higgeldy piggledy. The owner came out and he looked like a mobster’s mechanic covered in dirt, greased back hair and a tattered wife beater scowling like we were bothering him by showing up. As he scratched himself we left, his gaze unblinking followed us out. 

It was exhausting looking for a place to park and we sure did explore the coast. 

We inspected beaches to wild camp, campgrounds and any road we could get lost on. Some beaches had wild surf, some camping spots were centers of Saturday revelry and others had dreadful approach roads, steep inclines, rainy season trenches dug in the surface or collapsed muddy holes.  

Another popular campground in Playa Cocos looked good on paper but it was tiny and filled with so many coconut trees we could barely turn around and get out never mind find a spot to park. The enthusiasm others reported for these nasty places baffled us. 

It went on all day. We left our beach camp before seven in the morning and it was sunset by the time we found what looks like a really good spot which I’ll write about tomorrow as we may be here two days, maybe three… 

But the rest of Saturday was an off the charts struggle to find our way. The towns and villages we passed through had no architectural merit whatsoever.  

GANNET2 was brilliant taking it all in stride. We backed and forthed, made u-turns on narrow lanes and struggled up and down dirt tracks dodging vast holes in the roads without a problem. 

We spent almost ten hours looking for our next spot and we now know all we need to know about the state of this part of Costa Rica. It is not to our taste. 

Been there and done that including the dreadful unmarked speed bumps that hid from us in most of the villages. Invisible and lethal. 

What a day. 

Oh and some impossible hills. 

The Gulf of Nicoya, a glimpse in the distance, as we tumbled down another impossibly steep hill whose angle is masked in the photograph.

Oddly we neither of us were too fussed at not knowing where we would overnight. There’s always a place no matter how desperate things look. We’ve been doing this for a while now, living on the road in a van. 

$9 each per night, showers, toilets, electricity and picnic table included. 

We landed on our feet in Pochote Costa Rica.