Puerto Viejo de Talamanca

So after sitting around the hostel trying to fight off some virus I picked up in Nicaragua, I decided I had to ship out to the Caribbean coast for one last trip before school started.
What a great decision! Puerto Viejo ended up being one of my favorite cities in Costa Rica. Even though it is mainly a tourist town, Puerto Viejo has maintained a very comfortable environment. It’s a wonderful Caribbean getaway!

I stayed at Lonely Planet’s #1 recommended budget hostel called Rocking J’s. I paid $5/night for a hammock to sleep in. The place was right on the beach which was one of the most amazing beaches I’ve seen in my life! Every picture I took of it turned out post-card perfect! The mosquitoes liked the place, too. I ended up looking like a red polka-dotted clown by the time I left. I’m glad none of them gave me dengue. I hear bad stuff about that.

My first day in Puerto Viejo I met some people out on the beach. They turned out to all be students at the University of Costa Rica! I ended up following them down Manzanillo, a little town surrounded by a wildlife reserve. After hiking about 15 or 20 minutes down a dirt trail paralleling the coast we found some of the coolest places ever! These completely natural beaches just blew my mind!

Hugging the shores of most of the coast are coral reefs that prevent swimming in most areas. I got lucky on my last day there because I was able to borrow a friend’s diving mask and swim around the reefs. The reefs weren’t living, so they weren’t full of color, but they made great homes for a lot of colorful fish. That was yet another experience that fed my desire to learn more about life under the sea. It is a whole new world down there!
(Does anyone else have a couple Disney songs going through their heads after that last paragraph?)

Well, all good things do come to an end and I had to come back to San Jose to start going to school. I’ve done two days so far and it’s looking like I’m going to get to take some pretty cool classes that will end up allowing me to finish my minors in GIS and in Computer Science by the end of the school year. This should make for an interesting semester!