More fun in Costa Rica…

Settled in at Del Coco Playa and roaming around the town was fun…

of course I’m an old hand at traveling and adjusting to local conditions but what I found here in CR, near the jungle, was that the weather is oppressive in mid-November. Nearly 85F every day and 85% humidity. The heat I can get used to, the humidity? Not so much. I grew up in the dry desert area of eastern Washington state and did not have to experience humidity much. Anyway, time to roam around…and I was lucky that the owners of my rental DID have two working bicycles, and I could use one. The old fashioned one speed, rear incorporated brake where you step back on a pedal and it activates. Took some getting used to. Had a nice basket on the front. I’d seen the bikes in one of their promo pictures of the home on VRBO and sure enough, there they were.

So the left over portion of the 2nd day I was there in El Coco (note that I find it written both ways, Del Coco, and El Coco. They have different meanings, I’ll have to look it up. But basically it IDs the place) I biked down the road directly to the beach, then crossed the little stream and then onto the beach park’s pavement. Trying not to fall off the bike like an idiot. This city park borders the beach and fronts all the beach side businesses…mostly restaurants but there is one small motel.

And at this point I’ll post a bunch of photos to give you a sense of where I spent most of my days while here in CR…

I should mention that this tree is considered a local treasure. I forget why now. Size? Age? Diameter? I forget. It’s sort of a hang out for people. If I’d come there in the morning, there would usually be 2 or 3 guys without blankets or pillows or much of anything other then the clothes they wore asleep on the cement platform that surrounds the tree. I don’t know if they are/were homeless, or just hired nite time guards.

In this next picture, I’d ordered a couple Pina Coladas and they were delicious. Took a couple hours to finish them, while people watching. The beach is right behind me as is that big tree. When I asked to pay, this waitress showed me a bill in English that showed both CR colonies of ₡8400, and USD of $14. So I handed her a $20 USD. She walked over to the bar, handed the $20 over and then took the change but went the other direction and did not return. There’s already a 10% gratuity as part of the bill, so I was not happy with another $6 tip. After waiting a bit, I grabbed a different waitress and asked for my change back. She went and got it no problem. This happen 2 times when I was in CR. You’d give a server $20 and they wouldn’t return with the change. So I got into the habit of saying that I wanted my change back…in a nice way of course.

I’m right next to that big tree and there’s the cement surround that kids have tons of fun grabbing the vines and swinging out over the ground off the surround. Saw that several times. That and the guys sleeping on it.

I usually went down to this area around 2 pm after spending most of the morning trying to solve the mystery of where those damn credit card charges originated…which damn travel company sells their customers CC info like the number/date/code, including their customers phone numbers, home addresses, and likely ages too. The whole 9 yards.

If you travel a lot, you know that as you’re scouting things like places to stay, airline tickets, travel insurances, that often it’s required to put in all your personal info to buy stuff online. One or more of those companies in turn sell your personal info. But somewhere one of those businesses has criminals that sell CC and all the rest of that info to creeps and that’s what happened to me. They are sophisticated too as evidenced by the 3 American Airline charges that AA says aren’t their charges. The CC charges listings from my bank even shows the AA phone number. And then that bogus Travel Shoppers Network. Three different phone numbers and company names listed for 5 different charges to my card, and when you call them, they work really hard to UPSELL but refuse to refund even though the charges are bogus. HOW did they get all my info!? They had EVERYTHING! And I’ve never heard of the company.

Since then, mid-November, I have received HUNDREDS of bogus fake scam emails (You’ve WON!…sure I have), and 10’s of scam phone calls. I never answer my phone unless my phone recognizes the phone number so not a big deal…just annoying. I’ve blocked nearly all emails and phone numbers, and just now as I type, I got another bogus phone call. Now, what I do is leave it sitting on my desk and swipe up to answer it, but never say anything. Let them waste their time.

I am literally going to get a new CC with a $1,000 limit the next time I decide to plan a trip that requires plane tickets and VRBO or AirBnB rooms and fun stuff like tours. Then pay down the balance as soon as it shows up on the card. And next time, if I get a notice of suspicious activity on my card, I will click on having them suspend the card IMMEDIATELY instead of what I did this time which was to wait and see if they were charges to something I may have bought for the trip. Turned out they weren’t and I waited too long so they hit my acct instead of being blocked. GAH! Such trouble.

So yes, the first week or two at El Coco Playa was a bit stressful as I had to constantly check my acct to be sure nothing else ended up on my card prior to it being cancelled.

Anyway, back to some fun…this set of pictures are the next day, again rode the bike down to the beach, crossed the creek, got on the cement pathway and this time explored a little further into town. Note that the town’s population is only given as 3,000, and the tourists must swell that to 25,000 or so. I came here mid-November in order to miss most of the tourists that come during ‘high season’ which is mid-December through February and beyond.

My daughter is a vegan so I took this to let her know that yes, she can travel to CR and not starve. Heh.

Here’s a glance at the local prices. You can pay with USD and you’ll get colonies back. In all the places I went to and spent money at, I only recall a couple that asked for colonies. The ₡ 2300 shown here is around $3.85 USD.

Soccer & baseball multi-use athletic park right downtown. Shows you that yes, it’s a small town.

And up the street from the ocean side park is what was to become my go-to-bar…reason is that it’s a sports bar, and they show ALL the NFL games and many college games on their many flat screen TVs. They have a giant projector screen too where the most popular game is shown. It’s too bright to see much on that screen for most of the day, but gets better at dusk.

Just a look directly across the street from CocoNutz. Lots of jungle ’round here.

Back at my rental, I decided to try a meal at the tiny cafe up the street. I had their pork chop dinner. Very nice. It did cost $12.29 with the 13% tax that CR charges for everything and I had a beer. I also tried their chicken dinner and their Mexican style dinner. All of them were enjoyable.

Unfortunately, several shots I took of the menu and food didn’t come out so this is all I have of that cafe I think. I had several dinners and several b-fasts there. Maybe I’ll find some pics later. One of the strange things about this cafe/bar were the waitresses. One of them was just extremely good at what she did. I thought of her as the owner. She spoke passable English, explained the charges, handed out the receipt, gave correct change, could figure out what I wanted when I ordered. Then there was the other one who seemed lost and confused by the entire food/guest thing. One strange thing she did was they had their menu in English on one side, and Spanish on the other with each item numbered the same. I would come in for b-fast and point out the meal I wanted on the English side. She went to the kitchen and told them she had no idea what I wanted, twice this happened. The nice cook came out and asked me what I wanted. Huh, she couldn’t just turn the menu over? One example from many. I much preferred the other waitress/owner gal. She always had it going on. BTW, I was never disrespectful to the gal. I figured she was new.

Next day I headed down to the beach early, like 1 pm. Not many private boats in the harbor today. Locals enjoy the sunshine too.

There were some loud noises over in the distance and I took a couple shots just in case, but it passed quickly and I didn’t see anything weird.

After spending a couple hours at the beach, I rode my bike up to the local grocery store. At the time, considering the size of the town, I thought this was the only big box store in town. It’s not. First I stopped across the street and had a nice fruit drink.

Got a bunch of food stuffs I could make my own meals with. Turned out this store is tiny compared to the really big box store just a couple hundred meters up the road.

And then later that afternoon, near sunset, Will and Sary invited me to watch the sunset from their favorite place up in the hills. They hired a Uber type guy as it didn’t say taxi anywhere on his vehicle and though Uber is illegal in CR, there are still these Gypsy cabs as we used to call them. Hill was rather steep. I began to wonder if the guys car would make it up with the four of us in it.

Driver drops us off at the gated communities gate, we walk through the open gate (the neighborhood has realized there’s nothing to fear around here so they no longer care), and up the nearby path higher and higher on the hill over looking the harbor. Some people have quads so they don’t need to walk even 10 feet. These two are heading back down to the paved road.

And here we are. The harbor, and the almost sunset.

And you can see that El Coco isn’t all that big.

Lots of visiting sailboats though. Nearly all of those I’m told are private.

Sary loves this view.

Darn clouds in the way.

And that was that. We walked back to the front gate, called the gypsy cab and waited while he finished dinner or something. When he finally showed up, it was pitch black. That hill was just as steep going down. Lucky they don’t get snow here but in heavy rain, I suspect it’s rather dangerous.

The next day was more messing with my CC issue and then I felt it was time to create a spreadsheet of my CR expenses. Using OpenOffice by Apache on my tablet. Worked great but took some time to come up to speed with it. Once I had an idea of how to use it, and had entered all my receipts so far, using the tablet onscreen keyboard (I hate those but my mini full size keyboard just suddenly stopped working), it was late in the day. So I stayed home all day messing around. Read a little of a book I’d brought with me, played with the gata.

Late in the day, Will asked if I’d like to join them for a group dinner. Sure! Turned out he wanted $10 for it. And it was my least favorite style of beef stew; huge chunks of the meat and spuds and carrots. With sides of corn on the cob, rice, and bread. Oh, and wine, but I already had my favorite CR beer in the refer.

That’s Estaban (the guy who could get a car and drive me places…picked me up at the airport) on the upper right, and my VRBO apartment host, Will, on the bottom right. The other guys are transient renters.

The friendly, happy gal seemed to be here all the time so I think she’s one of the hosts?

Those are all the folks who were staying in the nearby apartments at the time I believe.

So even though the stew wasn’t my favorite dish, had a good time and was full when I pulled back from the table.

The next 2 days was mostly warm rain days, then the 3rd day I was able to venture out. Rode to the end of the beach trail and found these CR cops on horseback. Cool. First cops I’d seen in CR (except at the airport).

You can see that the clouds are still threatening. November is the rainy season and boy can it come down. But it’s warm! So I’d sit on the veranda and just watch the gully washer when it happened. But as I said, the next day was only a sprinkle or two so I rode down to the beach again, then up the main street and this time stopped at Zi Lounge where they tend to have soccer on the TVs instead of football. I had a pizza this day and yum, delicious. In fact, most everywhere I ate in El Coco had pretty good food. Not as great as I find Mexican food, but good.

See the soccer player there on TV, just did an amazing BS flop. Ha!

But I was here during the World Cup playoffs and if I wasn’t watching NFL next door at CocoNutz, I was here watching soccer. Costa Rica’s team was screwed royal by an official who had been previously banned from officiating any world cup games for cheating a few years ago, but here he was back, officiating, in the world cup. And he screwed up several calls that all went against Costa Rica in favor of the favorites, Brazil. It’s often said that the FIFA is the most corrupt sports org in the world, and it was sure on display during that game, allowing a known cheating official to officiate. How low can they go? Later that afternoon, another visit to the beach.

Went back to the cafe up the street from my apartment and I did take some pictures. These sorta burritos were excellent. But, CR does not have the selection of hot sauces I like. Here they only have bottled, commercial sauces. Nothing fresh made like a salsa or sauce.

And they had the TV on the world cup games. Not sure which teams but this wasn’t Costa Rica.

Next day the gata decided I am his bestie and so started snuggling up to me, much to Sary’s surprise. Instead of sleeping with her, he decides he likes my room better and started staying with me for hours on end. Both rooms have AC so he just like it better in my room.

Good kitty that protected the house and yard. Chasing off stray cats that would wander by. He would bound across the street right in front of cars though. Then during the day he’d wander on down to the beach and spend nearly all day carousing on the beach trails. Sometimes not coming home until dusk.

So that’s enough for today. Thanks for reading!