Playa del Coco: A Good Place to Do Nothing

My previous stop, Playa Copal, really had one purpose – kiteboarding. After two weeks of that, it’s odd to wind up in a place like Playa del Coco, that really, whole-heartedly embraces doing nothing. There are things to do there, like deep sea fishing, diving, and getting shuttled out to the host of adventure activities that folks expect from Costa Rican destinations. But people mostly just seemed to be hanging out on the beach or drinking. For the more adventurous, there was the option of both hanging out on the beach and drinking AT THE SAME TIME at a slew of beach front bars. That was some serious master-level shit though, so me and Elani usually stuck to one at a time.

Coco was definitely a tourist town. Walking down the main drag, I heard more English, French, and German spoken then Spanish. Lots of decent places to eat with a good variety cuisines represented and even a high end grocery store. At 33, I’m fairly certain I was well under the average age of the folks vacationing there. Mostly, the younger tourists either were families with young children who were looking for a easy time on the beach, or the occasional young couples that looked just slightly out of place, Elani and I fit neatly into the latter category. However, if you take a walk and get away from the main street and beach front bars and hotels, there are pretty sizable Tico (Costa Rican) neighborhoods. It was nice to see that foreigners haven’t complete overwhelmed this little beach town.

For us, it was a great place to chill out, give Elani that chance to catch up on some work with decent internet, and enjoy being able to walk to a variety of grocery stores, or restaurants if we didn’t feel like cooking. A nice change from Playa Copal where our food choices were, well, I guess the polite thing to say is limited. Another bonus was finding a free standing two story apartment on AirBnB for under $40 a night. There were a couple days we didn’t get very far out of the house – I have no regrets. Oh and did I mention it had a view of the bay? No, well, here’s a picture from the front steps:

The one downside of the place was that it was about a half hour walk to the beach, but since it was fairly flat, we usually just walked it instead of bothering to find a taxi. One particularly aimless day, we made the walk to beach and continued along north until we ran out of sand and continued along the rocks that were exposed by the low tide. The rocks had a number of tide pools containing a host of little fishes, crabs, urchins, sea slugs and other critters. Past those, the rocks curved around and gave a great view looking back at the town:

On our way back, we stopped and watched the sunset. It usually sets behind the hills in most places in Coco, but here we could mostly see it get to the horizon. The cruising sailboats all lined up on their way back to harbor to catch the sunset as well:

Two of the more standout activities we actually went out and did were snorkeling and eating at a hilltop bar aptly named “The Lookout”. The snorkeling trip was honestly a bit of a letdown. The last time me and Elani went snorkeling was in Indonesia, and its crystal clear shallow waters and abundant marine life set a high standard. We went with a local dive company that took us (and a bunch of scuba divers) out to some of the rocky islands off of Playa del Coco. The waves were reasonably rough, so we couldn’t get too close to the rocks and that combined with cloudy waters made it a bit hard to see. It was by no means a terrible experience, there was a large school of sleek sliver fish that was neat to swim through, a barracuda swam by, and there were a couple other neat fish. Here are the closest shoots I was able to get with the GoPro:

Actually, the best wildlife we saw was from the boat. A herd of devil ray were breaching a couple hundred yard out. It was great to see them hurtle themselves full speed out of the water. Elani was very excited – it’s something she’s wanted to see for awhile.

The Lookout on the other hand, exceeded my expectations. Let’s just start with a picture:

That gives you most of what you need to know. And, in case you were wondering, yes that’s craft beer (for Costa Rica none the less), which is a vast improvement from the canned loggers widely available in most of Costa Rica. But I digress, let’s have a little better look at that view:

Okay, but how was the food – good. Elani made a perfectly reasonable choice and got a poke bowl. I made a less reasonable chose and got something called “tuna poke nachos”. Why? Because it sounded ridiculous and people kept mentioning it, in a positive way, in google reviews. It was ridiculous, and it was delicious. It consisted of a giant plate full of deep fired wan tons covered in tuna poke, mango salsa, sliced jalapenos and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. I just managed to get through it, with some help from Elani. I’m lucky our apartment was downhill from the restaurant.

All in all, Playa del Coco was a good place to chill for 5 days and enjoy some good food and beer and some beautiful views. It provided a nice relaxing contrast to the adventure coming at our next stop – Monteverde.