Editor Pick
Playa Jaco and La Catarata
- August 10, 2000
- Rated 3 of 5 by
Tate from Santa Barbara, California
Hop on a bus at San Jose's Coca Cola station (it takes around three hours and costs two dollars) and make your way towards Jaco. The journey is kind of cramped and bumpy, but eventually you'll wind up close to the beach. The bus crosses the Rio Tarcoles, and will usually stop to let the passengers spy the crocodiles infesting the waters, and will continue bumping along for a while. Tell the driver you want to get our at Carara, which is a privately owned biological reserve, and start hiking up a long dirt road towards La Catarata, another private reserve with an enormous waterfall.
The hike is around 5km to the top, where there is an old man in a hut selling bottles of water and entance tickets to the falls. Cars cruise up and down the road all day, and I managed to hitch a ride with a cattle truck. The cows mooed and pooped everywhere, and I just stood on the side of the truck laughing. Once we got to the top, we talked to the old man selling water, bought our tickets (about a dollar) and ran down a mile to the swimming holes and waterfalls. If you're quick, you can run out, hitch back to the main road, and hitch the rest of the way to Jaco, where'll sit in the sun all day long and drink beer and margaritas from all the little bungalows dotting the coast.
Beware of riptides at Jaco.
From journal Misty Rainforest Adventures