This year we celebrated Christmas over Zoom with Omi and Opa on December 24th, and then had a lovely lunch with some newly arrived Philips expats from the Netherlands, who grew up in Greece. We finished the day with Lasagna and Queque Navidad (Costa Rica Christmas cake), and we were ready to leave bright and early Christmas morning for Christmas at the beach. We left around 6:30am, and thank goodness we did, because there was still a fair amount of traffic on the way to Domincal.
Although we arrived early, our awesome Air B&B host was happy to let us into the place which was cleaned and ready for us already. We unpacked and started exploring. Between the house and beach there was this cool little area of palm trees.
We brought the kitties with us for the first time. The place had a large screened in porch, and they had a view to some really interesting and exciting things - so many lizards, iguanas and basilisks. Apparently former guests have done a really good job of feeding them the universal Costa Rica fauna food: bananas. We did our best to keep up the tradition to entertain future guests as well. I was a little worried about the small guy who took a few minutes to choke down the giant piece I gave him so I learned to cut them into smaller chunks!
From the beach, here's the view of the palm trees.
The owner had built a little outdoor table in the yard, which was so nice for sitting in the shade of the palms and listening to the crash of the waves (during high tide, the waves were quite near to the palms) and the meow of the kitties who were cruelly not allowed to explore the outdoors.
The view of the beach from the backyard
and here come a bunch of beach photos... We were totally enchanted with this place.
Lots of big rocks on the beach, and almost none of them in the water, making it safe for swimming and super beautiful too.
The sunsets were spectacular.
The rocks were home to a surprising variety of crabs, some smaller than a pea, and others larger than your whole hand. It was fun and a little creepy to watch them scurry about as you walk by.
Here, Vivian and I are making sand piles and burying each other in the sand. The sand was super fine like Magic Sand and you could make those little drip sand castles while finding all sorts of living creatures in shells that would bury down as soon as they were placed back on the beach.
One day we went on a river tour of a huge mangrove and saw crocodiles and all kinds of birds.
Vivian at the bow of the boat - she liked the crocodiles best and me taking this picture the least...
This is the seed of one type of mangrove. It can float in the ocean for a year, which is why mangroves are everywhere. The white stretchy thing is referred to as the placenta for the seed and goes from the outside to the center of the seed! So cool!
We found multiple waterfalls near our place - this one is called El Pavon. The water was refreshingly pleasant, and several people were bravely swimming behind the waterfall while we were there - but the water was coming down pretty hard, so we opted to just admire it from afar.
yea... this is what the mamas do at the waterfalls... take the pictures. :)
This was another amazing one, Nauyaca Falls - a small hike from a parking lot near to our AirB&B. There were two falls, this one (the upper falls)
and this one, the lower falls.. We got there early in the morning and the sun shining on the mist was magical.
The AirB&B owner told us about a restaurant nearby where the monkeys come every day at 4:30 to be fed bananas. We arrived with a tupperware full of sliced bananas and drank beer on the porch overlooking the ocean until they arrived, slightly late (maybe they snoozed the banana alarm too many times on their monkey alarm clocks?) making a racket on that tin roof before they made a dramatic entrance swinging around and climbing to the feeding station. The Panamanian White Faced Capuchin: we saw these back on the beach in Manual San Antonio. They are funny little guys, and were very appreciative to get so many bananas from us. Locals refer to them as demons with skins. Probably like how after a few years in Colorado you start to think of the prolific mule deer as landscape destroyers instead of just beautiful creatures lying in your yard.
At the pizza restaurant later that night, Vivian had fun surfing.
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