The Amazing Surf Town of Santa Teresa! 🇨🇷 (New Country!)

The Amazing Surf Town of Santa Teresa! 🇨🇷 (New Country!)

Good morning. We are here in Puntarenas in Costa Rica. I just took the Bus down this morning from Liberia. It was about three hours. Really comfortable ride. Really good deal too. It was like 3,400 Colones roughly. I’ll put the actual mount on the screen here. But it was a direct Bus right from the central Bus terminal all the way to here. And then when I got here, the last two and a half or three kilometers or so from where the Bus let you off. Just hop in a taxi, which was $3. So we are here at the terminal for Tambor Ferry. So we are taking the Ferry across today. Ultimate destination today is Santa Teresa. We take this Ferry to Cóbano on the other side, and then from there there’s two buses. You basically just switch halfway through. so it’s about an hour or so on the Ferry here and then about another two hours on the Bus once you get to the other side so in the end it’s about a six to seven hour travel day to get from Liberia where I was over to where I’m headed but so far so good everything’s been pretty smooth and we’re just going to head in here now and get checked in I already have my ticket you can see there’s the ticket sales office there it was 810Colones for the ticket on the Ferry and that $800 is about $1.50 US. So let’s head over here. We’re just going to walk over there. I think there’s still a waiting area. Although I do see some people getting up on the Ferry now so let’s go over and have a look. You can see all the cars that are waiting here. This is a car Ferry so I see they’re boarding a bunch of the cars here now as well. So it is currently about30 and the Ferry takes off at 12. We’re going to head over and sit up top somewhere in the shade because I don’t have any sunscreen on yet. But we should be good to go. Just inside the Ferry. There’s a nice little bar there with snacks and stuff. Nice and air-conditioned in here too. I found myself a table so I can get a little bit of work done. on the right across the water. So we’re just heading across the Gulf of Nicoya here, which is aptly named because the next region we’re heading into here in Costa Rica is called Nicoya Region. That is where I’ll be spending the next few nights. I’m really excited about it. It’s an area that not a lot of people get to see in Costa Rica despite being up in the very touristy part of the country. But it’s a beautiful, all lush, jungle type atmosphere and I’m really looking forward to it. This Ferry ride has been really good. Very smooth. It’s a nice day for it actually. It’s perfect with a nice breeze here and it’s not too windy at all. So it’s a really great experience. So yeah, we’ve got about, I would say about 20 minutes left before we get to the other side. You can just sort of just see the dock over there. And then when we get there, we hop on the Bus, which stays at 1:30, and then off we go from there. And here we are, just about to arrive. From here, we’ll hop on the Bus and keep on going. Good afternoon. We are here in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. This is just over sort of the Nicoya part of the country. We come across the Peninsula on the Ferry. It’s a very popular destination for surfers, for expats, backpackers, and all sorts of travelers. We are just walking our way down here. Just up ahead is the beach, Playa Santa Teresa. And I thought we’d go start there and have a little chat about this part of Costa Rica. This is my sort of first, I guess, official stop here. I actually did make a stop up in Liberia for a couple of nights, but I stopped in Liberia mostly just to get some work done and to break the trip up all the way over to here. So Santa Teresa is part of the Puntarenas province here in Costa Rica. And we are sort of on the Pacific side of the Peninsula. We came over, as I said, from Liberia. It was about a six to eight hour trip to get here. It was involving three buses and one Ferry, but everything goes very smoothly. I’ll talk about that in this video and how to get here affordably. And because this place is also sort of notoriously expensive, I thought I would also show you some ways that you can come here on a budget and have an affordable and amazing time here in Santa Teresa. We are just coming down here to the beach, so let’s go down and take a look. Welcome to Playa Santa Teresa here on the coast. is a absolutely stunning spot here. And it’s very easy to see why this beach is much more popular than some of the others in the area. And I’ll show you why in a second here. But this is a very popular surfing destination along this coast. Everywhere you go down here, you’ll see surfers looking for that wave. I think this is sort of part of that series of places along the coast. So if you remember, we were up in El Zonte, which is near El Tunco, was a very popular surfing destination in El Salvador. And then you can continue on down the coast through Nicaragua and then down to here in Costa Rica. And you can see that there’s some really great surf here too. One of the things that makes this beach a bit more interesting and probably more popular is that during low tide, This area here, right in front of me, where these rocks are, this sort of becomes almost like a secluded pool from the rest of the ocean. And it’s very calm, as you can see the waves outside there are very strong. And that little pool is almost like a little spa pool of sorts for the area. So, so far my time in Costa Rica has been really nice. It is a big adjustment after three months in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Everything here is a different level, I guess is the best way to put it. It’s much more developed. It has a lot more infrastructure. And of course, with all of that, it also has a much higher price. So a lot of people, when they come backpacking through Central America, they sort of get nervous about Costa Rica because of the costs. They get worried that it’s going to be too expensive, that it’ll blow their budget. But I think there are ways to work around that. And so in my first few days here in Costa Rica, I think I’ve already figured out a few tricks. And some of these are nothing new for me. about finding affordable places to stay, affordable places to eat, and so on. But I think here in Costa Rica, it can be even more important if you are traveling on a budget or traveling long term and want to make it stretch for as long as you can. You see all along this coast, the beach just continues as far as you can see. There are these rocky oak crops and stuff along the way here too. But there’s a lot of sand and a lot of waves if you’re into surfing. I have never surfed other than surf the web. But I’ve never done any surfing myself personally. Always wanted to try it, but now I would just hurt myself. But it is a beautiful spot here on this coast. And it is a beautiful day to be out here. And this beach is not that busy considering we are about a five minute walk from the main street here in Santa Teresa. So one of my first suggestions if you’re coming to Costa Rica is plan to spend more. No matter what you do, no matter how much of a budget you’ve been on previous to this, and I’m assuming you’re coming fromNorth to south, you will spend more in Costa Rica that is unavoidable. However, I do think that you should be able to keep it to pretty close to what you’ve seen in other places. So I talked a bit about it in my budgeting video for a few different countries, and that kind of gave you a good idea of what the daily budget should be. On average, it was $25. $30 US, maybe $35 US, depending on the cities and things, but never more than that. So far, here in Costa Rica, I have managed to stay in that budget. At the high end of it, $35 or so dollars, but it is definitely doable. I think one of the things that helps with that is starting with finding places that have kitchens available to cook at home or home as in where you’re staying. Groceries in Costa Rica are relatively well-priced. They are certainly far cheaper than they are back home. They are slightly more expensive than they have been for the last few countries. But that doesn’t mean you can’t save a lot of money simply by cooking at home, because you always can, regardless of where you are. And so when I was in Liberia, the place I found there, this place had a full kitchen. And I was able to go and get some groceries. There was a grocery store just a couple blocks away. So I was able to go buy some groceries and at least cook breakfast and have some snacks kicking around for meals. That freed me up to, if I wanted to go for supper or whatever, still fit within the budget. So the place I had initially in Liberia was great. So as you can see, it was at the very sort of high end of what I’m normally used to paying. But the features that were included, it had a hot shower, it had really great air conditioning, it had the full kitchen, and it was relatively close to both the Bus station in Liberia, which for me is important, as well as the grocery store. Liberia is not really a place where you’re going to find a lot of activities to do. It is a place that a lot of people use as a transition to go to other parts of the country. But it was nice for a couple days just to be there, to check it out a little bit, and to get some work done. So it worked out great for that. And now here, it’s been, I think, even cheaper. Despite the massive amount of tourist hotels, tourist restaurants, and general more expensive vibe that this place has. So as my first official stop, I do find it pretty impressive that I was able to find a place here in Santa Teresa that has its own private room with a private bathroom, hot shower, air conditioning, outdoor kitchen space that’s dedicated to the unit. Everything I would need. Comfortable bed, quiet at night, and I am paying $20 US per night. So again, I’ll show you it later. I’ll give you the full review and stuff later to see what it looks like. But yeah it is certainly possible to come to this part of Costa Rica on a budget and maintain it about four minutes from my place there are a couple of grocery stores one of which well one of which I’ve gone to the most but um I’m just watching the water here as I stand I’m ankle deep in the water here on the edge um yeah I went to the grocery store picked up some groceries just basics things for breakfast, things for making coffee in the mornings, juice, snacks, those types of things. And then go for supper at night. And the places I’ve found for supper so far have been great. They are local, what they call sodas here in Costa Rica. They’re basically just local restaurants that serve local style meals. A lot of those come with things like rice and beans. I’ll show you a couple pictures here of some of the stuff I’ve had so far. And it was really affordable. It was like $8 or $9 for that entire plate of food. So I think that’s a pretty good deal. You can certainly spend a lot of money here on food. There are restaurants here that cater to every taste and price. I’ve seen some places here that have $30, $40 US meals on the menu. The places are pretty busy. So if you… don’t care for the kind of typical Costa Rican meals at the sodas, or you’re looking for something a little bit different, there are, like I said, lots of different options. I went to a burger place last night called Gyro’s number two. They had fantastic burgers. I got a burger for, and it was a big burger, and fries and a drink that came with it. And I believe the whole meal was around $12 US. So that was really good. I mean, that’s McDonald’s back home or more. And it was fresh made, delicious. So there are lots of local places that you can support when you do come here that you can check out and enjoy. But nothing beats coming down here to the beach on a day like today with the waves and stuff out there and just soaking up the sun. What a spot! So I thought I would talk a little bit about how to get here affordably. So I know a lot of people will hop in tourist shuttles for $40 or $50 US and you know that’ll take them from wherever they started down south or over where I was in Liberia, and it’ll take them all the way to here, on the Ferry boat, the whole bit. But that’s crazy. You don’t have to do that. So what I did was I actually found a really good site online that had accurate Bus information scheduling, costs, all that sort of stuff. And I thought I would sort of share some of that here. So unfortunately, this is the second of two video clips that I lost due to a storm, which you’ll see footage of shortly. So I thought I would talk through these steps here a little bit of the cost breakdown of getting from Liberia to Santa Teresa yourself and why you don’t need to use a tourist shuttle. So the first thing to do at Liberia is get on the Bus to Puntarenas This is a Reina del Campo Bus. Costs 3450 Colones, took about three and a half hours. They had a couple of buses that run during the day, but if you wanted to make sure the rest of their schedule goes smoothly, there’s a Bus at 7:45 a.m. from Liberia that I would recommend you getting on. Once there, as I mentioned in my last video, you then have to take a taxi from where the Bus drops you off in Puntarenas down to the Ferry terminal. As I mentioned, you then hop on the Tambor Ferry, which cost 810 Colones. Took about an hour or so for the crossing, and the one I took in this case was at 12 noon time. Once on the other side, you basically follow the crowd up out of the Ferry terminal, and there’s a series of buses waiting. You want to make sure you get on the Bus from Paquera, where you are, to Cóbano, where it’s going, and that is Transportes Cóbano, a Bus. That one was about an hour and a half and cost 1,500 colons. 30. However, if the Ferry is running late, it wasn’t a big deal as it was always waiting for passengers from the Ferry because that’s where their traffic comes from. Once you get to Cóbano, you have to hop off that Bus. And basically I got off, walked to the back of the Bus that I was on, and there was another Bus waiting there to go to my final destination, which was Santa Teresa. This was also a Transportes Cóbano Bus. That was 1,000 Colones, and the final leg took about 40 minutes to arrive in Santa Teresa. So there are a couple of different websites that you can use to travel throughout Central America for Bus routes, times, and those sorts of things. One is a bit more modern in that it crowdsources a lot of its information. Some of the information is a little older, but in my experience so far, most of the routes and schedules have remained the same. So the first site here is centrocoasting.com. Centro Coasting has information on routes for several different countries, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and others, including Belize, I believe, is on there as well, and Guatemala, although they are not as detailed. As the other three sites, it’s pretty good. I’ve had pretty good amounts of success with it, but another site that I found actually was better for information and up-to-date schedules and those types of things to work your. connections out and it has a far larger number of countries involved. It basically encompassed everything from Mexico all the way down to, I believe, Venezuela and Suriname and a few other places and everything in between. It is a fantastic resource. The website is the Bus schedule.com. It is a little less, like I said, it’s a little less fancy, but I found that the information on it was more accurate in terms of schedules, Bus company names, those types of things, as well as they also have maps for all of the Bus stations. So in a nutshell, yeah, so that was basically my entire breakdown. So as you can see here on the screen, you know, I had three buses, one taxi, and one Ferry in total. So the grand total for those three buses, one taxi, and one Ferry to get me all the way from Liberia to Santa Teresa, which was a full day of travel, I would say, 7 to 8 hours in total, cost me a grand total of 8,160 Colones, which works out to about $16 US. So it is less than 1/3 of what a tourist shuttle would have cost and is a far better way to travel if you’re on a budget. So I thought I’d give you a little review here of where I stayed in Santa Teresa here in Costa Rica. I stayed in a place called Box Studios and it’s been awesome. You know, for all the talk of Costa Rica can be really expensive and all that sort of stuff, I think I’ve done a pretty good job so far finding some places that are really well priced. So this is the unit that I had, this is a turtle unit. And this is all your own private space. So you get this table with two chairs outside. You get a nice cooking area here that’s exclusive. So you get a two burner stove, sink, you know, lots of dishes and stuff there. And then up inside here is your unit. And it comes with a very comfortable double sized bed, lots of pillows. and a little storage place here for, you know, clothes and whatever. Great air conditioner, kept the place nice and cool the whole time. And then on this side, there was a little work desk here, where I basically worked off of, and then there’s a bar fridge style here. Good size, actually. Some of them are usually even smaller than that, but this was a good size fridge. Little storage area, coffee maker, which I’ve used a lot, and then in here, a great bathroom, so nice and big. It’s got a nice walk-in shower with an electric shower head and sink and toilet and the whole bit. I’ve been really impressed with this place. I found this on Agoda.com originally. I usually start all my searches and I’m going to talk about this in a separate video very soon. But I usually start all my searches through a site like Trivago, which kind of is like a, kind of amalgamates all the different search sites into one and lets you look at all the different options, different pricing on the different sites, all that sort of stuff. And I initially booked it for a couple nights because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stay for here at all, at least a couple nights. But in the end of it all, once I got here, kind of, you know, loved the spot, to be honest. These are… You can see outside here, if you look across at the other ones, these are old shipping containers that have been converted. And they’re like 40 by 8 foot shipping containers. And then each one has two units in it. And so when I got here, after my first couple of nights, I talked to the owner on WhatsApp and asked him about extending and gave me an even better rate. So I’ll put both rates on the screen. The price I initially paid through Agoda per night, and then the price I paid through talking to the owner directly, ended up being like $20 US per night, which is fantastic. And I know that this is kind of, I’m here at a time where it’s kind of like a shoulder season, kind of, it’s not really the busy time, it’s not the quietest time, so I’m sure the rates probably fluctuate a little bit during the other parts of the year, but for now, for me, Fantastic deal, fantastic place. In terms of location, this place is fantastic. You are just sort of up behind another business here, so it’s quiet. You’re up off the road. You are 30 meters, about a minute long walk to the pathway that takes you down to Santa Teresa Beach, where that pool is and kind of where that beach area was that I showed you earlier. That’s all very close to here, so that’s fantastic. Grocery stores are nearby. Lots of great restaurants. You know, as I’ve talked about, you can spend as much or as little as you want when you’re here. I think that there are plenty of places that are generally quite affordable. You know, soda style restaurants and that burger place I talked about there before was great. And those are all within like 5 minutes of here going left or right off the main road. The Bus can also drop you off right out front, so you don’t have to walk any distance, and it’s… It’s been awesome. I mean, the weather hasn’t been awesome while I’ve been here. We’ve had some really, really heavy rains a couple of nights. Last night it was pretty intense. For three or four hours it rained, like it was just non-stop, like it was biblical almost. And there ended up being about 10 centimeters of rain had fallen in a period of a couple hours, so my whole outside area here was all underwater for a little bit, but it’s drained off, as you can see, and everything is fine today. Anyway, that’s the review. Fantastic spot. So if you want to look at staying in a spot in Santa Teresa that is affordable and convenient and locally owned and all that sort of stuff, it’s a great place to check out and I would highly recommend it. It is a very threatening sky here at the moment, so we’ll see if the rain holds off or not. I felt a few sprinkles already. It also rained pretty heavy this morning. But that is life here in Costa Rica during rainy season. You never know what you’re going to get or when. But that’s fine. So I thought we’d just go for a little walk down this way to the other end of town and I’ll talk a little bit about my plans I have coming up for the rest of the country. As I mentioned before, you know, I’ve been to Costa Rica once back in 2011. I was here for a couple of weeks back when I was working with BlackBerry, but that was still a thing. And I came down here to help set up a new technical support center that they were establishing here. Needed help training staff, answering questions, all that sort of thing. So during that time, I was only here in San Jose, and I was only here for, like I said, about two weeks. So really, I didn’t get to see much of the country outside of that. I did go on a tour to Coffee Plantation and Poas Volcano. and some waterfalls, which, ironically enough, are the oldest clips that I have here on my channel, which you can see here. So I really liked Costa Rica when I was here, but obviously a lot has changed in 14 years. So I’m pretty excited now to you know, continue and explore the rest of the country. And there’s some raindrops, but that’s fine. So there are some key spots in Costa Rica that everyone visits when they come to the country. Along this coast is one of them. I would say that Monteverde is another spot that’s very popular here in Costa Rica with travelers. And that’s actually where I’m headed next. I leave from here on a Bus, to a second Bus, to the Ferry, and then finally from the Ferry over to one more Bus to Monteverde, which should be great. So after I get to Monteverde, I plan on staying there for, I think, four nights initially. I really want to do the Cloud Forest walk and there’s some other stuff there that looks really amazing. It’s also high up in the mountains so it’s a totally different climate which will be kind of cool. So after Monteverde I’m heading to La Fortuna and then Bajos del Toro and probably back to San Jose the capital at that point because once I get back to the capital of course I can then go and check out Poas because it’s relatively close to the capital city. cross back over here. We’re getting a weird mix. There’s some very dark skies and then some blue sky. So who knows. Just made our way down to the beach here. This is sort of more the surfer area as you can see. The waves here are pretty open and it’s not as rocky. We were down sort of… there you can see the rocky point that kind of sticks out. That’s sort of where I was before. So that’s going to do it from here in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. Thank you so much for watching. It’s a pretty relaxed place. There’s not a lot going on here if you don’t enjoy the beach. But I did enjoy coming here and checking out the town. And the place I stayed in certainly helped. If you liked this video, please leave a like or a comment down below to let me know that you were here. And if this is your first time here, feel free to hit subscribe. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I certainly appreciate all of my subscribers. If you would like to support me further, there’s a couple different ways you can do that. I have donation links down below for PayPal and Bitcoin. And I also have a shop with some merchandise for sale. T-shirts, hats, mugs, all that sort of good stuff. And remember. Life is short. Wander. And I’ll see you in the next video.

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The Amazing Surf Town of Santa Teresa! 🇨🇷 (New Country!)