After a few really good days in Manuel Antonio, we felt ready to explore two small beach villages, that we'd heard great things about, about 1-2 hours bus ride away; Dominical and Uvita.
Problem with Costa Rica is that the bus system is not as extensive as it is in South America. Here you really have to plan your trip unless you want to sit at a bus station for hours. We've found that even if there are bus schedules, it changes all the time and buses are rarely on time. When we were gonna take a bus back from Domincal to Uvita for example, the bus left 20 minutes before the scheduled time..
So because of this we had some trouble getting from Manuel Antonio to Uvita, as there is only 2 buses a day. But after getting help from very friendly locals we somehow managed to get there.
As usual, we had reserved our two nights accommodation through Booking.com, and realised that we shouldn't have for these places as almost nothing came up, and the once that did were pretty expensive aswell. The best thing here would've been to just rock up to one of the hostels.
But in the end we had a pretty good accommodation and were able to explore one day in each village. They are really different, even though we'd heard that they are similar. Domincal is more of a cosy little surf village, with monster waves. Whereas Uvita is far more stretched out. It has like two small centres next to each other by the main road, so it feels like you're on the countryside somewhere in the US and from this center we had to walk for about half an hour to get to the beach. Anyway, here's how we spent our days in each village.
Uvita
With the constant intense heat humid air, our first aim was to find the Uvita Waterfall. It was only a short walk to the entrance, where we had to pay $2 each in order to see and have a lovely swim in the refreshing water. It wasn't busy with people at all, which made it even better.
Then we took many detours on the many different dirt paths before we found the beach, where, in low tide, you can see that the beach is shaped like a whale tale.
We found that the beach is actually a part of a national park, with loads of screaming monkeys and I feared to get a coconut thrown in my head. There were loads everywhere. I wish I was able to open up coconuts myself!
We stayed to watch the sunset on the beach and it was a perfect beach for an evening stroll. Before we went back to our hostel (when we got lost again by the way, this time in the dark and THAT was freaky) we ran into a small little restaurant along the road that served vegan soy meat burgers. So random and almost too good to be true. Well, actually it kind of was as we both had bad stomach cramps later on that night..
Dominical
The next day we took one bus from Uvita to Dominical, which is about 20 minutes away. We came here mainly for the food, as this village is way more vegan friendly and is a place for a yogi. Well, it would probably be paradise for someone who wants to eat vegetarian, surf and do some yoga.
The beach in itself was a bit disappointing, a lot of trash and the waves were, like I mentioned earlier, MONSTER waves. And for someone like me who's scared of waves, it was just too much. They even have big warning signs to look up for the strong currents.
There were also lots of souvenir stalls where we could kill some time by just looking at everything, but the highlight was of course the food. I could've spent the whole day eating if I wanted to (and if I had the money!)
First food stop of the day, was vegetarian Cafe Mono Congo where we had some brunch. They know vegan here, but unfortunately there weren't that many meals that could be turned into vegan. We had the burrito, which wasn't great but still good.
Still regret not trying one of the vegan desserts and shakes (I mean chocolate papaya cake!!!)
But we did have dessert next door instead and that was awesome. Mama Toucans is a little natural food market with loads of vegan food items. Everything from tofu, tempeh (!!!), to almond cheese, quinoa, grains and, most importantly, ICE CREAM!
I almost screamed for ice cream when I saw that they sold all different kinds of ice creams, different flavours of sorbets and coconut cream based ones.
As the chocolate maniac I am it didn't take me long to decide to go for the coconut chocolate one, which I sprinkled with some dried banana/coconut granola we got as free tester (the friendly guy working there also gave us free samples for peanut butter with chocolate flavour.. Bliss)
We spent most of the day in Dominical on the beach, recovering from all the yummy things we've had. It was pretty boring in the end to be honest, as it's not much else to do around here.
We did have more room in our bellies before we left Dominical for the day though, and therefore stopped by the more posh vegan friendly restaurant Maracatu. They knew vegan by heart, and had such an amazing menu. Guy had the vegetable curry, which he'd been longing for for a very long time and I finally got some tofu when I ordered the teriyaki tofu with brown rice. Such a satisfying meal, so I didn't care that it was a tiny bit more money than we usually pay for food.
In the end of the day, it felt totally worth going to Domincal from Manuel Antonio, just to fill up on great vegan food.
No comments:
Post a Comment