One week at Casa Zen was the perfect way to practise to really being able to relax. Even though Santa Teresa in itself is a bit too hot and humid for my liking, a week full of yoga totally made up for it.
Santa Teresa is a small village on the South Pacific coast. To get there we had to take a bus from San Jose to Puntarenas and from there go on a 45 minute ferry ride to Paquera, take another bus to Cobano, then one last bus to Santa Teresa. Yes, it's a tricky journey to do (but then again, most places are pretty tricky to go to in Costa Rica, unless you can afford taking shuttle buses everywhere, or if you have your own car)
We probably wouldn't have gone here if it wasn't for our booked mini retreat at Casa Zen. We had done lots of research and realised that this was the most affordable yoga retreat in the country. Because I can't say that I'm the biggest fan of Santa Teresa itself (it's probably a paradise if you're a surfer though!); things are expensive, the tap water is not drinkable in the area (which makes things even more expensive of course), there's no real town center, just a long dirt road stretched out along the beach and robberies are sadly very common.
But, saying what you want about Santa Teresa, the yoga did make up for all of this and made it into one of the best weeks we've had since being away.
Casa Zen is a really cool place with nice bedrooms, a garden where a monkey decides to hang out and be loud and an amazing yoga deck. The shared toilets unfortunately tends to become very dirty in a day, and having an air-con would've been a great plus because the room, well the air, was hot and humid ALL the time.
It does feel really homey because of the two dogs and one cat who lives here aswell.
We'd book the mini retreat (8 days, 7 nights), which now during low season was slightly cheaper than in high season. For $175 each we got our private room with shared bathroom, tropical breakfast every morning, use of yoga equipments and we were able to attend unlimited yoga classes.
Our mornings would usually start with breakfast; a plate full of fruit and really nice coffee and at 9:30 we went on the first yoga class for the day.
All of the yoga classes we went to were really great. It really felt like doing yoga in paradise on that deck and it felt great to challenge myself to do poses I'm not so comfortable with doing. The teacher are real inspirations and after doing so much yoga that week, I feel like I can't live without it from now on.
I've been struggling a lot with my patience hen it comes to yoga, because of my tight hamstrings and hips which makes it harder for me to do many poses. I really needed this week to realise that all I have to do is come back. In the end it does take some dedication, but finding the joy in it is a moment that I will never forget.
Here I am practising crow pose, my next challenge to master. Step by step.
I'm also so proud of Guy for coming with on all the classes and try to fight his scoliosis.
At the end of every yoga class, when it was time for corpse pose I could hear the sound of the waves so after most morning classes we went down 50 meters from the guesthouse to the beach.
Some days we walked further to other beaches aswell, all of them with big waves though. Good for surfers, not for me.
Our daily treat before we went on the evening yoga class, was to go to the airconditioned organic food store Green World store, to have a big, cooling avocado-banana shake. Bliss in a glass.
Since restaurant food seemed to be very expensive around here, we cooked most of the food ourselves. And this was very simple food. A lot of pasta with soy chunks in tomato sauce, avocado pasta, pasta with refried beans and lots of papaya and bread.
There aren't that many vegetarian restaurant in the area either. I only know of one organic vegetarian restaurant and that's about it. But it seems like many restaurants do have vegan options. The Bali deli Cafe, the neighbour to Casa Zen, even had sandwiches with vegan cream cheese.
We treated ourselves one night to eat out, when our craving for falafel just went though the roof. And so we went to Zula Restaurant, with supposedly the best falafel in town. Now, I know we don't have any other falafel from Santa Teresa to compare with, but I'm still gonna agree to say that this is the best falafel in town. It was amazing, especially loved the tahini sauce that came with it.
One day in Montezuma
One of the days we escaped the retreat to explore the waterfalls of Montezuma. We took two local buses (changed in Cobano) to get there, which was way cheaper than paying for a shuttle. On the other hand, local buses are never easy to take in Costa Rica. Usually very delayed and don't make any sense since the time tables seem to change all the time. But, we managed to get there and back anyway.
The waterfall hike was really cool. There were locals trying to sell themselves as guides to us, but it wasn't a problem at all to do it all on our own.
We walked along the river for a while until we reached the first monster waterfall where we had a swim and then we had to climb up (literally climb! There's ropes that you have to use to move forward and to keep you from not falling down the hill) a big hill to get to the top of that waterfall, where there was another waterfall, and on top of that, a tiny waterfall where we had another swim and had fun with a swing rope aswell.
This waterfall loop took about 1-2 hours in total and was a great refreshing, free activity. But the refreshness from swimming in the waterfall was gone 5 minutes later on the walk back, so I was stoked to find Cafe Organico where they have VEGAN ICE CREAM! They were out of chocolate/mint when we were there, but my second choice, the avocado/coconut ice cream, was really good.
Cafe Organico had a good menu for vegans, with v marked on every vegan dish they offered. There were scrambled tofu, curry and other things so a vegan can be very satisfied around here. Especially with these bird friends around.
No comments:
Post a Comment