Sufficient Sloths

For breakfast we drove into town and went to Cafe Rico, which is a very westernized breakfast spot in Puerto Viejo with a large collection of second-hand books for sale or trade. We had some more greasy bacon and eggs that tasted not as good as the previous day’s, and feels really unhealthy after eating fruit for breakfast every day. Afterwards we picked up our laundry and drove to Manzanillo which was by the same nature reserve as Uva and supposed to have very beautiful beaches. We parked the car there and strolled on the beach. It was nice enough but a bit more crowded and had fewer monkeys and no sloths. We decided that this tropical paradise had insufficient sloths, and headed back to Playa Uva.

First thing we saw after parking the car in Uva was a nice big three-toed sloth sitting in a tree. We took a picture of him with the big camera we brought today, and continued walking to the beach. In a creek mouth before reaching the beach we spotted a caiman sunning itself, and a sloth mom carrying a baby and dipping in the water near it. They come down once a week to defecate and I guess today was their day. We stood there and looked at all the lovely animals and were feeling very fortunate to be able to see them so close. Right when we were standing there came the same French couple that we met when rafting in Arenal and again on the ferry to Tortuguero. We greeted them and let them use Guy’s binoculars to get a better look at the baby sloth.

On the beach we sat in nearly the same spot as yesterday, in the shade of a tree over the sand, on which we hung our backpack and camera, between our two sloths (Slothy and Speedy) and a troop of monkeys including some babies. We enjoyed the nice weather and the proximity of our animal friends. We read on the beach and agreed it was a very good decision to return to this beach after all.

For dinner we drove through the pouring rain to a place called Stashu’s Con Fusion which did not sound promising at first but proved us wrong. It was Jamaican interpretations of curries and other Indian dishes served in a retro-gourmet restaurant style with tiny pieces of fruit and rice adorning the plates. The owner was an eccentric guy with a white beard tied and painted red at the tip, who greeted and served every customer, and warned us to drink only filtered water in Costa Rica - we’ve been drinking the rainwater in Tortugeuro and Puerto Viejo and trusting in our inoculations to protect us. They had a house hot sauce made of some 20 ingredients that paired well to add spiciness to the other sauces, like my Jamaican jerk chicken. They also served rather creative cocktails - Leia’s watermelon mojito was tastier than Guy’s rum-pineapple concoction.