The Nicoya Peninsula – Santa Teresa & Montezuma

From Corcovado we headed north towards the Nicoya Peninsula. We’d finally gotten Sean’s board fixed and we were all keen to get back to the beach.Unfortunately, this was the point in the trip that Sar was leaving us. She was heading back to San Jose for a night before flying home.
We all boarded a bus bound for San Jose and fell asleep. 3 hours in we had reached our destination and the 3 of us (Tash still with us) hurriedly said our good byes to Sar and jumped off (she had another 5 hours ahead of her). We found another bus, again bound for San Jose, and jumped on. This one was set to pass Jaco, a quite large beach town roughly 3 hours away. From there we planned to catch a water taxi to the Nicoya peninsula.

Once in Jaco we found a cheap place to stay and dropped our stuff off to go and have an explore. Whilst there we bumped into Aimee, a chick from New Zealand we’d spent a few days with in Manuel. It turned out she was also keen to head north so we decided we’d head that way together.

We stayed the night in Jaco and jumped on a boat to Montezuma the next morning. The boat cost $35 US each and was relatively hassle free, except for the sketchy beach landing made a fair bit more stressful due to a 4 foot shore break on arrival unexpected by our captain.

Once in Montezuma we again chucked our things in our room and headed for an explore. We cooked chicken schnitzel for dinner and headed to bed early.

The next day we headed to Montezuma Falls. These are a series of waterfalls you can access by a small trail from town. The trail is short and easy (we all did it in flip flops) but it is entirely over rocks and through some small sections of the river, so enclosed shoes could also be helpful.There were 3 waterfalls, and the first one you come to is HUGE. It also has a big rock ledge sticking out from the cliff half way down. Multiple people have died or received broken bones attempting to jump off this one, and resultantly we gave it a miss. The next one however is only 8 – 12m. I’m sure it has an actual set height, but for now it’s actual height depends on who you ask.

There are 2 ways of getting to the second (and jumpable) waterfall. You can pay $4US for access via a stair case on neighbouring private land, OR do what we did and scale a steep slope of mud and roots with the assistance of some well positioned ropes, and then scale back down the same way.

After a couple of jumps and plenty of footage we headed back to town for some lunch.

The next day we hired quad bikes and drove across the end of the peninsula to Mal Pais and Santa Teresa. It was meant to take 45 minutes but with our mad skills and sort of crappy bike (probably more our skills) it took us almost double that. Regardless it was fun, and we enjoyed Santa teresa so much we decided to book into a hostel (Don Jon’s) and headed there the next day. We ended up staying 5 nights!