Hiking and wedding location scouting

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Scoping out a good wedding location

Dan and I woke early to head down to the beach to find appropriate places to hold our wedding ceremony. We weren't exactly sure on how to get to Pan Dulce beach, as we had only looked at the map once on the previous day and had forgotten to bring it with us on this morning. It generally takes 15 minutes to walk there, but we had made it a good 30 minutes of walking back and forth before finally finding it down the road that we first decided against. It was the first time that we had seen the beach, even though I had seen photos of it on th eweb previously. It has quite dark grey sand with rocky sections on both ends of the beach, separating it from the beaches that start on the other side of the boulders. We found two suitable locations for the ceremony, one by three palm trees and the other by a large tree with cool roots on the edge of the sand. Not sure what would be there better place for the light, we decided that the photographer could help decide once he arrived, but I think we both really wanted the location by the one big tree.

Wild waterfalls

We made it up to the main hut, which is quite a distance up the hill from our bungalow, by 7am with enough time for us to enjoy our breakfast at the restaurant before we needed to go to the tour hut to sort out our gumboots for the Wild Waterfalls tour. We found suitable boots for our 3 hour trek and made friends with Mark, Laury and Bronwyn, who we had met the previous day on our flight out to the lodge. They were also staying for 4 nights and it was lovely to meet up with them every now and then around the lodge or grounds. Three young American guys that were travelling together also joined our group.

Edwin was our guide. He is a local man that has been taking the tours for quite a number of years and he knows the forest on the Lapa Rios Reserve very well. We starte our walk up to the start of the path for the Wild Waterfall tour, when he mentined to us that he saw a 3-toed sloth sitting in a tree closeby earlier that morning and that we could all go have a look to see if he was still there if we liked. We all agreed that we wanted to see the slow creature and we were lucky enough to find him in the exact same location where Edwin had found him earlier int eh morning. Apparently, sloths have been known to stay in one location for great periods of time. I looked through Edwin's binoculars for a closer look at the massive hairball that appeared to be static in the tree. He barely even moved his hed the whole time that we were standing there staring at him.

We walked back to the entrance of our chosen jungle path and walked through the rainforest, with Edwin stopping every now and then to explain about a certain tree or vine and about and creatures that he encounters. We walked through both primary and secondary rainforest and learnt about the differences between them. We saw land crab holes and a few different birds in the trees. Bronwyn, who is only 5 years old, did anamazing job of keeping up with us adults. She was very impressive how she walked most of the way, with her dad lifting her over the rivers we crossed as her little gumboots weren't high enough to keep the water out! We encountered a couple of waterfalls during our walk and we all had a swim in the pool of water at the base of the larst waterfall that we visited. The walk was rated difficult with a 3 hour time frame, but it wasn't that hard, even though it was a little slippery in some spots when walking through the rivers and past the mud made by last night's rainfall. We made it back to the lodge within the 3 hours even though we had spent half and hour finding and looking at the sloth! We found so many different types of fungi along the way. One was soft and pinkish, which Edwin displayed as edible by taking a bight into it, some were bright red, others brown or white and we also found one that was as big as your face! We also came across wild papaya, that the monkeys eat and also some monkey bones that were lying on a log after a monkey had passed away naturally from old age.

When we arrived back at the lodge, there was a small crowd gathered at the entrance to our trail. We looked up to wear they were pointing and saw some howler monkeys hanging around in the trees and also large iguana resting on a strong branch of a different tree. The iguana had a large crest, giving it a very dominant and strong look about it. Our day was wonderfully full of animal sightings.

More monkeys...

After lunch and a quick swim in the pool, we wanted to revisit the beach to see what the tide looked like at 4pm, as that is when we had planned to have the ceremony due to the suggestionof the photographer who wanted to capture the light at that time of day. During the walk down, Dan cursed himself as we didn't bring the camera with us and a whole family of howler monkeys climmbed and jumped around the branches that crossed over the dirt road on which we were walking. We counted 13 of them in total, including a baby with its mother as well. We could have stood and watched them for ages, but it was important to get to the beach to see the tide to make a judgement for our big day the next day.

Surprising tide

When we arrived at the beach, we were very surprised to see that there really wasn't any beach left! We found out later, that we had arrived exactly at high tide, which explained for the disappearance of the dry sand that we had walked along earlier that morning. We saw some guys balancing on a large palm that had fallen over and was now floating in the water. It was the group of Americans that went on the walk with us in the morning. We asked them about how long the water had been so high and they said it had been coming in for ages and there wasn't much beach for the last hour. They suggested that we walk around to see the other beaches, as there was more sand visible when they were there earlier.

Following the directions from the guys, we headed back along the path to try to find the beach south, as it was too risky to go around the rocks from our beach to get there. We finally found a track that looked like it had public access to the beach from the main road, only to find that we had wandered too far to a beach further away than we had planned. This was not an issue, except that there was no sand left to walk on and we wanted to get around to the beaches further north. The area is very popular with surfers and we followed some of them onto a small hidden path through the mangroves to the beach further down. We finally made it to the beach that we were looking for to find that it also had been swallowed by the tide. At this stage, we were stuck with no path to get back to Pan Dulce, our original beach, without going back the way we came. The water was coming in strongly and I had already bruised my ankle, as boulders that were being swept around in the tide crashed onto my feet within the white water rush. We took a risk and made a mad dash across the rocky section that joined us to Pan Dulce, but the waves caught us and knocked us around a bit. We were quite wet by the time we made it safely back to the road to the lodge and a bit exhausted from the effort of resisting the tide. What hope was there for a wedding location? We weren't sure at this stage, but would check out the tide times and make a decision about what to do after that.

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Photos

Playa Pan Dulce
The beach as it looked in the morning.

Comments

[Rene]

DID YOU GET MARRIED
Hi Rachael, I was reading one of your blogs and it mentions that you were looking for a location to get married, did you do it or will you return in the near future?

[RaeDan]

Wedding in Costa Rica
Yes, we got married on a small beach near the jungle in Costa Rica. The blog "Waves and Monkeys at the wedding" details our day :)