After recuperating for a couple of days in La Fortuna de Bagaces, we headed to the beach to recuperate for a few more days.

Playa Hermosa is a great place to take a few days off. There is a resort hotel at the northern end of the beach, and several minimalist cabinas on the southern edge with everything in-between, in-between. You can rent surf kayaks, swim, explore the tide pools or just lounge in the sun and eat and drink.

It was a good thing we were well rested as we set out on the next leg of our trip, because the monkey trail proved more than we could reliably navigate. The monkey trail is a sometimes jeep road (sometimes not because it’s too washed out or flooded for even the sturdiest 4WD) that starts just south of playa Hermosa and roughly follows the coast for about 20 miles until it peters out near playa Conchal. There are numerous side trails and it’s quite easy to loose your way (at least that was our excuse). We made a right when we should have headed straight on, and ended up on a beautiful deserted beach about three miles north of where we planned to meet up with the highway.

It was sort of a fortunate detour into paradise, unfortunately that paradise was at the bottom of a huge hill that was nearly impossible to ride down and would be a multi-hour hike a bike to get up. However, our salvation was at hand. There was an 18 foot fishing boat working the break just off the beach, and when they pulled near shore to clean the morning’s catch we hailed them and convinced them that they should really go into the water taxi business. They carried us around the point to playa Conchal, where we met the highway to Nicoya.