The Schiffers: Day 29 - Another try at the Waterfall

Playa Grande near Montezuma

Several days ago we attempted at walking to a waterfall that was a two to three hours walk from Montezuma. We were going to give it a try again today. This time though we were planning it better to coincide with the low tide. There are a lot of sections of the beach that can not be passed during high tide or even close to high tide. Some of the sections are hard enough to traverse even at low tide. This would make for a good half day trip. The sky was clear blue without a cloud in sight. Weather did not have rain in the forecast for Nicoya Peninsula. That was exactly what we wanted to hear for today.

We got Marco to come pick us up and take us to Montezuma. If we would have waited for the bus it would have thrown off the whole timing. We managed to get into town at about 8am and hit the Super Montezuma market right away for a couple of sandwiches, granola bars, drinks and snacks for the walk. Without wasting any time, we hurried and made our way down to the beach.

What you are seeing are rocks. Fossils really. Within the rocks were fossilized sand dollars, shells, etc.

The waterfall had to be at least 4 to 5 miles out. The terrain as we walked changed constantly. With each change of the terrain, so did the beach. There were at least four unique beaches we visited during our walk. One had a dark reddish brown sand, another light black sand, yet another light brown sand and lastly one that had a deep red sand. Each of the beaches also had different rock formations. It was really weird and amazing to see a change in the overall structure of beach over and over.

This beach had massive rocks or rock formations in the ground of all different colors. The read seem so out of place.

Our favorite area we came onto was Playa Grande (Large Beach). We hit the beach with about an hour before low tide. Its beach was very wide and the shells here were awesome. We spent quite a bit of time picking up all kinds of shells there. We found three huge sand dollars and Anna found the prettiest Olive shell. Playa Grande has definitely not seen the last of the Schiffers. We’ll try and visit that beach again on Wednesday.

Root system of a tree that was facing the ocean. The tree was massive. It was at least 40' long. Seemed it had been there a bit.

On the way to the waterfall we ran across a troop of Capuchin monkeys and later ran into a group of Howlers. It was a quiet walk. No other humans except for two. Where does that ever happen? Around noon time, we were maybe another half mile from the waterfall before we stopped to have lunch. We could see the waterfall off in the distance. We contemplated about going the rest of the way, but with the change of the tide and the possibility of a breakdown by one of the kids, we decided to head back instead. It would take every bit of at least two hours to walk back.

Howler snacking on a nut. He could have cared less we were there.

An hour into the walk Olivia spotted a green snake. The snake was around 3 feet long. We viewed the snake for quite some time before eventually leaving it alone and continuing back to Montezuma. A little before Montezuma there is a small river that empties into the sea where we stopped and cooled off a bit. After the dip we headed into Montezuma and went into El Sano for a well needed lunch. We were all starved from the walk. So as you can probably imagine, there wasn’t a morsel left on any of the plates. We called Marco and he came and picked us up and we were back home at around 5pm.