On one of our first days at the RIU Palace in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, we started hearing other guests talk about a secret beach. It was referred to as obscenely beautiful, with lots of shady spots to be found under the palm trees. The more we heard about it, the more we decided we wanted to see it. Everyone said to just walk left, down the beach, go around the cliff and you will be there.
One morning, after lunch, me, hubby, and our travel buddy Paula set off for this gorgeous beach. We turned left down the beach and a little while later came to the cliff. Apparently, none of us had heard the complete instructions for going around the cliff.
It jutted out into the ocean that was filled with a lot of rocks. We made the executive decision to walk around the cliff the other direction.
This way took us up a small footpath, around the cliff, and we came out on a gravel road. We could tell others had been back there on foot and on horse. This is where our Waiting For Godot story begins. The play by Samuel Beckett (buy it here), is basically a play in which nothing happens. It has the characters continually wait for Godot, but they come to no definite conclusions. This is how I felt about our hike to the secret beach.
We walked. And we walked. We walked uphill, we walked downhill. We walked for what seemed like forever. We walked up another hill, thinking the beach had to be just on the other side. It wasn’t.
When we had started out that morning, while still on the beach, I had pointed at a ridge and joked that if we found ourselves on the road that was visible way up near the top, we had probably gone too far. When we reached a stretch of that road that allowed us to see back to our beach, we realized that’s exactly what happened! We were almost at the top of that ridge.
We turned around and began walking back. It turns out we walked about 6 miles that day, but only really needed to have gone 2 to get to the secret beach. The crucial instruction that we missed was that we were supposed to go during low tide, when we could easily have walked around the front side of the cliff to the secret beach. I suppose that the next time we decide to go find the next secret beach, we will know to get better instructions AND pay attention to them. Or, we’ll just need to return to the RIU Palace in Costa Rica now that we know how to find their secret beach.
Travel tidbits from my life