In leaving Playa Grande we set Waze for Nosara and headed out for our final destination.
The first route had us turning right off the main paved road and heading down a gravel one. We stopped, and considered, and went back to the main road toward Liberia. Waze recalculated and had us turn southward again a few kilometers later. Onto a gravel road. Strike 2.
We stopped and really considered this time. Waze is considered THE PRIMO route planning app for CR. We've set Waze to choose paved road over the shortest route... but maybe the settings didn't take. There's no way to tell how far it is before pavement starts on this route. We looked in Google maps... and found the largest looking road running southward parallel to the coast, to Nosara, and decided to try our luck there. So we backtracked to the main road, turned Waze off, and followed Google maps to that promising road.
Only to find it was unpaved too!
At this point we decided that we've struck out and we have no choice but to take this unpaved road, it being the only option to head south. And maybe we'll get lucky and the pavement will start soon.
No such luck, but what an eye opening trip!
The road curved back westward, and then hugged the coast the entire 50+ bumping kilometers trip. We traveled through Playa Azul, San Juanillo, an area called Black Beauty, small villages where cow pastures were oceanfront and countless soccer fields, before finally madking it to Ostional, the beach just before Nosara and a popular turtle watching spot.
At Ostional the road became wider and better maintained, but I'm not really sure this is a good thing. Apparently the government has been promising to pave the main road at Nosara for years, without it ever actually happening. But what they do do is dump and smooth a gravel mixture heavy with dust over the road of this popular beach area. Sounds great, until you drive through and see the gravel dust billowing behind cars on the road an settling onto other cars and piling on the vegetation like snow. Seriously.
I stole this photo from a Facebook page