Golfito - going astray by taxi

After waking up a bit tired in the morning after the New Year's Eve celebration, we soon arrived in Golfito.

Golfito is a place that - according to our guide - most foreign tourists rightly ignore…

There are two national parks nearby, so we wanted to take a taxi to go to Golfito National Park, which is not too far away.

After some searching, because the first taxis that passed us were already occupied, we finally found a free means of transport.

We got in, said we wanted to go to the national park and drove off. The trip ended in front of a bench, in front of which there was a long discussion in Spanish, which was quite difficult due to our very limited language skills.

Eventually it turned out that the taxi driver thought we wanted to go to a bank, but he couldn't drive his car, which wasn't an off-road vehicle, to the national park.

A few dollars poorer and one experience richer, he let us out of the taxi on the promenade.

Here we walked along the water for a bit, but houses with fenced-in properties actually obscured the view of the sea most of the time.

After we had already sweated a lot in the sun and heat, we turned around and strolled back along the promenade.

At least we saw a few animals in the city park:

First, loud screaming alerted us to a pair of scarlet macaws sitting in the tree.

We then discovered a large iguana in the grass and another smaller one in the tree.

So we weren't in the national park, but we were at least able to go on an animal watching tour in the city park.

In the other direction we walked a little further along the main street until we came to the local church. We could only view these from the outside because high fences prevented us from even entering the property.

We turned around and went back to the harbor area. Nearby were the remains of the international banana trade that used to be based here.

After he left the area, Golfito's economy was so bad that the government decided to build a duty-free shopping center for locals. The aim was to boost tourism because shopping there required a few overnight stays.

Since we were in town for New Year's Day, almost all the shops were closed anyway.

Back on the ship we relaxed on the sun deck and got a good shower on the way out, but it was mostly blocked by the awning.