Costa Rica Vacation

In March of this year my family took off to Costa Rica for the first time and totally fell in love with this place. We visited the town of Jacó Beach, and honestly we are counting the days until we return….and plan to some day spend a LOT more time there.

I received a boat load of questions on what we did, where we stayed and how it was, so I figured I will just pop some info and a few photos into a blog post to explain some of it.

Keep in mind, I’m no travel blogger. I’m just a wedding photographer. I mainly just took photos of Ben and the sunsets. Oh, the sunsets are second to none. Every single evening around 5:30, the majority of people in Jacó stop and take the sunset in….it is incredible.

You get 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. 530am the sun is coming up, 530pm the sun is going down. Every single day we were there, it was 35 degrees.

We stayed in a condo style club. Club del Cielo. This is not a resort town, no buffets…etc. You buy your own food, which is cheap and you take care of yourself. There are amazing restaurants in the town, grocery stores, farmers markets, brewery joints…whatever. Honestly, whatever you want is there, bars, clubs, barbershops…the full deal.

This was our first experience with this style of vacation, sort of. We did visit Florida the year before but it was NOTHING like our trip to Costa Rica. Chances are we will never go to an all inclusive resort again, unless it is for a wedding or a group of families plan to go. Costa Rica, was just that much better in every aspect.

I always search for culture when we go on vacations, Jacó was culture overload. Sure, its a tourist town, but not like what you think. It was authentic to me. For example, we drove to a park an hour away to pay money and see monkeys, but didn’t see a single one. We did see a few sloths though. The next day we walked down the road and into the rain forrest and saw like 40 monkeys….they were just everywhere.

For the most part, it is quite cheap to go. You can rent a condo for a month for something like…$1500-2000. Flights from Sydney were around $700 each for a return trip. I have paid more for Helen and I for a week in Punta Cana then I would pay for 2+ weeks in Costa Rica. Sure you have to buy food, but it isn’t expensive and you don’t have to wait in a line up with a bunch of strangers to get it. You can eat on your own time and eat whatever you want. The farmers market was incredible and super affordable.

Here are some of the photos, like I said…I basically just take a camera to photograph Ben. Anything else is a bonus. However, there was so much cool shit here, I just kept the camera with me at all times. For you photographers, this was all shot with the Fuji XT2 and the 35mm F2 lens.

There is a lot of photos…so…ya.