A note about Golfito: When Cristina lived in Costa Rica, even though she was born in San Jose, she lived in the southern zone. Her grandparents had a house in Golfito, which is a port town on the Pacific side. There's a big duty-free zone in Golfito, so often people will come to Golfito to purchase appliances, because they are cheaper.
The grandparents sold their house in the early 90's and moved full-time to the farm house, but when Cristina spent summers in Costa Rica, she split time between the Golfito house and the farm house, which is closer to the border of Panama, near a town called Paso Canoas.
Golfito also bears the vestiges of the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita. At its heyday, Golfito was essentially a United Fruit Company town, filled with company housing, known as the American zone. Her grandparents house was a prominent house in this zone, as her grandfather worked for the company as an engineer.
But first things first, we had to get to our hotel/Airbnb in Rio Claro about 15 miles north of Golfito. This hotel's claim to fame is its pool, which is super touristy with water slides. Not why we booked it, but that's its thing. And we got stopped at another bridge for about 45 minutes for another protest. This kind of protest has a name: tortugismo, or turtle tourism. In other words, slowing down traffic like a turtle to get attention from the media and government leaders, who don't want to risk a decrease in tourism because of these slowdowns.
As we got shown our room at Hotel Teffany, the first thing we realized is that there was no hot water in the showers. The girls had been waiting to wash their hair till we got here, and now, the shower was not only cold, but didn't even have a shower head. You turned on the water and it just dumped out of a 1-inch PVC pipe, like a spigot. This would be perfectly acceptable if we had paid $20 a night for this place, but we had paid over $100! At the risk of sounding like a pampered gringo, that's just unacceptable. Suicide showers are not that expensive. The room should have one, period.
Ramon headed to the farm house, where he would stay the next 2 nights. We drove into town and did a driving tour of Golfito, which oddly looked very closed up and desolate. We found the old house, which looked very different. We needed some dinner, and many places were closed, but a restaurant that we remembered eating at in 1994 was still there, so we decided to eat there. Samoa del Sur stood out in our memory because they used to have a very tall conical thatched roof which was very striking, and they had served their natural fruit drinks in large handmade ceramic mugs, or pitchers. We were so smitten with them in 1994 that we asked if we could buy them, and even though they didn't normally sell them, they sold us two, which we still have today. We asked the guy who was serving us about it and he remembered the mugs, but when the old lady who made them died, they stopped using them. We offered to send him a picture of ours once we got home, and he was excited to see them. Blast from the past. His name was Roy, and he had been working there for 23 years, which means he started just a few years after we had been there in 1994. The thatched roof has been replaced with a more typical metal roof, still tall but not quite as tall.
In chatting with Roy during our meal, we ranted a little about no hot water at our last two places. He said in the past few years, the restaurant had added a hotel and pool, and if we wanted to take a look at the rooms, here were the keys. First he said we could have a suite, normally priced at 60,000 colones per night, for 50,000 ($84 instead of $100). After dinner, we walked over and looked at the rooms. Both were so much better than the dump we had gotten from Airbnb. I messaged the host of Hotel Teffany and asked if there was any way to cancel the second night and get some money back. I was even considering switching to this place even if we couldn't get any refund. Then Roy said he'd give us the room for 40,000 ($67) plus free breakfast at the restaurant. We decided to go back to Teffany and Cristina would chat with the hosts in person about our unhappiness with the shower. It didn't take long before they were willing to refund the entire second night. So we stayed at Teffany for one night, and in the morning we would pack up and head to the Samoa del Sur hotel. We would have a hot shower AND save about $60 (Teffany also refunded the extra we had paid for 6 people, because we only had 5...when we booked back in January we thought Wito would be with us). Because I was so happy to have gotten a full refund of the second night and extra person, I wrote them a positive review (though I still mentioned the showers, because people need to know that). The lady agreed that they should probably install a ducha (suicide shower) because "they're not that expensive." Duh!
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