San Jacinto

Monday, March 2nd 2015 San Jacinto
For the last few days, we've been staying at Casa WF about 2km along the beach south of the centre of San Jacinto. Linda DeLuca's friend Denise from Ottawa (whom we've never met) emailed us a link to the Casa WF website. It looked really good so here we are. It's great.
Casa WF is the very last house along the beach road before the mouth of a little river. Jim and Marty, our hosts, are 2 Americans who bought this lot and had the house built over 2 years. It's beautiful. They live upstairs. There are 2 suites on the ground floor with patio doors leading out to the patio, deck and little pool in a nicely landscaped fenced yard. We're right on the beach. Everything is new, nicely decorated and very well maintained. We're paying $60 per night and, since the other suite isn't rented right now, we have the whole patio, deck and pool to ourselves.

Jim makes our breakfast every morning for $3 each. We eat on the patio just outside our room. Usually after breakfast we go for a long walk along the beach, often into town to pick up any supplies like beer or wine. In the afternoons, we lounge around on the deck and have a dip in the pool when we get too hot.
In the evenings, around 5pm, we walk along the beach into town for dinner. We've eaten at 3 different little restaurants so far: Laurita's, the Copacabana and Marco's. They're all very simple and basic but the seafood is very good.

We've been eating a lot of camarones aponadas (lightly breaded shrimp) and calamari apanadas (same). Usually we're paying $7 each for shrimp or calamari, rice, fried plantain and salad. We split a 608ml beer that costs $1.50 to $1.75 in the restaurant ($1.50 at the bodega).
This is a working fishing village where the fishermen use logs to roll their boats over the beach to the water and set nets at night, returning in the morning.

Sometimes there will be about 18 or 20 guys pulling nets up onto the beach. Some fishermen also set nets in the river beside us.
Yesterday was Sunday which is family day on the beach. In any of the coastal towns, people arrive by motorcycle, car, or bus from inland to spend the day on the beach. Everything livens up. All the little beach shack restaurants open, there are little shade tents or umbrellas for rent, hammocks under the beach cabanas fill up, there are beach soccer tournaments and pickup games and everyone has fun. This morning, everything is quiet once more except for a few mothers with children playing in the water. It's summer holidays here.
Instead of going to a restaurant last night, we went into town around 1pm and bought half a roasted chicken for $6. Marty had gone to a Sunday morning market and picked up some tomatoes, mangos and a cucumber for us. In the evening, that was our dinner on the patio, sipping wine and beer and looking out at the sunset over the ocean.

This morning we walked into town and re-supplied. We'll probably go back to Marco's this evening. We're here for 2 more nights before we move on to Canoa.