La Playa Monterrico

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Up front disclosure…. it’s a little hard for me to write about this trip because immediately afterwards Brett and I got really sick with some gastrointestinal thing and fever and aches. We think we picked up something on the last evening when we ate at a restaurant in town rather than at our hotel. We are both still dealing with the effects, so our feelings about our trip to Monterrico are on the negative side. In fact, Brett said that he is still not ready to write anything about this trip!

For our first overnight trip outside of Antigua, we chose the beach since it’s about 2 hours away and also since we had heard about the nightly baby sea turtle release from Tortugario Monterrico, an organization working to help the declining sea turtle population.

So we rented a car last weekend and drove south to the Pacific Coast. On the way, we drove through the area where Volcan de Fuego erupted in June 2018 and parts of the highway were covered with lava flow. Unfortunately it was very cloudy, so we couldn’t see the volcano itself, but we could see the black ribbons of lava that cut through the mountain. This is about 20 km from Antigua. There is still major repair work going on.

The road to La Playa (the beach) is basically downhill, as we descend from our very pleasant altitude of 5,000 ft of Antigua and surroundings to sea level–and the heat and humidity that come with the lower elevation.

The true highlight of our trip was the Tortugario Monterrico where every night at 5:30, they release newly hatched sea turtles into the ocean. For 10Q (about $1.50), you can adopt one to release, which means that you get a small bowl with a baby turtle to release in the sand. They were just the cutest ever!

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We also spent a lot of time at the hotel pool, our first time with a swim up bar. The verdict is that it’s kind of weird to eat and drink in the water. But the pool itself was fantastic.

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One of the reasons we spent more time at the pool was that it was impossible to swim in the ocean. The waves were massive! It seemed too risky even to wade since the water was always violently thrashing everywhere. Notice the black lava sand.

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The final highlight was the ferry ride on the trip home. They have these flat boats with a small motor where they load 2 cars very carefully balancing the boat as they are loading. And you ride in your car on the boat for about 20 minutes. At first I was sure we would sink, although we had been assured by folks in Monterrico that it was safe.

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While we had a good time in general, there were a few things that had us missing the ease of travel in the US. We found ourselves missing cleanliness of the mid-Atlantic beaches (!). We got scammed by someone who sold us a very high priced night walk on the beach to look for nesting sea turtles (We didn’t see any, but also found out later that the guy who sold us tickets didn’t actually work for the Tortugario so not only were we overcharged but none of the money went to that cause.) All in all, we were glad to get back to Antigua!