8/10 Good
Holly T.
18 Jan 2022
Liked: Cleanliness, check-in, communication
Beautiful home for a rainforest stay, but you should know...
This is a tricky review to write.
First, the home is beautiful and the view?!?! Amazing. I've never seen so many butterflies and hummingbirds and heard so many bird calls and monkeys. You can feel the vibration of life around you and it is wonderful.
This is one of the better appointed VRBOs we've stayed in. Everything you need in the kitchen is there. Good appliances, cookware, plenty of towels. Washer / Dryer and laundry soap!
Having said that, this was not a great destination for us. If you want to stay at the house and enjoy the view, read your book and take a swim, it might work well for you. We wanted to come and go more, and that's where we bumped into some difficulty.
This may be on me. I read the description as 3 miles from Uvita. I saw that we would need a 4x4. We've driven on rough (!!) Costa Rican roads before. This was not surprising to us. What I didn't expect was just how long it would take us to get from Uvita to the house. With practice we got it down to 22 minutes. And that's 20+ minutes of very difficult driving. (I thought it would be a few minutes of rocky, rutted, challenging road.) It was over 40 minutes round trip just to run into town.
As a result, we didn't want to go down and up more than once a day, it was too much stress and kind of sucked all the Pura Vida out of us. Gone were my ideas that we'd jaunt into town for coffee and pastries, hop over to the beach in the afternoon, return home for showers and clean clothes and then scoot out to dinner. Instead, we made one trek each day and on two days decided to just stay in because we were tired of the difficult drive.
Then there's part two. We lost power. I know this is common in CR. We had a few 5-10 minute power hits as we expected. We brought flashlights just in case so we were ready. I'd picked up a little extra water as Claire had suggested.
The power stayed out for 22 hours. Without power, there's no water. No showers. No flushing toilets. No ceiling fans. No wi-fi for communication. Spotty cell service. I know the owners can't control the power grid. But having a generator might make sense. A stock of extra water. A bucket so we could use pool water to flush the toilets. I would have really appreciated a visit from a caretaker to check on us, maybe bring us a little food. We lost all the food in the fridge and an entire day of our vacation.
It's a beautiful home. Claire is very communicative. But we won't return.
Holly T.
Stayed 7 nights in Jan 2022
