Sámara Is Not My Place
Our final stretch in Costa Rica was supposed to be all about kicking back at the beach in a tiny town called Sámara on the Nicoya Peninsula’s Pacific Coast, a total escape from it all. Lots of people said this was the beach town to go to for such a vibe.
But so far Sámara has been our biggest letdown of the trip. Maybe it’s just fine and I’m being hasty to judge without exploring enough. After all we just got here a few hours ago. But first impressions are that it’s not all that pretty (coming from Monteverde, which to be fair set a very high bar), not all that friendly (compared to everywhere else we’ve been in Costa Rica), and not all that slow-paced or relaxing (also compared to everywhere else). It also feels more overrun by tourists, overshadowing its local character.
Or maybe I just miss Monteverde and its magical cloud forests and the cool breezy air at night, the layered mountainous terrain sitting a mile above the sea with some of the most expansive views I’ve ever seen. It was a small town, but sprawling with little nooks that make it feel bigger than it actually is.
The mix of cultures was also interesting in Monteverde. With a noticeable expat presence I was worried it might feel like rich gringos had taken over, or come with tensions between locals and foreigners that you see in lots of places around the world, but everyone we talked to claimed they all get along pretty well (i.e. all four or five of them we asked, which is a pretty hefty sample size if you ask me — also, you can kinda sniff out these vibes in a place to a degree). One person did say that if there’s any tension it’s more between some locals and tourists than locals and expats.
Perhaps it's due to the early Quaker roots from the U.S. since they settled there in the 1950s when it was almost entirely undeveloped, eventually partnering with Costa Ricans to protect the cloud forest. So in a way the locals and foreigners cultivated this place together.
Anyway, I miss it and am even tempted to say screw it and abandon ship and go back to Monteverde for our last five nights. Otherwise we’re just falling for the ol’ sunk-cost fallacy —doubling down on something we’re not that into — when we should just do what we want, no matter the choices that got us here, like booking a nonrefundable Airbnb in a beach town when we want to be in the cloud forests.
But I also want to give it a fair shot, so let’s see what happens.
Here’s the route we’ve taken so far:
Two Days Later
It hasn’t gotten better. This is strangely the least pura-vida-vibing place we’ve visited yet, I guess not what I expected for a tiny beach town. Probably doesn’t help that we’re staying a bit outside of the town center and beach, which means we’ve had to rely on the car more than I’d like. Off-road motorbikes seem to dominate the roads, and if you’re going any less than twice the speed limit they’ll ride right behind you and rev their engine and zoom around you. One guy passed us while going around a tight curve at night where it was impossible to see if anyone was coming — just totally rolling the dice on life or death and trusting that the odds were in his favor.
Today we had our worst encounter yet. We were driving through the town center where roads are a bit tighter and lined with parked cars, so it’s hard to see around corners. I’d inch up to each corner to see whether we could go, and at one corner I saw a motorcyclist coming from the left almost a block away. It looked like plenty of space so I started pulling forward to turn, but I guess the guy was going like 240 miles per hour and I was already halfway through my turn so there was no turning back. So of course he had to brake to avoid hitting me and seemed pretty upset by it judging by him yelling “PUTA!” and shaking a fist at me.
Yikes, take a chill pill dude.
We drove for a couple more blocks when I saw another motorcyclist in my rearview mirror about a block behind me in a pink shirt, which kinda looked like the guy. It kept speeding up and getting closer to us, finally removing all doubt when he tried to come around the car and yelling at me.
I sped up to get him off my butt.
And so did he. And we both zoomed down the main strip of Sámara for a couple blocks as he kept following us. I took a turn on a faster road and gunned it for a short stretch that didn’t have intersections.
And so did he. I turned right again back into the town to try to make it to the police station that I knew sat right by the beach.
And so did he. I could also see in my rearview mirror that he kept reaching back into a bag hooked to his bike whenever he'd get close to us. I didn’t want to find out if it was a weapon or something to smash my window, or — I’ll give him the benefit of doubt — maybe he was just hungry and grabbing for an apple. Hangriness can get pretty crazy sometimes. So I zoomed around the final corner leading to the police station, just a block away, just as another car was approaching the corner coming at us and there must have been just inches to spare for us to both fit, meaning the motorcycle dude certainly could not.
We made it to the police station and pulled into what appeared to be a driveway reserved only for the police cars as the one officer standing guard motioned me not to go that way. Meanwhile a police truck started backing out and almost hit us.
Yay pura vida.
We rolled down the window and explained we were being chased, pointing to the pink-shirted dude who was already a block away at this point and just turning a corner.
The officers drove just ahead of us as we drove to our Airbnb and we slammed that gate closed and stayed home for the evening, cuz shit, that was scary.
Onward
We messaged the Airbnb host just to let him know what happened, and he had his older brother come out to chat with us since he also lives on the property and was home. He apologized profusely and said this really is a safe town, but there is one guy that’s a little off and has a temper and has done this kinda thing before, but it never resulted in violence. So it was probably him. But he asked for more of a description of what he was wearing and such cuz it’s a super small town and he could figure it out. He said they’d make some calls to calm the guy down and we have nothing to worry about.
He also got talking about all the growth and change their town has seen in his lifetime, and how there was no development at all in the blocks surrounding the house where we were staying. The house apparently shares a plot of land with various members of the extended family who have owned the land for generations as it was once their “finca” (ranch) that has since been parceled into smaller properties and a gravel road cut through it.
Unlike Monteverde’s early Quaker-Tico collaboration, here the story felt more Tico-first — family land rapidly sliced up as tourism and growth slammed the tiny town in the last couple decades.
I guess a lot of people love it here. I kept looking around, kinda baffled and wondering what it was about it that makes expats and others flock here. It’s like we weren’t even experiencing the same place.
As silly as it sounds, what even is a place? If you lined up just the right experiences like a wonderful dinner at a cute restaurant on one of the side streets, friendly encounters with locals at the Friday farmer’s market, and caught some waves surfing, did you really visit the same “place” as me? How much of a place is the place itself, and how much of it is the experiences you have there?
For me Sámara felt way too rushed, the weather too hot and sticky, and there’s an overall weird vibe of agitation in the air and less friendly hellos.
Also getting chased by a maniac on a motorcycle.
To be fair — we did have fun frolicking on the beach with the kids, diving through the waves, playing in the sand, all that classic beach day with the fam stuff. We also spotted a few little bits of wildlife that you could easily miss, but if you looked closely little shells moved around like little pill bugs at the shore, which were tiny olive snails that scoot around in the swash. You could also see quarter-sized holes from ghost crabs digging the night before. And more birds. Also I watched an ant-mimicking spider make a web on my water bottle one evening which was kinda neat.
I can find pockets of my kinda place really anywhere on Earth. But as a whole, Sámara just wasn’t my place. And it’s crazy how a couple bad experiences layered on top of sub-par first impressions can really ruin a spot.
So we’re out, two days early, and I feel pretty great about it, sunk costs and all. And even better about where we’re headed next (more on that soon — I’m posting this a few days late).
Chances are you’ll never visit Sámara, but if you happen to be someone who lives here and loves it, I’m not knocking your town. In fact in a way, I’ve never even been to the same town you have. So no hate towards Sámara, but fuck whatever the place is that I visited. I hated it.
With love from Planet Earth,
Doug