In comparison to Dominical, which was a nice little surfer town with charm, we encountered Jacó as a huge, noisy, party-surfer town with one hotel and shop after the other. We only stayed one night until we boarded a night bus to Panamà the next evening. We made good use of our one day in Jacó, though, and went paragliding.
Our plan was to hike to the takeoff. We checked it on the map and it seemed to take around one hour. What we didn’t expect was the heat and blazing sun with near to no shade, the dry dusty slope, and the inaccurate mapping of roads on Google maps. We missed the path up way several times and had to turn back again.
When we finally arrived at the top, we were drenched, and especially our legs and ankles were covered in red dust. We were told that, usually, someone passes by on your way up and offers you a lift. We weren’t that lucky but ten minutes from the top, two guys stopped and at least offered to drive our backpacks up. We really sped up for that last stretch, though, because doubt started nagging on me if it was smart to eagerly give away our equipment worth thousands of euros to two random guys.
Those guys were obviously paragliding pilots with their own equipment in the car. They were also very friendly and excused themselves that they cannot offer us a ride. Also, in the paragliding community, it is quite common to offer a lift, if not for yourself, but at least for the equipment. So everything seemed pretty normal and when we arrived at the top, everything was indeed fine. They even put them into the shade for us.
After regenerating a bit and watching the other pilots fly, we launched as well. The takeoff is not very high and if you don’t get lift right away you are quickly screwed. The thermal conditions were rather weak and bubbly and it was not easy at all. We still soared for quite a while, Simon twice as long as I did. He also was able to practice landings back at the top/takeoff. In the meantime, I used the time to ground-handle (practice glider control on the ground) and walked the glider back toward the city until Simon landed close to me (the possible landing area is huge, basically all fields between the city and takeoff).
Halfway to the city we stopped at the first shop to get cold drinks and finished them in one go. After the initial needs were satisfied we started thinking of how to get a shower because we felt really sticky and dirty. We didn’t want to stay like that when boarding a 17 hours bus ride to Panamà in the evening. So we went back to the hostel we had checked out this morning and asked if we could use their shared showers. Unfortunately, they haven’t had any, but the receptionist let us in anyways to use the shared restrooms. Once in the hostel, we ended up asking a German guy we came into conversation with if we could shower in his room and luckily he had no issue with that… We felt a bit awkward but we were longing for a shower so much. And it was just a delight. We were so thankful!
After having dinner at an Italian restaurant we walked to the bus stop far outside the city. Here we had to wait next to the highway for our bus to depart 15 minutes past midnight. The temperatures were nice, but sitting there didn’t feel great. We were at the bus stop early because we didn’t want to hang around in town any longer. But when 00:45 am approached we started to get nervous, thinking if there was any way we were at the wrong spot (the ticket was only saying “Jacó (Maxi Pali)” which was a supermarket 200m behind us). At around 01:10 am I called the hotline. Right when I got somebody on the phone, the bus arrived. One hour late on point. We still wonder if this had anything to do with the one-hour timeshift between Panamà and Costa Rica, but it still makes no sense to us…
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