Hotel in Puntarenas
There aren’t many hotels to choose from in Gran Puntarenas, Costa Rica’s high-density port city situated on a very thin strip of land. A couple of years ago we stayed at the Yacht Club, but the room was gross and the shower-head water heater, with bare wires, too scary. The nicest hotel in Puntarenas is the all-inclusive Hilton, but paying over $450 for a family of four to just spend the night is outside most budgets. We were told Hotel Yadra was not very nice for its price. So we booked two nights at Hotel Alamar, at the edge of Paseo de los Turistas. The nightly rate was $150, overpriced for what it offered, but since there aren’t many hotels, they don’t need competitive rates. We changed rooms three times. The first night, we switched rooms because it smelled like cigarette smoke. Although all the rooms are smoke-free, people don’t respect the rules (and the ashtray by the bed makes it too easy to break the no smoking rule). The second room was fine, we spent the night, woke up early, and headed to the marina. When we came back from a full day at sea, the room had an unbearable stench of sewer gas. We called reception, but when we saw a man with a plunger and a can of Glade coming to “fix” the problem, we requested a new room. The man explained that when the tide was high (or low, I can’t remember), some rooms stink, probably because of faulty pipe laying. The third room was okay—the TV remote had disappeared and pigeons kept pooping in front of the door—but we couldn’t complain as long as the estuary’s sewage odors were outside our room. We didn’t even hear the cat fight on the tin roof that kept my sister awake on the other side of the courtyard.
Friday, March 20, 2009