Favorite hotel in Nosara

We love Jaco Costa Rica. It's a great base to explore the Central Pacific. If you want to check out Nicoya, we recommend Playa Guiones, aka Nosara. Click here for our favorite Nosara hotel, Kayasol. It is not as high end as DoceLunas, but its really close to the break and the top room class is fairly nice. Like DoceLunas, they have aspired to preserve the canopy, and while the hotel has much smaller grounds, they have put native plantings throughout and animals do come to visit.

Jaco Hotels - Halloween Concert

Halloween is a great time to visit Jaco Costa Rica and its a good time to get deals on Jaco hotels. If you are coming this Halloween, you won't find a discount at DoceLunas, but you will find a pair of free tickets to our annual Halloween Costume Party Dance Concert featuring live music from Midnite Spaghetti. They put on a great show that will keep you dancing for hours. If you are interested in booking at DoceLunas for the show, you can got to our reservations page or you can click http://www.docelunas.com/jaco-hotels.html for a list of Jaco hotels.

Abe Pollan Food Rules

http://www.kirstenhubbard.com/ has a nice blog post about Michael Pollan's new book about eating right for your health, for your neighbors, and for your planet. Food Rules is only $5. Check it out. Enjoy a delicious meal while making yourself healthier and saving the planet.

Hermosa Tulin Refuge has a new Administrator

Your intrepid Jaco hotel blogger loaded his surf kayak onto his bicycle trailer and hauled out to the south end of Hermosa beach where you will find the Tulin Refuge. The road gets sandy at the end. Its fine in a car, but a bike with a heavy trailer is a trick. You gots to gear down and spin.

But I digress. When I arrived at the Tulin Turtle Refuge, I discovered our local sea turtle hot spot has a new Jefe. If you are in the area, please join me in welcoming Don Belfort Cubillo, the new administrator of Refugio Tulin-Punta Mala. Don Belfort is clearly going to run a tight ship and has already made some much needed improvements to the volunteer facilities at the refuge.

Don Belfort has made arrangements with Central Pacific Chamber of Commerce so that they can receive any donations people want to make to refuge. The volunteer accomodations out there are pretty rough. With nicer facilities, we would get more volunteers here over time, and those adorable and helpless little turltes need all the help they can get.

More information will be coming soon, so please stay tuned to the Jaco hotel blog.

Jaco Hotel Weather

Our favorite Jaco hotel posted some more new pages a couple days ago but there were some errors with the links. Perhaps the most useful new page is and Jaco Costa Rica weather and climate, with temperature, rainfall, and links to current local weather forecast for Jaco Costa Rica.

Here is some more info on the new Jaco hotel blog page. The new posts cover our efforts to preserve the jungle canopy while protecting our roof tops, the virtues of coconut water, and how you can get a free vacation to Costa Rica by getting your root canal done in Jaco.

We have also added new pages on Jaco hotel reviews and Jaco nightlife.We hope you enjoy the new information. Please go the site and email us or leave a comment here and tell us what you would like to hear more about. Tours, activities and attractions near our Jaco hotel? Restaurants? More specific information on nightlife? Culture? Basic Spanish lessons for your visit to Jaco Costa Rica? Let us know what we can do to help you, and our Jaco staff will do our best to get a a head start on making your Costa Rica vacation the best ever!

Jaco hotels list and map

Jaco hotels are easy to find on the interent, with lots of Jaco hotels on tripadvisor and other list of Jaco hotels. But its hard to find a list of links to Jaco hotels and I have not been able find a map of Jaco hotels, so we decided to create our own Jaco hotels list and our own Jaco hotels map.

I dont think any of our competition has posted links to our site or maps showing where all the other hotels in town are. Perhaps it is because they are concerned that if people find out about the finest of Jaco hotels, DoceLunas, they won't be as interested in coming to their hotel. We are not so concerned.

We know you are going to look at all the other hotels anyway, whether they are hard to find or not, so we thought we would make it easy for you. Enjoy a sample our hospitality!

In addition to these two new pages on Jaco hotels, we can also recommend this link to a book on planning a trip to Jaco Costa Rica.

Thanks, and good searching for Jaco hotels. We are confident that in the end you will choose the best Jaco hotel for you.

Playa Jaco Costa Rica

Our Jaco hotel has posted a new page on Playa Jaco Costa Rica. The page is in development. We already have a page on Jaco Costa Rica that covers restaurants, nightlife, surfing and parks in the area as well as general information like Jaco population and travel time to various nearby attractions. The new page will be more focused on Playa Jaco - that is Jaco Beach - the beach itself as opposed to the general area. Its in development but we already have quite a bit of content up. Please check out our new page and let us know what else we can tell you about Playa Jaco Costa Rica.

Food Science at Jaco Hotel

The team at the Jaco hotel were talking about google searches and why some two word combinations would be searched more frequently in one order than another. We agreed that there would be examples of two word pairs where the two possible orderings of the words implied very different intents by the searcher. But we could not think of an example.

The Jaco hotel blogger feels compelled to warn you, there is rambling ahead.

Just now though I was thinking about the movie informant, and how they didn't dwell on the fact that a big part of the food chain occurs with poorly understood bacteria in a giant vat converting corn mush into isolated lysine and byproducts. I am thankful I live in Costa Rica and eat frequently at my favorite Jaco hotel restaurant, Eclipse at DoceLunas where they do not have products with isolated lysine created by mysterious bacteria.

Anyway, food science - hmm. Well food science should be, and increasingly is, a criticial look at our production and consumption choices and how they influence not only our health and our economy, but our society. As near as I can tell, food science as studied and practiced today is mostly an amazing reductive processing of two or three crops into everything else. Truly amazing feats of science in the name of feeding the world, once called the "green revolution" should, in this bloggers opinion, while they are to be lauded for their intent and rigor, should be examined with a critical eye.

"Science food," to get back to the hypothetical google search, should not be the end result of "food science." Socially, environmentally, economically sustainable healthy food production and consumpton should be the goal of "food science."

Perhaps there is some way to resolve high yield farming with healthy varied diets, localized production and consumption, and small enterprise stewardship of our environmental resources. Should we really trust agribusiness with the future?

But to get back to my favorite hotel in Jaco, we don't have science food. Ninety percent of what we serve comes from within 100 miles of hour hotel in Jaco and much of our produce and meat is produced by small family farms. Our fish come from the bountiful ocean just a mile to the west of the hotel and a lot of our fruit comes from the five acres of jungle gardens and fruit trees on the property.

So you can't get a brightly colored slurpy like you could at a 7-11, but you can get a delicious guanabana smoothy with a secret flower ingredient or my favorite, a papaya banana smoothy. I am getting hungry! Off to my favorite Jaco hotel, DoceLunas.

Jaco Hotel coconut water

Augua de pipa, the water inside young coconuts, is one of my favorite treats. At Jaco hotel DoceLunas, young coconuts are harvested on the premises and cut to make our coconut water. I live nearby in another neighborhood near the mountains and the south end of the beach. My apartment is on the route of Orlando the pipero. When he was younger he climbed trees to harvest the coconuts and cut them open. Now he hires kids to climb the trees for him and he rides around on his bicycle with a cooler full of refreshing and delicious agua de pipa.

Young coconut water, or coconut milk, is a truly refreshing drink on a hot day. Augua de pipa, as it is called here, is an isotonic beverage. It has a very similar balance of electrolytes to a healthy human body. Young coconut water is natures gatorade. But unlike gatorade, it is not very glycemic, has less calories than other fruit juices by about half, and is not colored with dyes to resemble nothing found in nature. I will take pipa water any day. Ask for it at our Jaco hotel and we will harvest you some from our jungle gardens.

Check out our new Jaco hotel blog at www.docelunas.com/jaco-hotel-blog.html

Jaco Costa Rica Yoga Retreat

Our Jaco Hotel offers a Costa Rica Yoga Retreat. You can find out more by clicking on the preceding link. Costa Rica Yoga retreats can be customized to fit your interests and schedule. Discounts are available for groups. Our Costa Rica Yoga retreat coordinator can take care of all your tours and activities and help you select from the abundant options near our Jaco hotel.

Jaco hotel onsite blog

The Jaco hotel blog will increasingly will be posting our information on Jaco Costa Rica, our Jaco hotel, and tips for choosing among Jaco Hotels, on our onsite blog which you can see at our Jaco Hotel Blog.

Currently there is a new article about the new highway and another about our tree trimming efforts and the safety procedures and equipment skills our intrepid crew learned before climbing 60 feet into the towering trees and removing limbs above the buildings. We are happy to say all the trees have survived the surgeries and are, as green things do in Costa Rica, thriving.

Pura Vida !
Til next time, thanks for reading.
Jaco Hotel DoceLunas, the finest of Jaco Hotels

Jaco Hotels new pages

The Jaco hotels website has a bunch of new pages. There are several Jaco Costa Rica maps each of which shows the Jaco hotels location and several new activities pages.

For Jaco hotel maps, we have

www.docelunas.com/jaco-map.html
a map showing surf breaks near jaco hotels

www.docelunas.com/jaco-costa-rica-map.html
a map showing national parks near jaco hotels

www.docelunas.com/jaco-map-restaurants.html
a map showing restaurants near jaco hotels

www.docelunas.com/jaco-map-highway.html
a map showing the new highway from san jose to jaco hotels

all the maps are fully interactive. you can pan and zoom in and out and click on icons to find out more details about the area.

please enjoy our Jaco hotels maps.

Jaco Bay passes water quality standards

Jaco Bay has just passed recreation contact water quality standards. I have been swimming and surfing here for years, and it was never as bad as San Diego or Washington D.C., but now it meets Costa Rica water quality standards that are 90% as stringent as U.S. standards. Two reasons to say "hooray!" in one day. If you don't count Pura Vida, toucans, scarlet macaws, kinkajou, anteaters, coatimundi, terrific surf, awesome mountain biking with spectacular views, great tasty fresh healty food, and the best hotel in Jaco, Jaco hotel DoceLunas, in which case that is - what - lucky thirteen reasons to say "Hooray!" if you are in Jaco or planning to come to Jaco.

For more information on the water quality, please see our onsite blog at www.docelunas.com/jaco-hotel-blog.html.

Highway to Jaco Completed

Jaco Hotel blog is very pleased to announce the new highway from San Jose to Caldera has finally been completed as of 1/28/2010. This part of the trip used to go through some pretty twisty and steep mountain roads. Once you get to Caldera, the coastal highway has always been an excellent road, but the new route around the mountains is a huge improvement. The trip from the airport near San Jose to Jaco used to take between an hour and fifteen minutes and two hours. Drivers report the trip now takes less than an hour and half and can sometimes be completed in less than an hour, depending on traffic. If you are not in a hurry, you may wish to take the old route since its slightly more scenic, and with almost all the truck traffic moving to the new highway, it will quicker and safer too. Hooray! One more reason to visit Jaco hotel DoceLunas, your base for expoloring the central Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Jaco Hotel updates

The picture above shows what I think of as "the crocodile stall" - because you can often see a croc just 30 feet away sunning itself on a sandy spot on the other side of the estuary while you are shopping at the weekly farmer's market in Jaco. It's just a mile from the hotel. But I digress, don't I?

We have some new and informative links on the website today. You can check them out at our Costa Rica page, our Home page, and our Jaco page.

There is general information on Costa Rica from several U.S. government and university sites and links to the U.S. and Costa Rica embassies among other things. One of the U.S. government links is to the C.I.A. world factbook. C.I.A. - not just for spying! Also great for travel information. Who'da thunk it?

Jaco Farmers Market

Every friday the Jaco Hotel Blog stops by the farmers market. Restaurant DoceLunas has its own local purveyors of fruits and vegetables who deliver to the hotel, so the hotel doesn's shop at the market, but its employees do. The market is pretty comparable to the grocery store in prices, but the produce is fresher and more locally sourced. While its not cheaper than the grocery store, its pretty cheap. A lot of fruits and veg are less than $1 a pound. In the photo you can see my haul of tiny potatoes (which were quite well washed) giant carrot, garlic, ginger, and broccoli only cost about $4.

Perhasp the best part about the farmers market: its located on an estuary and there is a sandy spot on the other side of it where a small crocodile can often be seen sunning. I have to get a picture of him for youse. Meanwhile, let me know if there is anything you would like me talk about in the blog here and I will do it. You can reach me at chrisc at docelunas.com.

Check out more information on the farmers market and more pictures at our onsite blog, www.docelunas.com/jaco-hotel-blog.html.

Til next, adios from the finest of Jaco Hotels, Jaco Hotel DoceLunas.

Jaco Hotel internal blog

Jaco Hotel Docelunas now has an internal blog on the website.
Check it out at www.docelunas.com/jaco-hotel-blog.html

Jaco Map

The finest Jaco hotel has just published a new interactive map of Jaco and the surrounding area. You can even zoom out to map the route from San Jose to Jaco or Jaco to Manuel Antonio. The map shows surf breaks and parks also. You can see it at www.docelunas.com/jaco-map.html.

That's all now from Jaco Hotel DoceLunas, the finest of Jaco hotels.

Jaco Ceviche from Bertil

Today's culinary adventure- Ceviche! This healthy and refreshing snack made of raw white fish marinated in lime with finely chopped onions and sweet peppers is made from catch of the day seafood at the tiny Pescaderia Bertil, 3/4 of a mile from Jaco hotel DoceLunas.

As you can see in the photo, a small mixed ceviche (4 to 5 ounces of fish and shrimp) is only 1,700 colones, or three dollars U.S. Viva Bertil ! This stuff is good ! You can also get super fresh fish here for about $5 a pound.

Jaco Soda Rustico Photos

Jaco Hotel blog is pleased to present some photos of a soda rustico.
Soda La Marea Alta (the high tide) is about 3/4 of mile from Jaco Hotel Docelunas, almost at the beach. It is open 24 hours, and the do a high volume of business, so the food is always fresh. You can see a photo of the menu below. The exchange rate for colones to dollars is about 580, so these menu items range from $3 for a chicken, beef, pork, or fish casado (small dinner plate with sides of beans and rice, small veg, small salad) to $7 if you want double size fish portion or $8 for a tenderloin steak. Breakfast at this place is about $3 also. Tomorrow I will see if I can get a photo of an actual entree.

This is about 3/4 of a mile from the hotel.

Right beside it that white building is pescaderia bertil

who we will be visiting with later.