Things We Wish We Knew Before Traveling To Costa Rica

The Things We Wish We Knew

1. Don’t exchange your money at the first floor exchange in the airport before customs. They charge you more for exchanging money here. We didn’t realize that until we were picking up our rental car and our salesman gave us some tips for visiting Costa Rica. Go to the local bank which is on the second floor or another local bank outside the airport and they will exchange your USD for the correct exchange rate without any added fees.

2. You don’t HAVE to exchange USD for Colones (Cost a Rican dollars). Most tourist places, including toll roads, will accept USD or credit card. You just will get Colones back in change if you use USD. So don’t feel like you need to exchange a bunch of money right when you get there.

3. When you go to any public beach, there are a ton of people renting umbrellas + chairs, surfboards, surfing lessons + other activities as well as many people selling food, drinks + handmade goods. Some of these people are really pushy and you just need to tell them “no” a few times and they will leave you alone. But if you want to rent an umbrella and chair at the beach (which we highly recommend because the sun is so unbelievably hot you’ll want some shade), you usually can negotiate the rental price.

4. You are required to pay for liability insurance in Costa Rica when renting a vehicle - this doesn’t cover the car at all, just damage to other people, their cars and/or their property. This was unexpected for us as we had bought car insurance online with our rental company beforehand and thought this is what was required and it wasn’t. So we ended up having to pay an additional $800 for our rental car which was 4X the amount we paid for renting the car itself. Totally unexpected. They also needed to withhold $3,000 as a “deposit” that they would give back to us should the car come back the way it was when we drove away on day one. Also unexpected. This website linked here explains the car insurance pretty well.

The Things We Wish We Had Packed

1. A Dry Sack Bag - this would have been really useful for our kayak/snorkel tour, our waterfall tour and for other waterfall visits to ensure your phones + belongings stayed dry

2. A Raincoat - we forgot our raincoats at home! But these would have been really nice to have in the cloud forest as the air was really wet + it did sprinkle there

3. Playing Cards - the days are quite short in Costa Rica and we didn’t feel comfortable going out after dark so we had wished we had some cards to play games

4. Waterproof Phone Carrier - this also would have been nice on our tours so we could have taken more photos and felt safe about keeping our phones dry

5. A Beach Bag - this would have been nice for bringing some stuff to the beach with us and for laying flat in your suitcase for travel

6. A Handful of Ziploc Bags - would have been nice since we cooked a lot of our own meals. We never had anything to put our leftovers in and didn’t want to buy a whole box

7. Mini Portable Fan - IT WAS SO HOT + HUMID on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. A small fan would have been nice to keep you cool

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