One night at Rio Celeste Hideaway Hotel – a perfect one night retreat

At first, we had trouble for some time determining where to go for a forced one night gap between our beautiful home rental in Nosara and a lake house rental in Nuevo Arenal.

The Costa Rica map system is confusing and a bit infuriating. When you look up Costa Rica driving map on the Internet, you get plenty of results. But the vast majority of them are just a series of jagged lines connecting points, with none of them labeled nor any clarity on which ones are more major than others. Using Google maps isn’t reliable – the driving times are not accurate, and there’s no way to know which are the best (major) roads…. And the best Costa Rica online driving tool only has major cities on it. Since Nuevo Arenal is not a major city, I was out of luck finding any online resources for driving there. In fact, very few tourists make it out that way, we learned later – it is much more, if anything, a pass through area.

So, I was in a quandary trying to figure out where to go that was a reasonable drive on both sides between Nosara and Nuevo Arenal. I had booked a place called Blue River Resort, in the Rincon de la Vieja area, but the more I looked on the maps, the more it seemed too out of the way, with 3-4 hour drives on both ends, when the entire drive straight shouldn’t have been more than 4-5 hours. In Costa Rica especially, where navigation and dirt roads make going from one destination to the next confusing, stressful and uncomfortable, it was a good call to cancel going to Blue River Resort.

I booked a new place, called Rio Celeste Hideaway, near Tenorio Volcano, and hoped it would be ok as an in between stop. There were convenient roads on the map on both sides but I was unable to tell if they were actually roads we could/should use. In Costa Rica, a shorter road can often not be the best choice, or even passable, due to tough dirt roads, ditches, and impassable river crossings (especially in the green season or right after the rain). Indeed many hotels have two ways to reach them – one if you are driving a 4×4, one if you are not.

I was still uncertain,  and when Mike looked it up on his GPS, it told us it was 5.5 hours! For a day or so, I wasn’t sure what to do, that seemed very far even if the hotel looked nice — given it was just 24 hours we would be there. Then I realized, Mike’s GPS was using the shortest route setting, that’s what got them into trouble when they drove out to Nosara. No one in Nosara knew where they were to give us accurate directions, but more possibly the hotel itself could give us a good idea of driving time from Nosara. Sure enough – I called and they told us it was about 3 hours. Then I followed up by later putting it in our GPS, which said the same. So, we were able to go there. I was relieved just to be able to not have to change plans and find a new hotel. I knew the Lima were looking forward to seeing a new location, it was more than just a place to sleep.

Well, it all worked out. Like so much of this vacation has. While some has been less than hoped, all in all it has exceeded our expectations. And the Rio Celeste Hideaway Hotel was one of those times. It was a gorgeous hotel, and they had 5 star service, taking our luggage and driving us In a golf cart to our rooms. The rooms were spacious individual cabins and very well decorated, each with a private balcony overlooking the jungle. We were sad at first that we were staying just one night… But luckily in the end we felt it was the perfect length of time. The pool and spa area was beautiful, and we hadn’t had a spa the whole trip. We spent a bit of time in them both days, but it was pretty rainy and cloudy there, so we didn’t feel the desire to spend hours on end there.

My favorite thing about the hotel was the balcony off of our room, where I could have spent hours reading, journaling, and drinking coffee, and the outdoor shower – which was my first hot shower in 2 weeks which was enough to enjoy by itself – but it also was beautiful. In the midst of clouds surrounding the trees above, it was like being in a mystic retreat.

Another great plus about the resort – it has it’s own path down to the Rio Celeste river. The Rio Celeste river is naturally blue – a bright brilliant blue, in fact. Apparently this is the result of a waterfall upstream where the water mixed with minerals from the rocks which transforms the color. The waterfall is an arduous 2 hour hike, each way – we knew we wouldn’t be doing that! But I was hoping to see the river at some point along its path — the path straight from the hotel was perfect for us given that we didn’t have a lot of time in the area – so we didn’t have to drive to another place to go see the Rio Celeste.