Tiny Grass

I know I already talked about “The Crab House”. That was Alby Lodge in Cahuita. I actually love, love, love the place! I think it is absolutely perfect for families, and it seemed to be one of the nicest places to stay in Cahuita. Here are the details:

Just the facts:

We stayed at Alby Lodge for a total of 7 nights at the end of October and beginning of November 2007. I made reservations ahead of time, but it wasn’t that busy during our time there since it was the end of the rainy season. I noticed that they took a lot of walk-ups while we were there. Reservations were made by email, and it was easy.

There are 4 cabinas at Alby. The cabina we stayed in had 2 full-sized beds with mosquito netting. Some of the other cabinas has one full and one single. Each cabina has a small bathroom and porch out front with a hammock and chair.

Here’s a picture of our cabina:

Because I love the place, I’ll start with the positives:

• You may very well see more wildlife at Alby Lodge than anywhere else in and around Cahuita. The Howler monkeys visited us every day of our stay there, sometimes climbing on trees right over our cabina and sleeping in the trees in front of our cabina. The birds love the gardens around Alby, and you could sit and watch them all day. Wonderful.
• There is plenty of space for kids to run around. I noticed that many of the hotels around Cahuita had limited or non-existant gardens. I don’t like going on vacation and feeling trapped in a hotel room and/or forced to get out early because your kids are going stir-crazy. At Alby, they can run around looking at crabs or watching tadpols in the cute pond there. And it’s not on the main road, so they can run around without you worrying that they will get run over by crazy drivers. They can be generally free. That meant that I could get up and drink a leisurely cup of coffee or two while my kids played and looked at monkeys.
• They have a communal kitchen. This both saved our sanity and saved us a lot of money. Eating out costs a lot. With the kitchen, we made our own breakfast and lunch or dinner every day. We could make meals that our kids would actually eat. And we could make coffee at 5 am every morning (we never adjusted for jet-lag, just got up with the sun).
• They have wireless internet access, and it was dependable. We actually came back to Alby Lodge so that Arp could get some work done while I took the kids to the beach. The speed was pretty good too.
• The owners are very nice, and are kind of interesting characters. Thomas and Yvonne were reserved at first, but quickly became friendly. I came to really like Thomas, and I could tell that he really likes animals, which I respect. They have 3 cute dogs that follow them around like children. They both came from Germany a few years ago, and it’s clear that they love Costa Rica and take pride in their garden.
• It’s close to the National Park and the beach., but not too close to town. A short enough walk that it was no biggie with two kids. Since it isn’t right in town on the main street, it is quiet and you don’t hear the traffic. That’s nice when you are sitting in the garden enjoying the wildlife.
• The price was excellent. $40 per night for two adults and two kids (the kids were free). I could not find another hotel with both a kitchen and internet access for that price. Most of the other hotels with internet accesss around both Cahuita and Puerto Viejo were more expensive, and few had a communal kitchen too. A really good deal.

Now, just a few negatives:

• Beds are pretty uncomfortable. They should get some new mattresses. (Arp tells me now that the beds felt more comfortable the second time we went back, but that must be because we were just glad to be back.)
• The fans were not strong enough. I would have been a millions times more happy if they got some stronger fans with better occilation. Some of those nights were hot!
• They need to fix the small holes in some of the cabina floors so that the crabs don’t get in. We plugged them up with blankets, which seemed to help the problem, but still, some crabs got in. I mean, it’s not like the crabs actually hurt you or anything. The ground crabs are all over Cahuita, and I got used to them. But my psyche would have been much happier without worrying about crabs in the darkness of my bed at night.

Overall, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Alby Lodge to anyone that doesn’t mind a rustic cabina. You don’t have to be a Girl Scout, but you have to have a certain tolerance for heat, bugs, and crabs. If you don’t have that tolerance, I’m not sure you should bother with Cahuita anyway, because the jungle there is filled with bugs and crabs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under costa rica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.