Virginia D.
The hike to the cave was very vertical on very uneven dirt and rock pathways for 2 km and then more level with gradual incline for the last 1.7 km. I would highly recommend people bring walking sticks if they have them. That would've been a beneficial Tip for us. Also, it recommends wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts. For the 3.7 km hike you absolutely do not need long pants and a long sleeve shirt. So wearing zip off pants where you would just be in shorts and a short sleeve shirt or a tank top would've been much more comfortable For the hike portion. There is no place to change near the mouth of the cave where the cave tour starts. So you would have to zip on your pants or have some pull on pants that you could put over shorts. You do want long sleeves and long pants in the cave. The terrain within the cave is very moist slippery rock. We were all wearing firm soul shoes, but needed to use many handholds on other other formations to balance ourselves to move from one section of the rooms in the cave to another. There are only two chambers that you visit in that cave tour. It is very time consuming waiting for your group to all descend the 62 step vertical ladder down into the base of the cave. The safety equipment and instruction was outstanding. It is just time-consuming to wait for each person to descend. Additionally, our tour guide was guiding in Spanish as well as an English even though our group was six English speakers and two Spanish speakers. It would have been much more to have had one guide for the English speaking group and had the other two join the group that was right behind us. That were Spanish speakers. So the double translation was also time-consuming. It made for what seemed like a long period of time of waiting. The actual time in the cave was only one hour and as I say, it was due to dual translation. It would have been better to have somebody from the park service talking to those at the top waiting to descend about the cave or the park, maybe repeating the same information that the person in the base of the cave would be speaking to those that had descended already. It seemed like a lot of wasted time once we got to the mouth of the cave and had to wait. There was a beautiful side hike. We could take to a lookout over all of Nicoya Peninsula, and it was well worth the hike. Then that was a approximately 4 km hike back down to the parking lot. **** to be noted – there are no bathroom facilities or porta potty available from when you leave the parking lot and the park Information building until you return to it. We left the parking lot at 8 AM and returned at 2 PM. This is a very long time for some individuals to be without Bathroom facility. The man in our group were able to just step off the trail and relieve themselves. Women should definitely bring a Ziploc bag and some tissue paper so that they can use for us if they need to and cart out their waste..