La Iguana
Went to Costa Rica and played La Iguana (part of the Marriott Los Suenos Resort) in 2011. I believe this was a Fantasy Football Championship pot funded trip. La Iguana offers a jungle golf experience like the recently closed Ko’olau Golf Course in Hawaii but a little less dramatic. However it has holes on the ocean (or bay/inlet/cove) which Ko’olau did not. It’s a beautiful course, an interesting layout and offers a great variety of golf holes designed by Ted Robinson (who also designed Sahalee – one of my other top 100 courses). La Iguana also had better conditioning, the overall non-golf experience was better, both are pretty exotic locations, La Iguana was definitely more enjoyable to play, but the wow factor still gives the edge to Ko’olau. Of course, La Iguana is still open where Ko’olau is not so I recommend playing La Iguana now.
Is it worth a golf trip to Costa Rica? I liked Costa Rica. I liked the Los Seunos resort. You can go zip-lining or volcano exploring. I liked the course but this isn’t a golf trip. It’s a rain forest trip that you can stay at a resort like this and get one round in (unless you like playing the same course over several times). If you fly into San Jose, this is your option (hour-and-a-half ride from airport though). If you can fly into Liberia (or are willing to connect), then it’s the Four Seasons at Papagayo (ain’t never been but they tell me it’s nice). Again, though, there is only one course there unless you want to drive one-and-a-half hours to Playa Conchal. I also played in San Jose during this trip (Cariari which is private but you can get on) but it wasn’t worth it and San Jose was meh (I’d actually say sub-meh). Long story short, if you want an eco trip with a side of golf, great, otherwise Costa Rica is not for you.
The ride. So there’s a relatively new toll road from San Jose to the west coast. Somewhere along the way I saw an electronic sign. It had the universal CAUTION symbol and a bunch of writing in Spanish. Piecing together what little Spanish remains in my vocabulary, I was pretty sure it read that the road up ahead was closed, so we got off the highway. I asked the girl at the toll and in my broken Spanish was able to confirm that the toll road was indeed closed and she pointed me along the detour I should take. My Garmin was now useless as it was trying to get me back to the toll road so I was driving blind. I followed the general direction she pointed me to and since the route was running parallel to the toll road I felt pretty good. After about a mile the road started climbing the mountainside and as we went the road kept climbing, getting narrower and went from pavement to loose stone to dirt to a cliff, just like you’d expect to see in a Road Runner, Wiley Coyote chase. No signs, no barrier, just cliff. Thank God this was not at night as there is no doubt we would’ve driven right off. Our u-turn looked like the below video (except backing up too far would have put us over a cliff). When we finally got back down the mountain and back to the tollbooth I saw a few cars getting off and decided to follow the herd until finally the Garmin stopped trying to send us back. This all killed about an hour and generally sucked.
Finally to the course. The front nine gently climbs up through the jungle then comes back down through nine. On the way up, my favorite was the short par four third. Even though it’s just 305 yards from the blues it’s up-hill so would be tough for even the big hitters to drive the green. On the way back down I liked the par-three 8th. The back nine goes back into the jungle through 14 then plays along an inlet and the ocean for the final four holes. Seventeen is another short par-four that I really liked and provided the best ocean views. We saw roosters, iguanas, heard exotic sounding birds (you know the kinds of bird noises that Disney pumps into the Jungle ride), but we didn’t see any monkeys.
We ate at the resort which was an outdoor affair and remember they had a swim-up bar. It was cool but the lack of Miller Lites at the resort did not tickle my fancy (Imperial is the beer here). The little town of Jaco Beach is right around the corner and is a cool little town with bars and restaurants . Lemon Zest here was a great restaurant – highly recommend you go if here.
Golf Scrapbook 