Living on the coast means that I have access to fresh fish. If I am wealthy, adventurous and lucky, I can go out with a charter boat and try my luck catching the stuff myself. Rarely am I. So I settle for the next best thing, and that is to dangle a 10,000 colones note in front of the many fishmongers at the Puntarenas fish market and see what I can reel in.
Puntarenas is a port city located on the Gulf of Nicoya about 200 km from Liberia. It's about a 3 hour drive from where we live in Play a Hermosa, but very scenic when you go by way of the Amistad Bridge. We loaded two coolers in the back of our Honda CRV and headed out - to catch some fish.
Boats come into the dock near the center of town and off load their fish. From there it goes to one of the many little stalls filled with large ice coolers for storage and cleaning.
You don't have to go into each shop either. On the street people ask you "what are you looking for", and will lead you to their favorite shop. It is expected I found out later to tip them for the service. I needed to get about 5 kilo of tuna (That's about 11 pounds). Since they didn't have any filets cut, the shop owner agreed to cut one off the whole tuna which weighed easily over 80 lbs.
I whittled the cost of the tuna to 6000 colones per kilo - or about $5.50 a lb. Still for fresh ahi tuna it was a bargain. I also picked up some camarones and some other filets of something they called "Angila". It looked pretty good so we bought some to try.
Inside the covered market there were many other fish vendors as well as meat, fruit, and herb vendors. Many of the types of fish I saw there were a mystery to me, and will make a great subject for a future Blog.