Cost Rica: Beginnings, bumps and San Jose impressions

It seemed a long two weeks of waiting between the drive home from California and the getting packed up for our Costa Rica trip out of Houston. Prepping for a six month trip seemed to cause our mother an inordinate amount of worry directly inproportionate to the amount of input we wanted her to have in the process. I was lucky to escape most of mom’s stress and worry over the trip by slipping off to New York for the three days immediately preceding our departure. Highlights included Sutton Court tennis, Laura’s 25th birthday dinner and subsequent Antarctic shenanigans, and a Sunday football BBQ at Frank, LT, and Hart’s new place. Thank you guys for a great weekend and sendoff!

When my sister and I finally escaped US airspace and touched down in San Jose on Oct. 23, however, we were anxious to immediately head down south to the surf and rainforest of the Osa Peninsula. We decided to spend only one night in San Jose simply to secure the rental car, gather info on the upcoming drive, and to do a tad bit of city exploring. If we found out there was a lot to see in San Jose we could always return later in the trip after we had quelled our anxiety to be off and running with our outdoor adventures.

With the gringos San Jose is probably most renowned for its whore houses and casinos, which are coincidently most often housed in the same complex. This impression is based mostly off eavesdropping into the conversations of those dining and drinking around us at the downstairs café of the Hotel Presidente where we were staying. Here businessmen, real estate developers and speculators, tourists, surfers, ex-patriots, and local Ticos (Costa Ricans) sat at open air tables looking out over a short wall at the Avenue Central in the heart of downtown. From many of these tables we caught wind of late nights spent at the famous/infamous Hotel Del Ray, gambling away all but enough colones to allow a late night tour of the locally euphemized “petting zoo”.

At the café drinking at the table next to us, Laura and I met Steve, an ex-patriot developer who had been living south of Dominical for 8 years. He was staying there after having brought his wife to a hospital in San Jose for the birth of their fourth child. Characteristic of most ex-pats, Steve was outgoing, from California, had been originally attracted to Costa Rica by the surfing, and had stayed after finding a welcoming and relaxed Tico culture rife with opportunities through cheap land and an expanding tourist industry. Over the course of a number of hours and Imperial drafts, he helped give us an initial feel for life in Costa Rica, where to go, what to avoid, and how to experience the most. Maybe it is something about the experience of having just seen his new child enter the world, but we were lucky that Steve was willing to sit a share with us about his life for most of that afternoon. We plan to visit him later in our trip.

Our wandering sightseeing was predominately along the Avenue Central, the main east-west thoroughfare in the city. The most characteristic element of the street was the ubiquitous lotteria tables selling tickets for some unknown drawing. Apparently even one table per block was not enough to oversaturate the market, as all the vendors seemed to be doing at least some business. Apparently gringos aren’t the only ones who enjoy gambling in San Jose. There was also a healthy amount of pedestrian traffic. We noticed students with backpacks, some office looking suits, young people in sun glasses, the homeless and the crazy, some street kids addicted to glue sniffing, and most obviously a menagerie of street performers, tourist scammers, shoe polishers, and impromptu tour guides all vying for our attention. Though believing myself above such obvious ploys, I was briefly inticed into following around a guy who claimed to be buddies with Warren Moon and promised me he could set me up with a local phone chip for my blackberry that would make phone calls much cheaper. Ten dollars and a stern warning from Steve later, I recognized there was no way I was going to get the elusive local phone chip and wrote it off as a learning experience into the art of the street scam. But, god, did he ever have me going by dropping the Warren Moon bomb.

That night, of course at the suggestion of Steve, we went to dinner at San Jose’s most famous Asian cuisine restaurant Tin Jo. The food was amazing and showed the city does have more to offer then seedy casinos and crowded streets. We had eaten gourmet quality haute-couture food at one of San Jose’s finest restaurant and spent only $30 between the two of us.

The next day we picked up our car at the rental car office, loaded up our luggage, and then looked blankly at the crowded and unmarked San Jose streets as we tried to orient ourselves to getting on the road to San Isidro- our halfway point for the drive to the southern Osa peninsula. As I sat in the driver seat of my Dihatzou BeGo in the parking lot of the EuropaRenta Car, silently congratulating myself on securing both a good rate on the vehicle and my surf board safely to its top, I realized to my horror that I was staring at a manual transmission. I had only driven a manual once before in my life, and that was only for a total of about eight days. Looking into the morass of San Jose traffic, honking horns, roundabouts, and unmarked roads, I recognized I was approaching a trial by fire. I took a deep breath and engaged the clutch.

In the first 10 minutes of driving down Avenue Colon I must have stalled the car 8 times, been cussed out in Spanish 20 times, and been laughed at as an idiot gringo unable to drive his own bright red rental car pretty much constantly. The traffic was all stop and go, so I was constantly having to transition into first gear without lurching into the car ahead. Things seemed to be looking up as a gained some degree of comfort with the clutch, when a Tico on the side of the rode ran to our car and began pointing at the back tire. I had written of the bumpy feel as due to the roads and my poor driving, but indeed we had managed to get a flat tire less than 5 miles into our trip.

We were profoundly lucky in the man who stopped to help us. The tire was changed and EuropoRenta car brought us a new spare within 40 minutes. I say profoundly lucky because, as we were told, tire slashing is usually part of a larger scam in San Jose where thieves slash the tires of obvious tourists and swarm in when they pull over, initially offering to help but really looking to distract the distraught motorists and rob them of their belongings. Somehow we must have driven either too far past our slashers (our tires had indeed been knifed) and been stopped by a true good Samaritan or possibly we were simply not distracted enough and the area was to public for the scam to be pulled off. I suspect the former as the man did an amazing job changing the tire and was so sincerely nice and helpful to two obviously out-of-their-element gringos. Nothing was stolen and we were back on the road. What a lucky break.

The rest of the drive to San Isidro consisted of lots of attempts to ask directions in broken Spanish, climbing up and out of the mountains bordering the San Jose central valley, pleading with local cops to let us through a road block only passable for local residents and official vehicles, and finally cruising through the rainforest jungle road at night for the last 50 kilometers into San Isidro. The road block had been set up because the main road, Calle 2, had become impassible due to a mudslide and the detour around it was a dirt road through a hilly valley that could only accommodate limited traffic. However, fearing that by turning around and trying to find an alternate route would surely only get us lost, we begged the cop to let us through and to pass the mudslide using the backroad detour. I soon learned the other challenge of navigating a manual transmission was in climbing wet and muddy hills at 45 degree angles. I stalled out numerous times on such hills and terrifyingly was unable to execute a mid-hill re-start and was forced to roll in neutral back down to the bottom in order to restart. This must have been extremely disconcerting to the other traffic, which was forced to dodge the fire red tourist rent-a-car hopelessly sliding down the muddy hills.

We eventually did make it to San Isidro that night and by the next day were cruising through the rain to the Pacific Coast and Dominical. There by eight, we got breakfast, checked the surf, and then drove the last leg of the drive down to the Osa Peninsula. The road down the peninsula is all dirt and rock and cuts right through the rainforest of Corcavado National Park. To the left and the east is the water of the Gulfa Dulce which separates the Osa Peninsual from the Costa Rican mainland. We reached the main town on the Osa, Puerto Jimenez by 1:00, and by 2:00 were at our hotel at the far southwestern tip of the Peninsula in a collection of houses called Matapalo. I had stayed here, at the Encanta La Vida, twice before and arriving felt like a homecoming after our long trip from San Jose. Laura and I are looking for some relaxing days of three cooked meals a day, surfing at three walking distance breaks, and jungle monkey watching which can be done right from the wooden rockers on the front porch of our cabin.