Pura Vida in Costa Rica!

After 7 hours of overnight travel, 9am came early, but we shook off our post red eye haze and made our way down to the ‘full American, Canadian and Costa Rican’ breakfast at the Adventure Inn, San Jose (www.adventure-inn.com). Wary of drinking the local water and ice, we stayed away from the fresh fruit juices that looked sooooo inviting and opted instead for dark, rich Costa Rican coffee (con leche y sucre). Considering ourselves to be discerning connoisseurs of the continental breakfast bars in US hotels, were pleasantly surprised to find that a full-service menu was included in our stay! Josh opted for the Tico special (rice, beans, 2 links of chorizo! and eggs) and I chose a fantastic veggie omelet.

After filling our bellies, we sat poolside and warmed up in the tropical sun. It was still early, but the cement was already sizzling beneath our feet! How quickly does sunstroke set in? It must be quick or we were still half asleep because we devised a master plan: Josh (the one who can’t even pretend to speak Spanish) would get picked up by the Thrifty guys (alone, with the wallet and both our passports and without the cell phone), pick up the rental car and drive back to the hotel so we could be on our way. In the meantime, I hung out at the hotel, playing in the pool with Nixie (the bartender’s daughter).

Fast forward to an hour and a half later, I’m packing up our bags for check-out and Josh isn’t back yet. By all accounts, he’s gone missing in a foreign country and I’m sweating. I’m devising a plan to ask the front desk to dial Thrifty rentals, the embassy and my dad in that order.  When I hear from Thrifty that he’s just left with the car, the girl at the desk lets out a sigh. Who would have guessed - the moment  he pulled into the lot at the Adventure Inn in a beat-up Toyota Yaris now ranks up there with seeing him at the end of the boardwalk when I walked down the aisle!  And the day only got more exciting from there…

Under a vague suspicion that the main highway to the west coast was closed for the day, we pulled out of the Adventure Inn with a map drawn in orange marker, sorely lacking in scale road names. Not that the road names would have helped. As we soon learned, in Costa Rica, there are no road signs to speak of! When we almost drove up the exit ramp for the highway at 60km/hr, we should have called it and sent the rental straight back to the lot. Instead, we made a U-turn and worked our way through the back roads of San Jose to what we thought was a shortcut.But, little did we know that, instead of a short 1.5 hour jaunt to Jaco beach on the Pacific Coast, we were in for a 6 hour (almost literal) crash course in Costa Rican driving that included the following:

- A 50 minute uphill detour through coffee plantations, parks and protected areas only to dead end at what seemed to be a Tico family reunion and retrace our steps back down again

- A winding drive through the streets of Santa Ana, a tiny town in the central highlands with few street signs and even fewer street names

- Crossing crumbling 1-lane foot bridges over deep gorges and rushing rivers and jamming into low gear to scale sheer rock walls ahead, all while hearing eerie howls from down below (later we learned that we were driving through the land of the bruja or witch!)

- Finding a few miles of smooth pavement and ‘civilization’ and landing smack dab in the middle of a Costa Rican cowboy festival, complete with macho men on horseback, fried food carts carnival rides
- Chilling at a tiny dive and lucking out to find an English-speaking woman there who gave us directions to the highway (and then let us know that it was completely closed until 5pm on Sundays!) and also recommended the fresh pork rinds as a snack while we waited

- Willing our 2WD Toyota Yaris straight up toward the sky on the unpaved, gravel and boulder ‘old road’ where only seasoned burros should dare to tread, in hopes of finding the highway, muttering 'I think I can, I think I can' under our breaths, channeling the Little Engine Who Could

- Finally comming to a round-about, asking directions again (Donde esta Jaco?!?) for the umpteenth time to make sure we were headed in the right direction and then waiting another 20 minutes in our car for the police to remove the road blocks 

- Following a squad car most of the way to Jaco, driving a good hour in the dark, on a one lane jungle 'highway' with thousands upon thousands of cars moving quickly in the other direction (Locals and tourists who were moving west toward San Jose in 40 miles of bumper to bumper traffic, making the LONG trek home from a their beach weekend!) 

We finally arrived at our Jaco beach hotel - alive, generally unscathed, but completely fried! We grabbed groceries for dinner and crashed in bed, ready for a peaceful night's sleep. Peaceful, that is, until the rains came...