This is the day we woke up at 3am, strapped on our backpacks and trekked across campus in the dark, dodging sprinklers and drunken frat boys, to get on the AB bus to the airport and stand in line with the people who had been bumped off of yesterday’s morning flight. Despite taking a Benadryl allergy at 8:30 the last night, I had only gotten about three hours sleep (like the kid on the Disney commercial, I was too excited).
The line at the airport went relatively smoothly, and we had just enough time before boarding the plane to grab a couple of sausage biscuits from McDonald’s – a true hero’s breakfast to wash down malaria medication. While waiting at the gate in Houston for our flight to San Jose, we spied on other people’s conversations to see if anyone was going towards Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca) that evening. We met some nice people but no one offered us a ride.
There was a slight possibility that we could make it to Puerto Viejo that day. Our plane would have to land in San Jose early, we’d have to clear customs quickly, catch a taxi to the bus station in light traffic, buy the right ticket and get ourselves and our luggage on the correct bus.
We had reason to hope. The plane took off half an hour late but somehow landed on time. We got on the ground at 2:20pm, and we were quite sure that the bus left the station at 4pm. We walked briskly through the San Jose airport (about the size of the Huntsville, AL airport) until we caught up with the line for customs.
There were actually two lines – one for Costarricenses and another for foreigners. We tourists were lined up in such a way that we were always in front of a gift shop. After the terminal, the line snaked for a while longer through some unfinished concrete rooms until we opened up into the newly finished main arrival/departure building. In this section, we were organized amusement park-style.
Time was beginning to get tight as we made our way through the line, but we were in high spirits because we were finally in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, the man behind us in line was not so happy. He constantly sighed and grunted under his breath about how long it was taking like a child wanting attention. We both decided to actively ignore him, although if I could have punched him without any other negative consequences, I would have.
As the time inched closer to 4pm as we stood in line, Mere and I considered our options. If we took a cab to the bus station and we were too late for the bus, we’d have to catch another taxi to a hotel that might have vacancy. We thought about just staying near the airport and catching a private tourist shuttle to Puerto Viejo in the morning. These options were made more complicated because everyone in the country speaks Spanish and we don’t.
In the end, we decided to be adventurous and go to the bus station. We got into the taxi at 3:40. The driver was able to help us call the bus station and figure out that the bus had not left yet. Traffic cooperated and we actually made it to the station at 3:56. Even if the bus was not running late, we probably would have made it.
I ran through the bus station asking for the autobus to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca at every window, bought the tickets, and ran out to meet Meredith and the luggage. The taxi driver told us to look for stop number four, but in our frenzy, we saw no numbers posted anywhere. We must have been the perfect ugly tourists going around randomly tapping people on the shoulder and asking/demanding “!Mepe!”, the name of the bus company.
We tapped the right shoulders, belonging to a couple of French backpackers who were waiting for the same bus. It had not arrived yet. Shortly afterward, we were joined in the line by another backpacker from Georgia. Being in the presence of other tourists was calming as we prepared for our first Costa Rican public bus experience, even though the backpackers probably thought we were obnoxious tourons.
The bus left the station around 4:30. The GAP brochure described the ride over the mountains to the Caribbean coast as “thrilling”. Having driven on a few mountain passes in Colorado, I knew a little bit about what to expect. The mountains were beautiful – there were waterfalls and sheer drops right off the road. The canyons were so tight we were convinced the sun was setting many times, only to come back to a valley and be able to read a little more of our guidebook. And it was uninterrupted green – so different from the reds, browns, and greys of the Rockies.
The real thrilling part, however, was ultimately the riding itself. Our bus was at least thirty years old. As we ascended and descended, the transmission and the brakes respectively took turns threatening to cease to function. Costa Rica is notorious for bad driving. We felt that if our bus didn’t die on us, we still had much to fear from its driver’s behavior. Up hills, the bus came to a near stop as it crawled forward. Down hills or on flat road, our driver made an effort to pass every car in front of him, regardless of their speed.
Costa Rican pedestrians somehow have faith in their motorist friends. No matter what time of day or the weather conditions, you will pass walkers and bikers confidently sharing the road with speeding buses, cars, and trucks. I have heard that Costa Rica has one of the highest rates of pedestrian motor vehicle deaths in the world, and while I never saw a close call myself, I have to accept this fact purely based on the law of averages.
The mountains gave way after about an hour and a half to more gentle terrain, and we began to see small towns, gas stations, road-side restaurants, and banana plantations. The sun set at about 6:30pm and we could only see what the bus’s headlights and the sometimes visible full moon would show us. After two and a half hours, we reached the city of Puerto Limon, where our bus had a short and very welcome stop at a local restaurant to use the bathroom or eat.
Mere and I welcomed a return to civilization, although Limon did not fill us with comfort. Mere was afraid that our bags would be stolen from underneath the bus, and the town seemed sketchy overall. We gladly reboarded the bus to make our last 60 km to Puerto Viejo, with the Caribbean Sea to our left as we traveled south.
Our backpacker friends got off the bus in a town called Cahuita, which to us seemed friendlier than Limon. I was able to see road signs as we traveled, and calculated that we had traveled something like 180 km from San Jose. The road was no longer paved after Cahuita. This thankfully meant that the bus had to slow down.
We made it to Puerto Viejo around 8:30. A man who spoke English with no discernable accent except that granted him by alcoholic consumption helped us get our bags off the bus. I think I gave him a 500 Colon piece to try to shake him off, but he insisted on taking us to our hotel in his cab (or someone’s cab). A lady tried to convince Meredith to come eat at her restaurant (or maybe her house). The scene was very confusing and not comfortable.
We ducked into a shop to ask where we could find our hotel. “Donde esta … El Escape Caribeno?” I asked the shopkeeper. A loiterer who spoke English offered to help us. I was happy to hear someone who seemed coherent, but Meredith was very unsettled. The loiterer tried to tell us that we would have to take a cab to our hotel - that it was in Cocles 3 km away.
This didn’t jive with what our guidebook told us. We made a break for the main road a few dozen meters up and dropped into the courtyard of a restaurant – El Loco Natural. We randomly asked a couple of North American guys if they’d heard of our hotel, which they hadn’t, but they wished us luck in finding it and suggested we follow the main road down. I was confident that the guidebook was right, and the main road was looking decidedly safer than the one near the bus stop. There were many shops and restaurants with tourists looking dumber than us in them.
We followed the road a couple of hundred meters and came across a sight that would be a representative one of our trip. We saw a line of cars stopped for an animal in the middle of the road. I initially interpreted it as the tragic sight of a dog that had been hit by a car – such was impression from the speed of motion and low, curved shape of the beast. A closer look, available because we’d adopted the local pedestrian behavior, showed us that it was a sloth crossing the road. We would learn the next day why the sloth seemed so feeble on flat land.
Not long after the sloth, we welcomed the sight of El Escape Caribeno Cabinas. We entered the office and were greeted by one of the innkeepers – a man who didn’t quite look or sound Costa Rican – I thought Portugese, but we’d learn later he was Italian. We said GAP Adventures and he smiled, gave us our key and told us that our group was out to dinner – at the restaurant El Loco Natural.
We put up our luggage, but were anxious to meet our group and guide. We went back to the restaurant and looked for the largest group there. We were greeted with applause when we introduced ourselves. We met as much of our group as we could in the frenzy, ordered a couple of bottles of water and a meal and met our tour leader. Because of unintentional overbooking, our group happened to be possibly the largest GAP group ever. When our Peruvian group leader Zaida met us she proclaimed, “the fellowship is closed”.
Our bungalow, which was actually pretty nice, was fan-cooled. This was tolerable in the hot and humid weather if you didn’t bother with sheets. We were provided with mosquito nets, a novel idea for me but nothing new for Meredith, who’d slept with one in Kenya. Had we not been so tired, the fight with the net that first night might have been comical. Possibly because I was working off of no more than seven hours of sleep in the last two days, I had a good night’s sleep.
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