Up at 4 am yesterday, we geared up for our trip. We departed Newark relatively on time; a nice change from LGA and JFK. The flight was smooth into San Jose. As we got closer to the ground I could see the lush, green hills/mountains of Central America. Very cool. I'm also pretty sure I saw a volcano. There are 122 volcanoes in the country. Now I can't be sure, but it was a large black triangle and if I had been asked to draw a volcano in third grade, this is exactly what it would have looked like. So therefore, volcano.
We landed in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. Um, where's the runway? I see trees, hills...no runway. We got our rental car and asked in very broken Spanish for directiones to La Nueva Carretera. (The New Highway). We had been told (and I had researched online) that this "new highway" was going to save us a ton of time on our trek up to the Guanacaste Province near the border of Nicaragua. Well, let's just say, they apparently don't believe in street signs or street names in this country and it took us probably more time finally getting to the new highway than it was supposed to save us. Along the way we traveled narrow, precariously winding roads through the jungley (new word?) mountains, passed lots of shanties, and some REALLY poor towns. We stopped several times to ask for directions to find out if we were at least headed in the right direction. It was fun trying to communicate with the locals, albeit daunting being as tired as we were and frustrated about the lack of signage. By the time we got to this New Highway, there wasn't too much of it left, and then we got our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, ever. Cool.
We continued heading north to get to our destination, a tiny village called El Jobo (check it on Google Earth), that some Costa Ricans hadn't even heard of. Great. On this stretch of the journey we encountered a ton of cows, chickens and chihuahuas. Seriously. They run free and wild here like squirrels at home. I kept half expecting to see Juan Valdez riding a donkey on the road, but no such luck. We did see a lot of people walking along the Pan-American Highway and kept asking ourselves, "where are they coming from? And where are they going?"
HOURS later, were only in Liberia...this would be where the other major airport is but it was more money and not a direct flight. In hindsight it probably would have been a better decision, especially since we were now paying $600 for the rental car (don't ask...). We figured we were between 1-2 hours away from our destination. We were exhausted and needed a five minute break so we stopped at the McDonald's in Liberia. The Golden Arches were a welcome sight!
Then the rainforest lived up to its name. The monsoon-like weather really added to the experience. People were still walking on the road and we still asked, "where are they coming from and where are they going?"
Back on the road again, it started getting dark. The sun sets here a bit after 6 all year round. Several more wrong turns later and very broken Spanish spoken to very local people, we finally found the dirt road that would lead us to El Jobo. This was no ordinary dirt road. It was pitted with pot holes and gravel and I felt like we were on a ride at Disney. Thank goodness we didn't blow a tire out!
6 1/2 hours after we landed in San Jose we found the "wooden gate" (no sign of course) that we were to be looking for. We were welcomed by a nice, young American guy named Mike who graduated from the same college as Vic. He welcomed us by saying, "We have a nice warm dinner waiting for you." Ah, those were the best words I've heard in a long time!
More to come...
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