This starts off in Florida on a Monday after the wedding. We woke up plenty early, with all our stuff already packed, and got ready to go. We got to the airport without incident and checked in smooth as butter. As is traditional for these overseas trips, so far at least, we only had one backpack each. Most of that was taken up by clothes and a couple of things to keep us entertained on the flight. We felt very sharp when checking in and seeing people with huge bunches of massive suitcases. I can’t imagine what was in those things. Maybe they were moving to college. Worked especially well considering that Spirit airlines charges you to check in even one bag. It’s one of the reasons their tickets are so cheap.
The flight was quite short, Florida is closer to Central America than I thought, and before I knew it, we were on the ground! A foreign country, how exciting! Getting through customs and immigration was a breeze, we just showed our stuff and they let us right in. The boons of traveling to tourism-friendly locales. We changed a bunch of money from Dollars to Colones, the local currency, right at the airport, but I hadn’t figured out the conversion rate in my head, yet. When we walked out, we ran a gauntlet of taxi drivers, and mostly ignored them. We did ask one where Poas rent-a-car was, and he called for a guy. Someone with Jessie’s name on a board came over and escorted us over to where the shuttle would pick us up. He was very friendly, but I don’t think he actually worked for the rent-a-car place, and he was pretty explicit that he was just working for tips. Like I said, I hadn’t worked out the conversion rate in my head, so I tipped him 100 colones. I wasn’t going to do the dumb thing and accidentally tip him 50$ for carrying a backpack 25 feet. As it turns out, though, I tipped him roughly 20 cents. Oops.
Poas rent-a-car was pretty nice. They spoke english, which was true of most of the tourist-y places we went to. They got us hooked up with our manual, 4-wheel-drive jeep and a GPS specifically for finding our way around the country. The GPS was great, because most of the major, country-crossing thoroughfares look a lot like nearly-abandoned mountain passes. The GPS never steered us wrong. About 25 minutes after we left, though, the car started acting up. It started off being hard to shift into gears. Jess would tell me, and I’d have to use both hands to get it into position. After a while, though, we couldn’t even do that, and whenever we downshifted below 3rd gear, the car would sputter and die. And then we couldn’t get it started again.
So there we were, in the middle of San Ramon, unable to speak any Spanish, with a dead car, and still about an hour away from our hotel. I was about to go out and brave the wilds of Costa Rica to see if I could get a telephone and call Poas and tell them to bring us a car that worked, but Jess recommended we wait for a while. After about 10 minutes, we were able to start up the car again, but it still wanted to die every time we dropped below 2nd gear. So we did pretty much the entirety of the drive in 3rd gear or above. Which was exciting on those tiny mountain passes. At least we could coast on the downhill stretches.
The drive was gorgeous, though. Costa Rica is as green as any place I’ve ever seen, and it’s filled with so many amazing sights and strange plants that even the drive was a nice opportunity to see plenty of rainforest countryside. Well eventually, on our drive, we discovered that the clutch wasn’t as loose as Jessie’s truck, and we had been leaving it ever-so-slightly depressed while we drove. Evidently, the clutch didn’t like that, and as soon as we stopped riding it, the car gave us no problems for the rest of the trip.
The GPS drove us right to our hotel. We checked in, mostly, but the front desk informed us that the power was out to the entire hotel, so they couldn’t run our credit cards yet. Well it was still daylight, so we walked off to our room. Pretty much the entire hotel was a series of bungalows, all of them with a beautiful view of Arenal Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Also very conical and Iconic. Our private room had an awesome view, and we just spread the windows wide and drank in the view for a while. After that, we had some dinner at the hotel. We really ended up liking that restaurant. Jessie especially liked the dessert, ‘Baccio...something’. We never got the name down, but it was a puff filled with nutella and nuts and cooked in a fire stove, and served with ice cream and chocolate. We intended to share that and the Tiramisu, but Jess ended up eating most of the Baccio. As with most nights, we ended up going to sleep early. The sun set at around 7, and it set fast. After that it was so dark that sleeping was really the only thing to do. So we did.
I'll be making little videos to accompany the text entries. Enjoy!
-N
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