Well, Day Two definitely tested our relationship. (We passed.) After a wonderful hotel breakfast, we got our rental car and checked out. The rental car guy was really, really thorough, and we got a GPS, so we felt safe. And then we drove for several hours, from San Jose to Zarcero, and from Zarcero to Santa Elena.
Actually, I lied. It took us another hour to get out of the parking lot. First, we had to buy neosporin and water for the journey. Then, we had to get a bite to eat. "Spending all that money made me hungry," Sean said. Then, we had to go back to the hotel and get a road map. Then, we had to go to the bathroom. "Spending all that money made me have to go to the bathroom," Sean said.
This was Sean's first time driving in a foreign country. This was my first time using a Garmin GPS. Costa Rica doesn't really use addresses. All the signage and all the GPS directions were in Spanish. Sean isn't very patient when he is waiting for directions and I am apparently not very good at communicating driving directions that I don't understand because the GPS is still loading and the map just flipped upside down and now it's telling me to turn where there isn't a street and who knows how far 600 meters actually is. Don't worry, we only had one fight and we arrived in one piece. We will most surely work on our taking directions and navigating skills and going forward. "Communication is essential for success!" (That's my boyfriend.)
It was super cool to drive through the city and around the countryside. We saw some small villages in the middle of the mountains and many neighborhoods of houses lined up on the tops of ridges with the best views in the world. We saw many stray dogs, all of them little-to-medium sized. We drove on the InterAmericana Highway, the road that stretches from the top of Mexico to the bottom of Chile. The section that we drove on was two paved lanes, with a yellow line down the middle and reflectors planted into the ground- pretty fancy for Costa Rica. There were no street lights.
Zarcero was really cute. The main church was built in the Spanish style with tall, arched ceilings and decorations on every surface. The gardens surrounding the church were totally normal until the 1960s, when the gardener decided to prune all the shrubs and trees into bizarre shapes. It looks like Edward Scissorhands did a number. There are arches and double arches and dinosaurs and twirlies and secret coves and all sorts of weird shapes. Sean and I traipsed around and took pictures for an hour. We got to watch one of the current gardeners give a shrub a haircut. I excitedly related to Sean that I had the same kind of pruning shears in the trunk of my car. While we were out there, it started to rain, our first rain of the trip!
The region around Zarcero is known for its cheese and cashew production. The highway out of town was lined with roadside shops selling cookies and nuts and blocks of cheese and other local goodies. We got some cheese and desserts at one shop, and stopped for burritos a little further down the road. These burritos were small and flat, but delicious. The bag of salsa that came with was the best salsa we've ever tasted. We ate it with Triscuits that I brought from Trader Joes.
The sun was setting when we turned onto the dirt road that wound up to Monteverde and Santa Elena, and it was completely dark by the time we made it to our hotel. Costa Ricans have purposefully NOT paved the roads up here to try to deter further development and crowds of tourists. (That apparently worked for a while, but NO MORE.) It made us feel like we were going to a really remote, special place. Driving through the clouds was quite surreal.
This unpaved road, which we traveled on for almost an hour, was the reason we rented a 4WD. We only passed a few restaurants and houses, and traffic was pretty light. We passed numerous piles of round boulders, sitting in neat arrangements by the side of the road. At first, I thought they were the remnants of a landslide. But then several dump-trucks full of rocks passed us and we saw some parked tractors and we realized they were grading the mountainside and carting the rocks away.
We reached our hotel eventually. Checked in, found our room, had no idea if we had a good view because it was too dark, dumped our stuff, said nice things to each other, had a quick snuggle, and went out to get dinner in town.
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