OUR LONG DAY OF DRIVING

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.

Photos From San Jose

There Will Be Blood

Sorry, yesterday's post got cut short because while I was typing, Sean cut his head in the shower and was bleeding all over the place and I had to go downstairs and ask Jorge at reception for bandaids.  Jorge came back upstairs with me to make sure that the cut wasn't serious and we didn't have to take Sean to the hospital for stitches.  Jorge also went out and bought us some gauze.  We put pressure on the cut and then I tied two bandanas around Sean's head to keep the gauze in place.  Sean did not like that I involved our hotel guy, but I was pretty freaked out, butt tired, and I thought that I might have seen a tiny bit of brain sticking out of the cut and I didn't really trust myself.  (That bit of brain was just skin, FYI.  Sean is totally totally fine and the cut is dried up already.)  

Anyways, we were both a bit shaken and Sean looked like Old Mother Hubbard.  It took us a long time to fall asleep.  We both had dreams of him bleeding out.  (SEAN IS FINE IT WAS JUST A SMALL CUT.)  A dramatic first night.

But back to the first day.  We walked around central San Jose.  It was a pretty relaxing first day.  They have many fabulous plazas and parks where the local people gather and hang out.  At one plaza, there were crowds and pigeons and kids feeding the pigeons and ladies selling corn to feed the pigeons.  There were also a bunch of clowns making balloon figures and some sad/dirty looking costumed Elmo and Micky Mouse.  We saw one couple walk past holding a shrieking child.  The kid was afraid of the Elmo.

Another park we walked through was having an arts festival.  A huge pillared dome sat in the middle of the park, like San Francisco's museum near the Golden Gate Bridge.  Beneath the dome was a very enthusiastic drum circle.  The drumming was really rhythmic and cool and made me want to dance.  Around the edges of the park were people walking on stilts, portrait artists, teenagers jump-roping, a hula-hooping contest, tables with checkers and chess and jenga and other games, people teaching kids how to mold a clay nativity scene, and some craft tables selling their stuff.  The park was full of people and full of life.  There were really tall, leafy trees and exotic looking flowers growing.  Is was pretty inspiring to walk through.  We read later that the dome is called the Temple of Music.

We also walked past a group of young boys playing soccer in the street.  I became a little bit stalkery and took like fifteen pictures of them.  They were really cute!  They were all randomly wearing red shirts!  It looked like a scene out of a movie.

The biggest draw of San Jose was the gold museum.  This museum houses an extensive collection of pre-Columbian figures made out of gold.  It was super cool.  The museum is like a vault, a huge cement building four stories below the ground.  They had great exhibits on how the native peoples made the gold figures-- first they made a wax figure, then a clay mold around it, melted out the wax, poured in molten gold, and finally cracked open the clay.  There were tiny figurines of frogs, birds, lizards, butterflies, and spirits.  Sean describes them as, "The shit they saw in the forest."

The gold museum was connected to a money museum, so we got to learn all about Costa Rica's currency and how it came to be.  It was also really neat, even though all the exhibit signage was in Spanish.  Their bills are super colorful.  Some of the old coins, which were made by coffee plantation owners, had great detail.  A third section of the museum was art.  It was boring.  Except for one large sculpture that looked like a flaming vagina.  

Then we headed back to dinner at the loneliest hotel restaurant, and I already wrote about that.  Awesome first day.  Some observations:

- There seem to be no municipal codes governing sidewalk or driveways.  Every street has a different sized and patterned sidewalk.  Most of them look like they haven't been touched since they were laid fifty years ago.

- There are drunk homeless people in every country.

- Lots and lots of police all over the place.  The backs of their uniforms had "POLICIA" written in fluorescent reflective plastic.  And they traveled in large packs.

- We don't quite understand how the street lights work.  We've made a rule for ourselves, which is, "Don't get hit."

- Sean was really disappointed that the TVs in the restaurants and bars were showing futbol and the rodeo, and not NFL.

- We are fucking exhausted.

- We are super excited for breakfast. 

- All the craftsy souvenirs in the market are probably made in Guatemala.

- There is trash everywhere.  So much litter.  (But very strict no-smoking rules.)

- We love our hotel staff.  Hotel Presidente.

- We still haven't grasped the currency exchange rate.  Everything looks like it's outrageously expensive.  For example, our KFC lunch cost 7,000 colones.

- Sean REALLY wants to tip everyone and I have to remind him that they don't do that here.  

the Arrival

I'm writing this now from the loneliest hotel restaurant in the world.  It is completely empty save Sean and I and the loud dance hall techno coming from the (empty) bar area.  We're sitting beside the Wall of Oppression, a floor-to-ceiling carved mural made of black stone, depicting gold miners, slave drivers, and imminent violence.  Despite the ambiance, our first dinner in Costa Rica was splendid.  We got delicious local cuisine: beans, rice, salad, veggie stew, fried plantains, fish.  Sean got a Coca Cola Light!  The Broncos beat the Dolphins!  The food perks us up enough that I put down my notebook and we reminisce about our day.  

We also decide that we are going to rent a car for the remainder of the trip.  I'm excited and super freaking out about this.  Like, I'm definitely old enough to rent a car on my vacations now.  But I've done it so few times, and never in a foreign country.  Renting a car will make tomorrow's plans waaaaaaay easier and cheaper, and it will let us "control our own destiny."  Sean is fond of using that phrase. 

I am so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open as I type this.  I think I slept about seven minutes on our flight over here, and that means that Sean slept for six minutes.  We had a fabulous time in the Sky Lounge last night, playing backpack show and tell, drinking free drinks, remembering our first airport adventure in Dubai with ACC, planning our future movie theater/brewery.  Once on the plane, we were so distracted by the plane tracker on the TV and the flight attendants kept giving us food that we didn't try to go to sleep until an hour in.  Our plane landed at like 6:45am Costa Rica time, which is 3:45 PST.  I definitely look a hot mess.  There is a picture to prove it somewhere.

We sailed through immigration and customs in two minutes, used the ATM, and got a cab to San Jose.  I've been super paranoid about pick-pockets and thieves and will not let my daypack out of my hands.  I wouldn't let Sean put his pack in the trunk of the cab, for which I received a dirty look.  (For the record, a vast majority of the time I'm right.  In this case, he needed both his sunglasses AND camera while in the cab and was quite thankful that he had them accessible.)  Then we checked into our hotel and I convinced Sean that he did NOT need to visit the breakfast buffet but rather should take a nap with me for an hour before we venture out.  (He fell asleep before me, naturally.)  

Oh!  In the middle of our nap, I woke up to the sound of water falling pitter-pat on the floor.  The air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall was dripping.  All over the place.  Sean McGuyvered a trashcan and towel so that we could continue sleeping with the A/C on while the water collected silently.  I dreamed of peeing.

After the nap, we gleefully unpacked and rearranged our daypacks and put all of our valuables in the safe.  Sean revealed that he brought Poo Pourri.  "I brought it to save the relationship," he explained proudly.

We sort of wandered around the Central Avenue before winding up at KFC for lunch.  Sean suggested it as a joke, but I thought it was a brilliant choice, such an incredibly bad idea that it became a good idea.  The chicken was pretty much exactly like American KFC, but my meal also came with beans and rice and fried plantains.  While we were sitting and eating, Sean turned to me and asked, "Did we lock the safe?"

I looked back at him.  "No.  No, we did not."  And I burst out laughing.  Guys, we were SO TIRED.  We had at least three conversations this morning planning out how we were going to use the safe and what the combination was going to be and was the laptop going to fit, etc etc.  But I was fairly positive that we had never actually CLOSED the safe. We returned to the hotel and sure enough, the safe was packed full of all of our valuables and wide open.  Luckily, everything was still there.  Sean probably gave me like eighty thousand exaggerated sighs, but I was too busy laughing at my own idiocy to notice.

items that we debated over packing, but brought in the end

• Five different types of bug repellent  (You never know which DEET is the right one for you.)
• Mouthguard (Adina's)
• Walkie-talkies

Map of Costa Rica

Costa Rica Itinerary

Sunday, November 23:  Arrive in San Jose.  Spend the day touring the city center.  Sleep at Hotel Presidente.
Monday, November 24: Travel through Alejuelah Province, Zarcero, Arenal.  Sleep at El Establo Mountain Hotel.
Tuesday, November 25: Monte Verde and Santa Elena Reserve.  Sleep at El Establo Mountain Hotel.
Wednesday, November 26: Monte Verde and Santa Elena Reserve.  Sleep at El Establo Mountain Hotel.
Thursday, November 27: Monte Verde and Santa Elena Reserve.  Sleep at El Establo Mountain Hotel.
Friday, November 28: Travel to Manuel Antonio Reserve.  Sleep at Shana Hotel.
Saturday, November 29: Manuel Antonio Reserve.  Sleep at Shana Hotel.
Sunday, November 30: Manuel Antonio Reserve.  Sleep at Shana Hotel.
Monday, December 1: Manuel Antonio Reserve.  Return to San Jose.  Sleep at ?.  We don't have a booking yet, but they do have a Hampton Inn, and I sort of feel like we have to stay there just because.
Tuesday, December 2: Fly home, arrive in LAX 12:30pm.