The alarm went off at 2:30 AM EDT, or
1:30 AM Costa Rica time. We trundled out
of bed, grabbed showers and made our way to Albany airport for a 5:40 am
flight. All was on time and it was a
glorious day for flying. We landed in Baltimore
and had a luscious breakfast at the Sliver diner in BWI before hopping the next
jet to San Jose. Cheri had bison huevos
rancheros. John had scrambled eggs and bacon with a biscuit. That set us up for the next leg of the
journey.
We arrived in San Jose about 25
minutes early. Luckily we were exiting
the plane with many others, because as we had been told, signage in Costa Rica
is at a minimum. No one was sure how to get
from the plane to immigration. After a
trial and error, we found the down escalator and a sign!
We got into the customs line and it
moved pretty quickly and we were out of the first part just about the time we
would have landed. As we exited the
passport control, but before we left immigration, there were many helpful
vendors including a SIM card provider (Kolbi). Go with Kolbi/ICE – the government backed company. There can be
slightly cheaper plans and some say service is better from Claro but ICE
held a monopoly for years and still much higher numbers of towers,
stores, and market penetration. If you’ll only be there for a few weeks
use the big company unless you get advance information from your hotel
or resort that one of the little guys works better in their area.
We got 2GB of data for $20 installed!
John got some local money and we were off.
Exiting the airport, a man with our
names on his sign was waiting to greet us so we could go and pick up our rental
vehicle at Adobe. Thankfully, Anthony had told John we needed a vehicle with
pickup! John got the biggest 4x4 on
offer, Hyundi Tuscon, which would be considered a small SUV in the US. It came with wifi as well as a free local
cell phone.
John hadn't slept much for the three
previous nights, so he promptly handed the keys to his favorite Sicilian
driver, Cheri! Being Saturday, the roads
were very crowded, so we just settled in and enjoyed the ride. Of course the first stop was Wal-mart! Pillows all around, water, fruit and toilet
paper. No sense being caught out in the
woods without!
Then it was onto the long drive. Costa Rica doesn't have an abundance of
addresses and therefore GPS Works in an entirely different way. Type in the thing you want and pray it's In
the database. We'd learn a bit later in
the day that Waze was much better than our $6/day GPS.
So off we went through the beautiful
scenery. One or the other of us remarking about how a scene reminded us of
China, Bali, Ireland, or South Africa! We
didn't totally trust the GPS, so we also began using the iPhone maps. Part way up, we texted our hosts and they
decided we needed to drive all the way to the accommodation. Remember what I said about GPS? Ok, so John knew that in advance and had
diligently looked at satellite maps as well as road maps and landmarks like
rivers to be sure he knew how to get us in.
So, we go spinning off the primary
road onto a small concrete road which very shortly turned into a rock road
which then turned into a cow path....a wet cow path. I was very thankful for
our 4x4! After a while we came upon a
man, the angel David. He didn't speak a
lot of English and we not much Spanish, but his wife knew a bit more. They finally said, you have to download
Waze. It's the only map to use! Then they directed us how to get back to the
principal road. We struck off, on the
cow path, found our way back to the principal road and just as we turned onto
the concrete road again, a white SUV came up behind us. It was David, the man we had met five minutes
before. He wanted to be sure we didn't
miss the turn a second time around. So
he escorted us part of the way.
A double, huge rainbow appeared. At the point he was to turn around, we got
out of our vehicles and shook hands and took pictures with the rainbow.
So now we knew we were headed in the right
direction. It would be another 40
minutes and much more cow path before we finally got to the top of the mountain
and our lodging. At one point Cheri
remarked that she felt like she was in Romancing the Stone....where was the bus
to Carteghena???? And can you imagine after driving for almost 4 hours that we
had to pee....bad!!!! Along the way
there had been no, zip, nada signage. We
got to the final turn and there was a sign!
We pulled up to the door of the main
house and Juan Carlos was there asking what we wanted for dinner and when. We told him we were beat and dinner would be
lovey soon! We made plans for a hike the
next day. Breakfast, traditional Tico,
at seven thirty and then walking with his brother Stephen.
Darkness was falling and the mist was turning to rain.
That's all for tonight!
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