Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Costa Rica! Saturday- Sabados – January 20, 2018



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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