Quest to See the World

On Wednesday I made my way on a long, uncomfortable bus ride from Liberia to San José. The bus departed at 8am and arrived after 5000 long stops, to San José, the capital. I tried to sleep on the bus, but it was very difficult. I had the window seat, but the window only opened a little bit and the part that opened was toward the back of my head, not directly beside me. I opened as much as possible so that i could feel a breeze and tried to take a nap. I think i dozed off for a few minutes because i woke up and the window was closed. the guy behind me did this a couple of times and i just kept on opening it back up. sorry, but it´s not exactly cool here and there´s no a/c on the bus, so i was needing fresh air. he never said anything to me though.

We had one more of those ID checks along the way which i don´t like because it gives other people a chance to see where i stash my passport although i still try to be sly about getting it out and putting it back in. a lot of people here get their passports stolen so i always keep it in a safe place. Besides that, I´m still convinced that the bus system here stinks. In all of the other countries I´ve been to so far the buses stop and pick up other passengers along the way, but they stop for seconds, if even completely coming to a stop at all. Once the person is on the bus, someone other than the driver walks through and collects the fare, allowing for a smooth, quick transportation service. Well here in Costa Rica the bus comes to a complete stop everytime and then we have to wait for the driver to slowly collect the fare and give change to every person entering the bus along the way. The people who run these buses need to take a trip to Nicaragua to see how it´s done, the right way. Another thing about the buses is that in the other countries the people working on the buses are very helpful with luggage, but not here. In Guatemala when i took one of those old greyhound type of buses they put numbers on our bags, gave us a copy of the number, took the bag and put it under the bus for us. Once we arrived at our destination, they took the time to make sure that everyone´s numbers matched the luggage so that no one could steal your bag and they also crawled under the bus in the dirty storage area and pulled out the bags for us. Not here. No numbers and you put your own bags in and pull your own bags out. I again stood back and let everyone get their stuff, watching to make sure that no one was walking off with mine, and then got my pack after the impatient crowd had dispersed.

Once i got my bag I had to get a taxi to the hostel. In both of my guide book, and also common sense tells me, to only take official taxis. here in san josé they´re red with a yellow triangle on the side and have one of those yellow things on top that lights up with the word ¨taxi¨. so i go out front and find one. i told him where i was going and got in. when i closed the door the guys starts giving me a hard time about supposedly slamming the door. i didn´t close that door any harder than i close any other car door-I didn´t slam it. He kept going on and on about it and i was like ¨Listen, I don´t want to ride with you¨ and i got out, and he kept going on about the door. I don´t know what his deal was, but i didn´t want to ride around town with an angry man. Next, some guys were pointing to another red taxi, but it had other people in it and here the taxis run on meters and i wasn´t about to pay for their trips too, so the driver of that car told me to go with some other guy who was standing there. so i start following him to his car and asked which one it was and it was just a regular blue car, not a taxi. I told him that i wasn´t going with him because his car isn´t a taxi. he tried to talk me into it and i firmly told him that i wasn´t going in his car. he got really mad and said, ¨fine, go in another car and get assaulted…¨, well thing is that that´s exactly why i didn´t go in his car. Finally, I found a real taxi with a normal driver and got to the hostel.

It was only 1:30pm, but i was really tired and had a headache and didn´t really feel like adventuring out, so I emailed and ate and surfed the internet and read and stayed in the hostel the rest of the day. It was so nice because it rained really hard and i love the rain. it really cooled things off and i had to put my fleece on to eat dinner at the rooftop restaurant that night. I fell asleep and tried to sleep in yesterday, but got up at 7:30. The hostel is really nice. I get free internet, free coffee, free 10 minute international phone call per day, it has a swimming pool, travel agency and a previously mentioned rooftop restaurant/ outdoor seating area with a panoramic view of the mountains.

Yesterday I wondered around and checked out bus schedules and tried to buy advanced tickets without success (they aren´t selling them yet). I didn´t really do too much other than find my way around the city and stop in stores along the way, eating a couple of pastries and an ice cream cone during the afternoon. I again looked up info on the internet about panama in preparation for the next 2 weeks.

Today I did pretty much the same, but made my way to a big park, La Sabana, and found out that they have a ¨canopy tour¨ there, but it´s not really much of a canopy, just some ziplines in a city park. I may do that tomorrow. it´s only $7 as opposed to the ones meant for tourists in the national parks which cost anywhere from $35 to $50.

Dave arrives in approximately 12 hours and on Sunday we´re heading to Tortuguero in the northeastern part of the country. it should be cool because they call it ¨the amazon of central america¨. you can only arrive by boat or plane, we´re doing the boat. there´s a national park with a bunch of canals you can paddle around or get paddled around by a guide and the area is also know for turtle nesting, hopefully we´ll see some. i don´t know if there´s internet access there, but i doubt it because it´s pretty isolated so i probably won´t be writing for a few days. AFter tortuguero we´ll head down the caribbean coast most likely stopping somewhere around cahuita national park and then cross into panama via an old railroad bridge.

I added some more pics since my last post. Happy Mother´s Day to everyone who´s a mom. Hasta la próxima.

Tags: Central America 2007, costa rica, san jose

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 12:27 am and is filed under Central America 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.