Completing the Circuit

I'm not a fan of San Jose.

When DW and I first arrived in Costa Rica, we landed in darkness. The only thing I could discern from the port side of our craft, from the window seat, was that we were landing on high ground, with some small valleys and more hills surrounding the Juan Santamaría International Airport.

We were met outside the arrivals area by the owner of our hotel, who drove us through darkened streets. Once in our room, looking off the balcony, we could see only darkness, as there was only jungle before us. It was only after looking at Google Maps, to find our location, that I knew which direction we had headed from the airport.

Basically, it was north, just northwest of the town of Alajuela, which itself is to the northwest of the greater San Jose area.

Leaving Alajuela, we got onto a highway and headed north, and then west, to La Fortuna. On the route, we saw no urban buildup and, as soon as we reached the mountains, we were immersed in jungle.

Our first taste of a sizable city was on our last full day, having left the Quetzal National Park, winding our way down the mountains to the city of Cartago, Costa Rica's first capital city. Almost immediately, we were caught in traffic and construction. Even on a Saturday morning, we moved at a snail's pace.

Every once and a while, Highway 2 would pick up and we'd move at a decent speed. But as soon as we entered San Jose, our GPS mapping system took us off the highway and through congested roads. And we were back to a crawl.

Looking around the city, while stopped in traffic, I was initially reminded of some South Korean cities that I had driven through in the late 90s. Buildings of all sorts, surrounded by mountains, with really crappy drivers who were more interested in getting ahead of you than in following the rules of the road.

I was never happier than I was at pulling in to our hotel and parking the RAV4. We had arrived at noon and couldn't check in until 2:00, but the hotel let us park the car and keep our luggage in safe keeping. Though the vehicle had served us well in the country, I was happy to know that I'd never drive it again.

To kill time before check-in, DW and I hailed an Uber cab and went into the heart of San Jose. It was great to let a native driver worry about traffic but the car had no air conditioning and we had to keep the windows down, which meant that we had to endure smoke and exhaust from other vehicles. Throughout our time in the country, we had seen so many vehicles that seemed desperate for oil changes.

In San Jose, a haze of black smoke seemed to hang in the air (again, reminding me of South Korea in the late 1990s).

We were dropped off outside the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum. This is a highly recommended stop in the heart of San Jose. It was interesting to see life in Central America before the conquistadors: I was surprised to see so many gold and clay artifacts that were in pristine condition. One can only wonder what this fascinating civilization could have grown to be if not for the Spanish and Portuguese invaders.

The museum took about an hour to go through, and by the time we were done, we realized how hungry we were. We hadn't eaten since we had sat with our friends, for breakfast, at our lodge, nearly six hours earlier.

We walked westward along Avenida Central, looking for the San Jose Central Market, a tight, crowded, labyrinth of a market that offered just about everything you can think of. Again, I was reminded of the Namdaemun Market of Seoul or the Nambu Market of Jeonju, South Korea.

DW was looking for a plush toy of a quetzal bird: something that she had seen in the gift shop of the Cafetería Don Cayito, the day before, and had wanted to buy as a souvenir but decided to hold out. Walking almost every corridor in the market and visiting several gift shops, we saw lots of toy parrots, toucans, monkeys, and sloths, but no quetzals.

The plushy, it seems, is elusive as the real bird (she finally found one in the Duty-Free section of the airport, the next morning).

We found the market just a bit too claustrophobic for lunch so we made a Google search for the best non-chain restaurant in the area, and found Café Rojo as the highest-rated. And it was only a seven-minute walk from the market.

As we left the core of Avenida Central, DW became nervous. There were fewer people on the streets and the buildings became less commercial. When we were walking along Avenida Central, which is a pedestrian street, closed to vehicles, I was hounded by someone who was begging for money. When I told him that I didn't have any money (which was true: DW and I tapped with our phones at almost every place we had visited on our vacation), he became more animated more desperate, and kept trying to touch me (he was also speaking in English).

DW was worried that he would try to grab my camera, which was hanging off my shoulder, and when she spied a shop with a security guard at the entrance, she grabbed me and led me inside. The security guard, seeing what was happening, shooed the man away. When the coast was clear, the security guy nodded to us and we continued on our way, but still had others begging for change or trying to sell us trinkets (but not as aggressively as the other guy).

DW was about to suggest heading back toward the busier streets when we spotted Café Rojo. It was tucked away but had a nice, gardened patio, which hid patrons from the traffic. The staff was friendly and greeted us immediately, in perfect English, and had us sit on a picnic table.

The food was exactly what I needed. They even had local craft beer and I had an excellent saison with my pork meatball báhn mí sandwich. DW had a chicken salad and a tasty red gin cocktail. For a short time, it made us forget about the bustle of the downtown core.

We didn't have a lot of time left to get back to the hotel, where our car-rental agent was to meet us to retrieve the RAV4. We wanted to leave a buffer because we knew that the traffic was bad and that estimates of travel time were incorrect, based on how long our GPS told us it would take to drive to our hotel, and how long Uber said our ride into town would take.

We arrived at our hotel around 4 and immediately checked in. DW carried our luggage to our room while I went to the RAV4 and started emptying it of our non-valuables and garbage. When I thought I had retrieved everything, I had DW come down to the vehicle for one last look, to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

On this trip to the Toyota, we saw a man in a blue t-shirt near the car, watching us approach. Though his shirt had a logo from some other company, he was holding papers from our rental agency, with my name on them. He didn't speak English but we were able to communicate with our limited Spanish and Google Translate.

He already noticed the small scrape on the front-passenger side of the vehicle. When DW and I took the ferry across the Gulf of Nicoya, one of the attendants in the car port kept guiding me closer and closer to the side wall. I trusted that he was watching closely, even though I thought I was getting too close to the wall, and when I felt the RAV4 make contact with the wall, I knew that I should have trusted my own judgement.

I explained this to the rental agent, and he seemed sympathetic. He thought that it could be buffed out, but I doubted the plastic could handle any buffing. He didn't seem to care.

We signed off on the vehicle and he told me that his manager would assess the damage and contact me. We shook hands and he drove away.

"Did you check the compartment between the front seats?" DW asked as we headed to our room.

"The only thing I placed in it was the USB cable to connect my phone to Android Auto," I said, "and I removed that cable with my phone when I first parked the car."

"I kept snacks in it," she said, "and I had a cable for charging my phone."

"I asked you to double-check for me," I replied. "That's why we returned to the vehicle. I thought you would have checked while you were making a video."

DW and I always take a detailed video of a rental vehicle, both when we take possession and when we return the vehicle. It's our proof of the condition before and after. I saw that she was taking video but because I was trying to communicate with the agent, I never noticed if she had looked inside the Toyota.

"I was so focused on recording that I didn't look inside anything. Plus, I was listening to you."

The snacks were no great loss and the cable was purchased in La Fortuna when DW discovered she had left hers at home.

We headed to the pool area of the hotel in time for sunset. As the light waned, we felt a coolness settle in. I snapped the very last photo of our trip before we headed to our room.

Our flight to Toronto was for 8:50 the next morning, which meant that we had to be at the airport by around 6:30 or so. Because neither of us wanted to go to bed too early—we were always waking up between 4 and 5—we found a TV station that was playing old episodes of the original CSI, back-to-back, and we forced ourselves to stay awake until about 10:30.

We still woke up before 5.

With our shuttle to the airport, our circuit of Costa Rica was complete. We had made a good-sized ring route of the country and we decided that there were areas that we hadn't yet seen but would like to see, as well as wanting to return to some of our favourite spots.

Screen capture of Google Maps.

We'll have to return some day but who knows when? We're already in the process of planning our next vacation.

Where to? I'll let you know when we've made concrete plans but we're aiming for September.

And I've already started work on upcoming YouTube videos from this trip. Stay tuned.