Let Me Drop Some Pura Vida On Your Asses

It really, really, REALLY is great to be home. Unfortunately, I don’t even know where to begin… so I suppose, in a somewhat unpredictable stroke of logic, that I’ll begin at the beginning.

Last Friday morning, we flew into the airport just outside of San Jose, and like two idiots, planned to spend the night there and experience the nation’s capital city before getting an early start the following morning. BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG mistake. If you ever go to Costa Rica, head straight to your next destination from the airport, no matter how tired you are. Especially if you’re tired. Nothing will drain you like San Jose. TRUST.

Here’s what it looked like driving in:

San Jose is a living nightmare of a city, multiplied by 4000 times if you’re a tourist. Multiplied by 19000 times if you’re a tourist in a rental car. I have no words for how dreadful our time spent in this city was. If you’ve ever been to the dust bowl that is Mexico City, imagine that. (Everyone else, imagine Adams Morgan, only everyone hates you and you’re covered with an inch-thick coating of grime, cigarette smoke and pollution. To breathe is more painful than to not.) Everything is a clusterfuck of cars, trucks, scooters, and pedestrians, and everyone has the right of way. Now imagine all the roads and sidewalks are 1/4 of “normal” size. Now imagine that within your first 10 minutes in the city you see this, urinating and/or masturbating, on the side of a building, for the entire time that he is within your sights:

Yes, that is a Santa Claus hat. No, I have no explanation for it, seeing as it was 75 degrees and sunny. This was, however, a different bum from the one we encountered a few moments later, who asked us for some spare change. Because I hate coinage, knew that the colones in my pocket were worth fractions of pennies, and wanted to feel cultural and interact with the locals, am a very generous human being, I gave him the small handful of the silver coins weighing down my clutch.

Without even looking, his closed fist felt the weight of each and every coin, discerned its value in less than a second, and inexplicably, without even looking in his palm, he spit a U.S. $0.25 back in my face and walked away. Stunned, we looked at each other, trying to be offended… but mostly we were just really, really impressed. I mean, you can’t argue with that kind of skill. The man was clearly much better at his job than I am at mine.

If you read the comments prior to our departure, we planned to head north to the hot springs of the Volcan Arenal, (please forgive the lack of Spanish punctuation; frankly, my dear, I don’t have the energy); followed by a day in the cloud forests of Monteverde, and then on to the Pacific Coast. SOMEHOW, mostly through an inconceivably unknowingly very, very stupidly) venture headfirst into the worst of it.

By the grace of el bebe jesus christo, we stopped at a Tourist Info booth in San Jose and asked for directions to Arenal. The very sweet lady (the first truly kind- to us- person we had met in Costa Rica) laughed at us, showed us the many, many newspapers documenting the devastation that was the western half of the country, and told us to head for the Caribbean coast immediately. The mountain range dividing Costa Rica prevents the horrific weather of the rainy season from reaching the eastern coast, and as she put it, the beaches there were “Sunny, sunny, sunny.” Please imagine this phrase with a magical and lyrical incantation to it, as we spent the subsequent drive chanting it to each other as we watched the car’s external thermometer rise to a balmy 30 degrees celsius on our way to the unbelievably glorious beaches of South Caribbean Coast Rica.

Our drive looked something like this: (I tried to capture the weaving in and out on one-lane roads as trucks barreled around the corner towards us, but it is

impossible to do with a Canon Powershot 300)…

Here is the moment when we came around yet another inconceivably sharp bend and thought we would collide with a broken-down banana truck:

We drove through the mountains to Cahuita (below), a one-”road” town on the Caribbean coast, where the largest living coral reef in Costa Rica is located. There were about 20 buildings total, half of them hotels, the other half bars and restaurants. We met a certifiably crazy yet remarkably endearing Vietnam vet named Wallace Price, which is an amazing story in and of itself, and which I think B can do more justice to than I.

In Cahuita, the beach meets the rain forest, which is protected as one of the country’s many national parks.

We saw monkeys. We saw sloths. We saw lizards and crabs and birds. We met an wonderful couple from Vermont, who we spent days in Manzanilla and Puerto Viejo with. We met them like this, as we walked down a path and came upon them staring unblinkingly up at a palm tree:

Branson: “Hey, have you ever seen a sloth??”

Me and B: “NO…?!?!?”

Emily: “You wanna??”

Ummm… duh?

The next four days were a blur of sun, beer, and bodysurfing. I tasted the most wonderful food I’ve ever had in my life, (mostly B’s, since he out-ordered me on EVERY single meal,) and saw the most gorgeous landscapes I’ve ever laid eyes on. It was disgustingly romantic, incredibly FUN, and worth every goddamn penny we spent.

More to come…