Surviving Costa Rica

My sister's going to Costa Rica over her daughter's April school vacation. Whenever anyone in my family contemplates a trip they ask me for advice as chances are high I've been to wherever they're considering going. My feedback on Costa Rica was not positive, but my sister's going anyway because my experiences in that country were almost certainly aberrations. It's a safe bet that my sister's week will revolve around typical Costa Rican vacation things like horseback riding, rainforest hiking and ziplining rather than the robbery, hypodermic needles and other random unpleasantness that marked our long ago Costa Rican sojourn.

My money belt containing a thousand dollars in travelers checks was stolen while we stood in the immigration line five minutes after landing in San Jose at 9 PM, a time by which the American Express office was, of course, closed. Welcome to Costa Rica.

Also closed was the airport location of the rental car company from which I'd booked a vehicle with a car seat for then three-year-old Adam specifically because the company advertised being open until 10. I waylaid a worker who'd just finished locking the door to a competing agency and begged him to reopen and rent us a car. He had one car but no car seat, so we drove off with tiny Adam strapped into an adult seat belt and sitting so low on the rear seat that his head didn't reach the window. We'd travel throughout the country in the next week, and Adam couldn't see outside the car. He napped a lot as we drove, wisely figuring that a better use of his time than staring into the velour back of the seat in front of him.

We spent a day negotiating the chaotic mess that is San Jose to locate the American Express office for replacement checks and standing in special "foreigner" lines at a downtown bank to change small American bills into Costa Rican colones so we could call American Express from pay phones each time we thought we'd found their office then found we hadn't. (This 2005 post from the archives takes you on our quest to decode San Jose's arcane street address system.)

I was three months pregnant with Dana and had to eat constantly to battle debilitating nausea, one night eating my gut-calming midnight loaf of bread in a hotel bathroom while staring down a gang of cockroaches. (Another post from the archives takes you to the scene of that showdown.)

In a hill town where I'd parked for five minutes to run into a grocery store for emergency snacks, I got a parking ticket that would have required a mandatory court appearance had I not bribed the ticketing officer with baksheesh sufficient enough to make the citation disappear.

When Adam developed a flaming case of bronchitis in a small beach town, we took him to a clinic with mint green wooden siding where he received shots of penicillin delivered through a needle the size of a turkey baster.

We got a flat tire while driving a dirt road through a vast jungle of banana plantations and spent several hours at a ramshackle car repair shed that sat -- a miracle wrapped in a week of mishaps -- on said remote road.

I recounted this series of unfortunate events to my parents today as we sat sipping coffee, talking about my sister's upcoming trip. "Oh my!" chuckled my dad. "I see why you couldn't give Costa Rica a good recommendation! Was there anything good about your trip?"

I thought for a moment. "Yes. The smile on the face of the pint-sized extortionist in the tourist parking lot at Manuel Antonio National Park was good, great even. I will always remember that smile. This boy ran to our car as soon as we'd opened the doors to get out and said, 'Senora, give me money and I will watch your car for you.' When I asked why we should pay him to watch a car that was properly parked in a designated lot he said, 'Because if you do not, your car might be stolen.' "

But he said it with a smile, a really good smile.

LoriHein.com

Costa Rica: Gotta feed the baby

Each April Dana’s high school sponsors a vacation week student trip abroad, and this year the kids and their chaperones are heading to Costa Rica. I tried to get Dana to sign up, but none of her close friends are going, and even the "horseback riding in the mountains" part of the itinerary wasn’t enough of an enticement.

She hasn't seen it, but Dana’s been to Costa Rica before. Before she was born.

Adam was three and Dana in utero when we took a family vacation to the verdant, coffee-growing nation. For me, the trip highlight was freeing my growing stomach from the confines of business suits. I hadn’t yet shared my pregnancy news with the office and was still cramming me and Dana into my usual non-maternity corporate straightjackets.

I planned to announce the impending blessed event on our return from vacation. I wore a big, full, empire-waisted dress to the airport and, once on the plane, after ensuring no one I knew was aboard, removed my coat and let the belly breathe. I could hear Dana sigh under my skin.

Because I was pregnant, we didn’t engage in the physical adventures that have come to define most people’s Costa Rican vacations. We didn’t hike up the Arenal or Poas volcanoes, tramp through the Monteverde Cloud Forest, gallop a gelding full throttle through the surf, or jump off a treetop platform and zoom through the jungle canopy on a zip line.

We did tame things.

Like lose our traveler’s checks and spend a day negotiating the sprawl of San Jose to find the American Express office to replace them; test my Spanish at a medical clinic where, for 20 bucks, Adam, who’d developed a raging case of bronchitis, got a series of penicillin shots delivered through really gigantic needles; get a flat tire on a dirt road somewhere near Quepos and Manuel Antonio National Park and sit for two hours in the tin-roofed auto repair shop God had miraculously laid in our path while the gracious owner and his son fixed our car.

To these memories of Costa Rica I add one more: Nausea – unrelenting and 24/7.

Dana was one of those babies who have to eat. All the time. Nonstop. Every 15-20 minutes, around the clock. Feed the baby or suffer – and I mean suffer – the consequences – and I mean consequences.

Breakfast in our hotels opened at 7 AM. We were invariably hovering outside the doors by 6:45, my face fairly pressed to the glass, hoping the sight of a desperate housewife, clearly pregnant as evidenced by my proud, flapping maternity clothes, would impel the staff to unlock early (never happened). I hauled food around wherever we went, and I saw the insides and persued the aisles of nearly every mom and pop grocery store in the country. I kept a loaf of bread next to my bed and wolfed down slices through the night while Adam coughed and Mike slept.

One evening in Jaco Beach we dined at an al fresco oceanfront restaurant. The scarlet sunset over the Pacific was spectacular, but I was focused on food. I ordered jumbo breaded shrimp and scarfed down three of the half-dozen on my plate. Waiters in Costa Rica aren’t used to being asked for doggy bags, especially from hotel-staying gringos, but I wasn’t letting those shrimp go. I knew Dana would be hankering for them before the night was out. "A llevar, por favor."

Sure enough, about 2 A.M., Dana told me she wanted food. Shrimp, about three, jumbo and breaded.

So as not to wake the deep-sleeping Mike and the by-now-quieted-by-penicillin Adam, I took the shrimp into the bathroom and sat on the cool tile floor to eat.

There were six creatures in that Jaco Beach bathroom: me and Dana, the shrimp, and the shiny black cockroach who sat under the sink, bug eyes fixed on my meal.

No way, pal. Just try to get your feelers on these shrimp, and you're toast. Gotta feed the baby.

Lori Hein.com

Costa Rica: Do you know the way through San Jose?

The men in the family lost their drivers’ licenses. Not get-a-lawyer lost but physically lost. Misplaced. Dropped. Left behind. Adam’s wallet slipped out of his pocket, and there went ten bucks, gym membership card, New Hampshire boat operator’s permit and four-month-old license. Happily, no credit cards yet.

Mike lost his license at the Hertz airport rental counter in Buffalo, New York. He gave it to a rental clerk who never gave it back. We’re mildly concerned, as Mike’s license is the old-fashioned “YES! THIS IS MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!” kind. We’re imagining an illegal alien or identity theft ring operating up there in Buffalo on the Canadian border, with purloined documents supplied by the occasional corruptible rental car agent. Mike reads people well, and the fact that his particular clerk never looked him in the eye bothered him. We smell something fishy in Buffalo.

Father and son became license-less within hours of each other, so they spent an afternoon bonding at the purgatory that is the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. They returned home with temporary paper that keeps them legal until their new plastic arrives in the mail.

This drama was rather easily resolved (if you discount the specter of identity theft hanging over our heads) because we were on home turf. It’s a tad tougher when your stuff is lost (or stolen...) in another country.

We'd been on the ground in Costa Rica no more than 10 minutes when the money belt I was wearing under my sweater disappeared. Thankfully, our passports and credit cards were in a separate neck pouch under my shirt, but we’d lost all our traveler’s checks. Somewhere between the plane and the airport exit, our money went missing. Welcome to San Jose.

We picked up a rental car, checked into the San Jose Holiday Inn, and called American Express. It was midnight. The voice on the phone told us to go the office of TAM Travel in the morning for replacement checks. Sounded easy. The address? “Avenida Central Primera.”

At 6:30 in the morning, the Holiday Inn took the holiday part of its name very seriously and blared Nat King Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” (which you can now download as a ringtone) through the hallways. It seeped like spilled eggnog under our door and through the pillows we held over our ears. Hopeless. There was nothing for it but to use the croon as a wake-up call and start the day. Good morning, Central America!

At breakfast, where we gorged for a good long time on eggs, bread, fruit and chewy Costa Rican coffee, I asked the maitre d’ if Avenida Central Primera was close to the hotel. “O, si!” she nodded. “Muy cerca.” Just three blocks this way and two blocks that.

We packed up, checked out, got in the car and found Avenida Central in a flash. As primera means first, I looked for Number One Avenida Central. No such animal. We soon realized that Avenida Central was miles long and that the buildings had no numbers. We tried the three-blocks-this-way-and-two-blocks-that tactic but found nothing that linked Avenida Central to anything vaguely Primera.

As we spiraled deeper into the vortex of San Jose’s clogged, carbon-monoxide-infused chaos of one-way streets, I wished I hadn’t violated one of my own travel rules: carry a street map of every city you may visit. A good map puts you in control. We hadn’t planned to spend more than our first night in San Jose, so I’d chosen not to bother with the extra paper. We'd come to Costa Rica for Jaco Beach (above) and Manuel Antonio National Park on the central Pacific coast.

For nearly three hours, we crisscrossed and circumnavigated the unwieldy metropolis. I told a traffic cop we were looking for Avenida Central Primera. “Calle Ocho,” - Eighth Street – he said, and pointed off in the distance. What Eighth Street had to do with anything we didn’t know, but we drove in the direction of his finger. And drove. And drove some more.

I asked three more cops, and each used the word “calle” several times. “Cual calle?” Which street?

I began to get it. Building locations in San Jose are all about where Avenidas meet Calles. To find a place, you need to know its closest avenida-calle intersection. We’d found the right avenida, but to find where TAM Travel sat on it, we’d need a calle, too.

I wanted to call TAM to pinpoint their location before we wasted more time and energy, but I had no Costa Rican colones. Mike double-parked at a bank, and I hopped out. The police kept shooing him away from the bank, so he circled the block for an hour until I emerged, having waited in a colossal queue to change a small American bill into Costa Rican coins to feed a payphone.

The woman on the phone at TAM cried, “No es Avenida Central Primera! Es Avenida Central, Calle Primera!” Eureka. Then she unknowingly added insult to injury: “Es cerca del Holiday Inn.” We recrossed the city and found TAM, three blocks this way and two blocks that from where we’d started so many hours ago. At the American Express desk housed inside, gracious people treated us kindly and gave us new checks.

As we’d seen enough of San Jose to last several lifetimes, we headed north out of the city. In the pretty town of Alajuela, where we stopped to buy groceries, a cop gave us a 1,000-colone ticket for parking in a taxi zone. I flashed some money, mumbled a contrite apology, and in short order he swapped the ticket, which required a court appearance, for a 500-colone payment that went straight into his pocket.

An hour later, on a deserted coastal highway, a three-foot-long iguana emerged from the brush in front of our car. We pulled off and watched his rough, beautiful body lumber across the asphalt.

All thoughts of lost money and time, urban gridlock and baksheesh disappeared into the ether. The iguana reminded us why we'd come.

Where shall we go next?

LoriHein.com